ART TIMES NOVEMBER 2021 EDITION

NOVEMBER 2021 ARTTIMES.CO.ZA

Johannesburg Auction 16, 17 & 18 November 2021 Fine & Decorative Art, Furniture, Silverware, Jewellery, Watches, Carpets, Militaria, Vintage Fashion & Collectables

Preview, register and bid on www.swelco.co.za Contact us for viewing appointments or condition reports on 011 880 3125 or email info@swelco.co.za

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Vladimir Tretchikoff · STILL LIFE WITH CHRYSANTHEMUMS IN AN ORIENTAL VASE · R500 000 - 800 000

Art Times November 2021 Edition

CONTENTS Cover: Audrey Anderson, Zigzag, Sealed Acrylic on Canvas, 77 x 61cm, 2021, Gallery 2

8. M.O.L 24 - THE MUTTERING WORLD: MARGOT MUIR’S PHOTOGRAPHS Ashraf Jamal Column 16. ABSA L’ATELIER 2021 Winners Announced 18. LOOKING AT LONG STREET AND OTHER CITY PAINTINGS…

By Hayden Proud 28. PAUL WEINBERG - EARTHSONGS Spiritual Connections to The Land 34. BODY – PLACE – SPACE Work from senior Artist Proof Studio students 38. I TALK TO THE TREES The journey of life in turbulent times 42. PRINCE ALBERT OPEN STUDIOS The Summer Edition 46. BOOK REVIEW LUAN NEL (Malta Bella) 56. THROUGH THE WINDOW A Collection of Visual Narratives 60. BUSINESS ART Fine Art Auction highlights 74. ARTGO Exhibition Highlights John Kramer, S. Lazarow, Albert Road, Salt River Medium: oil on canvas, 50cm x 50cm, 2020, Cape Gallery

Editors Note

SOUTH AFRICA’S LEADING VISUAL ARTS PUBLICATION

CONTACT ART TIMES Tel: +27 21 300 5888 109 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town PUBLISHER Gabriel Clark-Brown editor@arttimes.co.za

Alma Ita Vorster 1962- 2021. Serenade in Masquerade II,1988 (Etching and Aquatint)

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his month’s exciting Art Times feature line up is really exciting: From Margot Muir’s soulful photographs; John Kramer’s light-filled paintings of people’s lives and the livelihoods that their shop facades portray and Paul Weinberg’s stunning works.

Also reviews include Absa Hotspots and Unisa’s Celebration of 35 years of art collecting. Also to look forward to later this year is the thrilling Prince Albert Open Studios.

This month I would like to pay a personal tribute to the passing of two great human beings and fantastic artists. It is with sadness to report that Alma Ita Vorster passed from this world in the middle of August, a huge sad loss to both South African art, teaching, and printmaking. Alma’s works are still shown to First Year students demonstrating printmaking. After almost 25 years since finishing her MFA, I have never seen anyone use aquatint like her. Maybe one can say her life was similar: quality; detailed; sensitive, and rich with a quietness about the subject matter.

The second artist is Drew Lindsey, of the Spaza Gallery, who lived his life and art. I first met Drew at Mark and Tamara Attwoods Artist Press years ago. At first, I thought Drew was a crazy man - best avoided, but then he persuaded us all to dance before working. He made all the mosaic artists dance and he danced himself. At the end of the residency, we hugged each other like two sobbing and crazy artists, his energy was infectious.

There are so many artists’ stories I’m sure- of being broke or needing assistance, and Drew would provide shelter. Drew was one of those real people who both helped and looked further than the here and now and made you feel really special.

I wish I could turn back the hands of time and give Drew a huge hug again, and to sit with Alma with a cup of tea in her small studio and laugh and laugh. We live in the best of times, let’s go out and inspire one another to live and love the best we can.

Gabriel Clark-Brown

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ADVERTISING & MARKETING Eugene Fisher sales@arttimes.co.za DIGITAL MEDIA & EXHIBITION LISTINGS Jan Croft subs@arttimes.co.za ART DIRECTION Brendan Body ARTGO CONTENT info@artgo.co.za Rights: the Art Times magazine reserves the right to reject any material that could be found offensive by its readers. Opinions and views expressed in the sa art times do not necessarily represent the official viewpoint of the editor, staff or publisher, while inclusion of advertising features does not imply the newspaper’s endorsement of any business, product or service. Copyright of the enclosed material in this publication is reserved.

