THE POWER OF REPRESENTATION Juxtaposing and re-interpreting art through the genres of Still Life, Sculpture, and Landscape Text by Yolanda de Kock
The Power of Representation is currently on display at Oliewenhuis Art Museum’s Permanent Collection. The exhibition was curated with the intention of showcasing the variety of artworks and different media held in Oliewenhuis’s Permanent Collection. Another purpose is to emphasise that museums are seen as mediators of new discourses and custodians and purveyors of visual and cultural memory. The display rooms are divided into different categories: The art of Still Life: From trompe-l’oeil painting to found miniature objects. As the subtitle suggests, the viewer will find a variety of traditional Still Life interpretations of Andrew Murray, Michael Pettit and Margaret Nel. For over a century Still Life as a genre has been practiced in South Africa and, as Michael Godby (2007) mentions, in the early twentieth century South African Still Life painters reflected or even adopted the European tradition. In this display room a focus is set on the Hungarian-born Still Life painter Romek Årpåd (1883 – 1960), who worked super realistically in oil. This Still Life represents ‘typical’ objects found in the Still Life painting: glass bottles and brass containers on a white cloth. All the items are displayed on a dark background. Årpåd’s approach could fittingly be compared to the French term, trompe-l’oeil, aiming to depict the objects so real as to deceive the eye of the viewer. In comparison, the piece by contemporary artist Elrie Joubert, I will Always Have Paris (2013) represents real collected miniature objects (less typical of the Still Life genre) collected on the streets of Paris. The intent of the artist here may be not to deceive the eye of the viewer, but to add an extra layer of memory and history to each collected item, and add a component of archival memory by documenting each found object in meticulous miniature drawings. Joubert’s work leans more to two-dimentional installation, in stark contrast to Årpåd’s approach of traditional painting on canvas, albeit that both artists attempt to bring forth an illusion of reality of a specific place or location and setting.
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Romek Årpåd, Stillewe, Oil on canvas. Photo Credit: Jano Myburgh photography. Oliewenhuis Art Museum Permanent Collection.
The sculptor’s playroom: Traditional sculpture, installation art, vanitas and rusted objects. As the title of this display room suggests, artworks selected for this room are focussed on different approaches the sculptor can explore or even ‘play with’ in the studio: installation art by Christiaan Diedericks, traditional wood carving of Lucas Sithole, and a stylised abstraction sculpture by Gert Swart that displays a combination of metal and wood. Lucas Sithole was a remarkable artist, best known for his wood carvings in indigenous wood. The subjects Sithole chose to carve fall unmistakably into three categories: animals, human figures and heads. His work Just like that (1978) showcases a strong combination of his African ancestry and the historical era in which this work was made. The 1970s were a pivotal decade in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. Although Sithole’s work represents the traditional approach to sculpture, it represents so much more: hope, masterly skill and a timeframe in which black artists had to work extremely hard to be acknowledged in the art world. We are privileged to showcase these artists’ legacy in our museum. Jeanette Unite and Toni Pretorius’s work in this display area are contrasted with Sithole’s work. Sithole’s is a three-dimensional sculpture, standing on the floor, whilst those of the two younger contemporary artists are two-dimensional installations on the wall, conveying messages
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