SEEDS OF CHANGE 1976 Michaelis Reunion Exhibition 2019
UCT Irma Stern Museum 3 – 24 August 2019
P
hilip Willem Badenhorst was invited to exhibit at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town in August 2019 to coincide with his retirement from teaching at the Hoboken Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp Belgium where he has been living since graduating from Michaelis in 1976. His idea to share this opportunity with a group of friends, all of whom studied at Michaelis School of Fine Arts, saw a Reunion Group Exhibition “Seeds of Change” materialize. All five participants completed their studies at Michaelis in 1976 and although its now 43 later and they are all reaching their ‘mature years’, they are all still producing work, upholding the fact that artists never retire.
The selection procedure was as follows: You had to have finished the four years at Michaelis and you had to still be ‘burning the midnight oil’, working as an artist. Simon Stone (living in Cape Town), Asiya Clarke /née Patsy Warton (living in Luton, England), Giovanna Biallo-Stone (living in Cape Town), Julia Beeton-Kuhlmann (living in Johannesburg) and Philip Willem Badenhorst (living in Antwerp, Belgium) are the artists that make up the group. Amazingly they always have been and still are in contact. Stone usually starts with water colour sketches which get transferred in oil or encaustic paint to canvas. He is primarily a figurative painter who incorporates and combines landscapes, buildings, objects, figures and abstract elements into his work, aiming to achieve a sense of inevitability or rightness. Different images are often juxtaposed together in one work. Giovanna Biallo-Stone, Eye Tap, oil on canvas
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