Errata: Hermanus FynArts - would like to apologise for omitting the name of Karin Lijnes from the list of artists who are exhibiting at Sculpture on the Cliffs - 2020. Her work, Freedom Tree comprises of a large steel mobile of five ceramic bird forms.

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EXHIBITIONS 2021

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY Artful Chance Encounters 29 June - 16 January 2022

THE JOHANNESBURG STATION PANELS Pierneef’s Journey ICONography The symbols of Rembrandt, Rorke’s Drift and Ardmore

3 August - 28 November 2021

PORTRAIT 100 Portrait Award / 2021

4 September - 28 November 2021

Bonnie Ntshalintshali (1967-1999) Daniel and the lions Serigraph 8/50 Rupert Art Foundation Collection

Stellentia Road, Stellenbosch Tue – Fri: 10:00 – 17:00 Sat – Sun: 10:00 – 16:00 info@rupertmuseum.org 021 888 3344 www.rupertmuseum.org

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THE MUTTERING WORLD: MARGOT MUIR’S PHOTOGRAPHS Ashraf Jamal arttimes.co.za/mol-ashraf-jamal

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n a world enthralled by style, obsessed with the defining image, a photographer who is unconvinced by such an orchestrated luminescence is rare. Margot Muir is uninterested in the artfulness of photography, and its accompanying deceit.

In fact, I’d wager that Muir is profoundly concerned, if not mortified, by the absolutism of the photographic image in the 21st century – its new world order and its ubiquity. Does one truly struggle to create a singular image in this oversaturated era? Is it not, rather, the fact that the generic image is a fait accompli? One might think me cynical, however, my deeper point is that it is well-nigh impossible, at this historical moment, to isolate a distinctive image repertoire, this because pastiche – more insidious than parody – has cannibalised the ability to single out a unique point of view.

In South Africa – before this metastasized moment in global photography – photographic or documentary realism was celebrated. The purpose of the photographer was to record – in the 60s, 70s and 80s, when this genre peaked – the injustices of the apartheid regime.

Photography was a political record. However, a shift occurred in the 1980s. As Simon Njami argues, photography was not motivated by politics alone, or rather, a new politics comes into being, in which photography is ‘no longer about denouncing, but about revealing’. The counterpoint is telling. To denounce is to react against, to reveal is to disclose a truth. For me, however, both assumptions are dubious.

A political image is not a reaction against some oppressive reality, it is an enigmatic fragment of that inconclusive reality. As for the revelatory power of photography? That is a greater and more enduring deceit. How so? Because photographs lie. They edit and exclude far more than they include. In The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer puts it bluntly: ‘In photography there is no meantime. There is just that moment and now there’s this moment

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Margot Muir, Untitled (Grandmothers holding the universe together XXI)

the image in the present moment, reveals our rapacious hunger. We devour an image-world unconsciously, shape our lives accordingly. For Muir, however, a photograph is neither trope nor index, it does not serve a consumerist ethos in which, disturbingly, an image is recognisable precisely because it is generic.

Above: Margot Muir, Untitled (Knowing the unknown X) Opposite Page: Margot Muir, Untitled (Knowing the unknown XII)

and in between there is nothing’.

We of course refuse to accept this, choosing instead to fill in the gaps. Photographs are traces, we assume, fragments of a deeply personal archaeology – they are divining rods. After Robert Frank we choose to believe that ‘There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment’. This is the greatest and most enduring conceit. It is this belief – rather like the globally ubiquitous love of Impressionist art, or God, or some other deity – which overrides and denies the corrosive fact, stated by Susan Sontag in On Photography, that ‘Whatever the moral claims on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation’.

It is against this misappropriation of the photographic image that Muir positions herself. That she should declare herself against the artfulness of photography underscores this antithetical position. The question, however, is whether artfulness can be avoided. In taking a photograph – an appropriative act – neutrality is impossible. The cannibalistic relationship to

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As Dyer eerily notes, the way in which photographs are shot changes the way we look and experience the reality it putatively records. More troublingly, ‘often it turns out that when things have been photographed, they look like other photographs, either ones that have already been taken or ones that are waiting to be taken’. Photographs future-proof the world, and, thereby, immunise us against it. This for many of the most profound thinkers on photography – amongst them Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag – is photography’s most nefarious and inescapable calling.

The monstrosity of the image is built in the apparatus that records it, in the culture that applauds it, in the history it produces – all of which is manipulated and manipulable.

Given the inevitability of this outcome – the fatality factored into photography – Margot Muir’s counter-intuitive drive is remarkable.

However, to suppose her an innocent in a corrupted historical moment is to miss the point. Muir believes in neither the reactive role of photography, nor its revelatory power. At best, all we have is the facticity of the thing – the photograph itself – unmoored, shiftless, yet utterly frozen in an unredeemable moment in time. To weigh it down, buttress it as it were, with a rationale – say, a record of the grandmothers of the black townships, or the record of privileged white occupants of an old age home – may be helpful as a framing device, but it has no further purchase. This is because the stories we attach to images are, perforce, belated. It is true that Muir visited a township and an old age home, true that she took photographs, based on a mutual agreement, which, for her, revealed two contrasting facts: the purpose-defined life of the grandmothers who care for an extended family in dire circumstances; the comparative misery of the white aged isolated in their rooms designed to mirror their tastes and cultural inheritance.

I’m not sure that this is necessarily the case.

No utopia exists, no exemption for rich or poor from suffering. We, overtly and crassly

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Above: Margot Muir, Nomathamsanqa Luvalo (Grandmothers; holding the universe together II) Opposite Page: Margot Muir, Untitled (Knowing the unknown VII)

disingenuous, romanticise the townships – the catastrophic symptom of governmental dereliction – and the austerity of the lives of the poor. Is this because one refuses to see suffering, absorb it? Because the pornography of pain is morally inexcusable? Or because the camera – the technology designed for seeing – suffers from glaucoma? Or, as T.S. Eliot concludes in Four Quartets, ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’? Was the shift from denunciation to revelation none other than the diminishment of a collective struggle in the name of an oracular individual artistry?

And, in this shift from the imagined collective to the imagined singular – engineering to psychographics – have we become less human, less caring? Certainly, our inability to see and absorb the world suggests this. In an image-driven world we have become blind.

might allude to them, but it cannot represent them. This because photographs, despite the pressure we put upon them, cannot explain the world. My point being that, in the case of Margot Muir’s images, one must address them singularly – as fragments of an irreconcilable and impossible whole. It is for this reason that she justly challenges my use of the collective noun – ‘we’ – and definitive article – ‘the’.

For her it is perverse to romanticise poverty, even more perverse to fail to understand it. Lack need not be attrition, which is why Muir emphasises purpose in a life. To speak of the ‘majority’ of black grandmothers is to generalise what can only be understood singularly. In response to the ‘blanket’ usage – ‘the’ grandmothers, ‘the’ white aged – Muir prefers ‘the utterly productive “unknowing”, the nuances of “individuals”’.

Since Jeremy Bentham’s surveillance system of the early 1800s – the panopticon – applied to asylums, schools, prisons, old age homes – brilliantly analysed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish – we accept the view that normalcy is only sustainable because we have constructed the abnormal. This deception applies to all binary economies. A photograph

Muir’s challenge is vital, precisely because we do generalise and simplify the world. And yet, I continue to wonder why Muir predominantly records the black grandmothers of the township as a medium shot? Because context is key? Because the individual life is inextricably linked to others? Because the home is a mirror of the being? Because this

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is the received aesthetic of documentary realism? Because individuality – in black life – is inextricably connected to indivisibility?

Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong’s photographs of black life in East London in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, suggests this, as does the SubSaharan lore – Ubuntu – which supposes that we are whom we are because of others – a cultural logic which directly counters a binary economy, of say, ‘Self’ and ‘Other’.

Is Muir endorsing the lore of Ubuntu, or is she questioning it? Is her emphasis on individuality a counter-intuitive challenge?

As for the predominantly used medium shot, typically understood as a visual register for normalcy in photography and cinema? Does Muir support this view unthinkingly, or does she skew it? Or, then again, what are we to make of the in-mates of an old age home shot both in close-up and as a medium shot, as portraits and in a broader context? What is Muir seeking to access through her close attention to aged white faces? Mortality?

Inexistence? The limits of an imperious white mythology? Or, freeing oneself from the dictates of race, are these close-ups not a summation – despite Muir’s distrust of generality – of what Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer defines as a ‘bare life’ – a life caught at the margins of state control, acknowledged yet barely relevant?

Pathos is an overused and exhausted descriptor. It is neither pity nor sadness that Muir’s photographs evoke, but neither are they consoling. Caught between austerity and sentiment, I think that Muir’s images ask us to suspend judgement – a lesson I’m learning – and allow ourselves to see without adopting an inherited cultural lens. If her photographs are naked rather than nude – or that they aspire to be so – has everything to do with a distrust of aesthetics – despite the fact that it is inescapable – and a desire to produce a raw-yet-immersive experience in the moment of looking. The question remains: are we ready for the naked, or do we prefer to hold onto the deceitful pleasures of the nude, a world prettified into oblivion?

of a culture and society which is systemically cruel, a culture and society which Sontag justly sees as cynically pragmatic, exclusive and exclusionary, which depreciates everything and everyone into ‘an article for consumption … an item for aesthetic appreciation’. Muir’s strategy – if she can be said to possess one – is to undo this absorptive and corrosive force and make us see the world in its most raw forms – undoctored by any cynical aesthetic.

Is this possible? Is this truly what she has achieved – the impossible?

It is curious that Muir should turn to Foucault, a penetrating analyst of power and its abuses, to preface her reflections on photography, what she understands it to be, how, as a medium and tool, it helps her to see the world.

‘It is necessary to strain one’s ears,’ Foucault writes, ‘bending down toward the muttering of the world, trying to perceive the many images that have never turned into poetry, so many phantasms that have never reached the colours of wakefulness’. Why have we failed to do so? Because we are somnambulists, tin-eared, tone deaf. Because, in ceding our lives to a preordained image repertoire, we stop seeing, feeling, intuiting, reaching, loving. This is why, for Foucault and Muir, we must pitch our ears to an otherwise inaudible frequency, peer more deeply, heel and yield to the world, because only then will we hear its inscrutable mutterings, only then embrace its phantasmal wonder.

It is only when we accept the photograph as an estranging ghost, only once we see it as a muttering creature, not a mute, that we will begin to understand what it was meant to offer us. Neither document nor revelation, a photograph is a mystery that hides in plain sight. It is there in an aged face we refuse to, or cannot, see, in an embracing extended family tenuously and tenderly aligned.

Foucault and Muir’s muttering world – more sonar and echolocation – requires that we become human, a difficult thing to achieve in this posthuman moment. But perhaps photographs, when they are finally understood differently, can help us to do so.

It is true that Muir is interested in lives deemed superfluous and supplementary, which, for her, are anything but. True that her photographic eye is integrative, that she seeks to bring to our attention worlds which are not deemed essential to life – this according to the dictates

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S A L O N N I NETY O NE P R E S E NTS TARA DEACON. SKINNY DIPPING, 2021. GOUACHE ON ON PAPER.

01.12 - 23.12.2021

The Island C h l o e To w n s e n d Joh Del Kirsten Beets Lucy Stuart-Clark Ta r a D e a c o n

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ABSA L’ATELIER 2021 CELEBRATES DIVERSE TALENT FROM ACROSS THE AFRICAN CONTINENT www.latelier.absa.africa

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bsa in partnership with the South African National Association for the Visual Arts (SANAVA) proudly announced the four category winners of the prestigious 2021 edition of the Absa L’Atelier at an online event hosted on the Absa Art Hotspot.

Since its inception 35 years ago, Absa L’Atelier has showcased, and continues to invest, in some of Africa’s finest young artists between the ages of 21 to 40. This year the competition established itself as the first African art competition to be hosted completely virtually; from entry, submission, and adjudication of the artworks, to hosting a series of masterclasses and a mentorship programme for the 2019 Absa L’Atelier ambassadors, culminating in the online awards ceremony.

After receiving a record number of registrations, hundreds of eligible entries were judged by an independent panel of adjudicators and one Ambassador per group was chosen from the three groups of African countries.

• In Group A (Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia), the winner was Adelheid von Maltitz from South Africa.

• In Group B (Mauritius, Nigeria, Seychelles and Tanzania) the winner was Ayobola Kekere-Ekun from Nigeria.

• In Group C (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya and Namibia) the winner was Blebo Michael Jackson from Ghana.

These artists now take on the title of Absa L’Atelier Ambassador 2021, while the winner in this year’s Absa L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto category was Cape Town-based artist Abongile Sidzumo.

Group A Winner, Adelheid von Maltitz

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Group B Winner, Ayobola Kekere-Ekun

Group C Winner, Michael Biebo

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The Ambassadors received trophies that depict hands, symbolising the physical manifestation of creation, designed, and produced by established South African artist Roberto Vacarro, while the Gerard Sekoto trophy depicts a bull, representing prosperity and resilience.

The criteria for selecting the Ambassador included technical execution i.e. the artist’s expert handling of material and techniques; conceptual and thematic engagement i.e. how they revealed an honest and intellectual reasoning or rationale; freshness of artistic vision within the context of the contemporary African art landscape i.e. how the artist engaged with honest and fresh ways of seeing; as well as aesthetic appeal which implies that the artist must have shown great consideration for visual quality and conceptual concerns, and whether the portfolio of artworks was a cohesive submission carrying the intended message or thematic idea.

Group A winner, Adelheid von Maltitz, is currently studying towards her PhD in Fine Arts at the University of the Free State in South Africa, where she also lectures primarily in sculpture and drawing. Her winning entry, presented in partial fulfilment of the requirement for her Doctor of Philosophy degree, is concerned with the transformative potential of dynamic threshold places such as roadside shrines. For her, making sculpture and installation art involves processes that allow her to constructively engage personal anxieties around death and loss.

Her interest in roadside shrines was sparked when she observed, what looked like a mother and sister continually, over months, rebuilding and maintaining a roadside shrine which she passed regularly on her daily commute. By initially examining the nature of roadside shrines in relation to her own artmaking processes, she was struck by the similarities in the ways in which death and loss may be engaged with, constructively and in a healing manner, through art.

Group B winner, Ayobola Kekere-Ekun, hails from Nigeria and, like Adelheid, is also pursuing a PhD in Art and Design from the University of Johannesburg.

Fascinated with lines, her brightly coloured work is driven by three foundation pillars: lines, neutrality of paper and fabric. Ayobola transforms traditional

Nigerian fabric and paper with a technique called quilling, whereby strips of material and paper are individually shaped, placed, and secured to capture pockets of light and shadow, giving her works a three-dimensional effect. It is a methodical and labour-intensive process; a single piece can take her between three and seven weeks to complete.

Group C winner, Michael Blebo, also known as Troy, was born in Accra, Ghana.

Specialising in sculpture, he is a Fine Arts graduate from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. His work combines sculpture, installation and drawing, and explores the environment and the decay of domestic architecture. As an emerging artist, he combines unconventional material such as white clay, charcoal, natural pigment, brown paper and chipboard to erect large scale works. Scale plays a major role in his work and he is influenced by the large scale works of American artists Richard Serra, Laurie Lipton and Adonna Khare as well as fellow Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama.

Established 17 years ago, the Gerard Sekoto award goes to a South African artist, aged between 25 and 35 years, who has continued to demonstrate integrity in the quality of their artwork. The Award is made possible by the Embassy of France in South Africa, the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), which is the cultural arm of the Embassy, and the Alliance Française network in South Africa.

“With our partners Absa and SANAVA, we are proud to support the Gerard Sekoto award and to accompany young artists to share their work both nationally and internationally. We believe in this award which grants a talented young South African artist an amazing opportunity: to expand his or her horizons with a 3-month artistic residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and, of course, gain greater exposure as a result. The artists are inspired and inspire. They learn, and they teach. They explore, and exhibit, allowing people in France and in South Africa to learn more about their individual style and vision”, says Aurelien Lechevallier, who is France’s Ambassador to South Africa.

The 2021 Absa L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto category winner Abongile Sidzumo was born in Cape Town, where he currently lives and works. Abongile completed his degree in

Gerard Sekoto Catagory Winner, Abongile Sidzumo

Fine Arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2019. He works with leather offcuts and repurposed materials to create works that reflect and interrogate humanity, the way we co-exist and our relationship with nature. He also revisits memories and connects them to spaces he has lived in as well as the everyday life of marginalised communities.

Leather is often associated with luxury, wealth and power. Through his process of restitching and weaving leather, Abongile proposes that we start thinking about repurposed materials.

By his process of stitching, he is connecting to notions of healing trauma and in a sense, his practice also functions as a manner of interrogating the continuous healing of black communities in post-apartheid South Africa.

The adjudicators for this award were acclaimed artist and Director at BKhz, Banele Khoza as well as Armelle Dakouo, independent curator and artistic director at AKAA Art & Design Fair.

Though Covid-19 provided its challenges, the past two years were likewise a period of innovation and technological progression.

“The pandemic has allowed us to advance our digital art presence with the launch of the Absa Art Hotspot. This unique virtual experience platform made it possible for us to host live events such as webinars, art exhibitions, art

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masterclasses, and art auctions, while certain elements of our art-related sponsorships and partnerships such as this year’s awards event were also migrated to the platform,” says Paul Bayliss Senior Specialist Art Curator at Absa.

Hosting the competition digitally allowed for the removal of any barriers to entry, all the artist required was a smart phone or access to the internet. “With this year’s theme ‘The Act of Art’, we called our continent’s fearless creators to act and to enter. This years’ competition once again provided an opportunity for visual artists to respond and make their voices heard. We are committed to putting the basic building blocks in place to ensure that young artists from across the African continent can reimagine their futures and bring their possibility to life,” says Bayliss.

“We look forward to working with this year’s ambassadors and Gerard Sekoto winner and providing the next generation of young African artists with the support, recognition, and exposure they need to solidify their careers and build their brands,” concluded Bayliss.

For further information about Absa L’Atelier winners, please visit https://latelier.absa.africa

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THE ART OF INNOVATION EXHIBITION OF WINNING WORKS Pretoria Art Museum 11 November 2021 - 9 January 2022

www.sasolsignatures.co.za

LOOKING AT LONG STREET AND OTHER CITY PAINTINGS…

An exhibition of oil paintings by John Kramer at the Cape Gallery, Church Street. From 8 November 2021 Hayden Proud capegallery.co.za

At this time, the depredations of Covid-19 have been nowhere more in evidence than in the universal spectacle of emptier streets; of silent, shuttered shopfronts and abandoned showrooms. Cape Town’s once-bustling CBD is only now showing signs of economic recovery. The closure of so many bars, restaurants and shops on Long Street, one of the city’s oldest and most colourful, reflects this dramatic transformation of our urban environment. A barely noticeable, gradual pace of change has given way to dramatic desolation within a mere 18 months.

For resident Capetonians, John Kramer’s latest exhibition Looking at Long Street and other city paintings thus comes as a timely ‘remembrance of things past’. Although raised in Worcester and known for his paintings of buildings in the dorpies of the platteland, Kramer is nevertheless a long-standing habitué of Long Street and what is colloquially known as Cape Town’s ‘city bowl’. A resident of the Gardens area, he is a graduate of the local Michaelis School of Fine Art, and he was also employed at the nearby SA Museum as a display artist. He is one of South Africa’s most committed and accomplished realist painters.

Kramer’s special attachment to Long Street is made clear when he says; ‘having walked up and down the street over many years I would always enjoy the kaleidoscope of colour and textures and how the play of light affected the look of the buildings at different times of the day or year. The light in the morning would be dramatically different to shadows cast in the afternoon’. With his trained and selective eye, Kramer has, over the years, assiduously photographed many of his favourite locales on this street at different times of the day and year. This repository of images has only now been brought forward to serve as reference material for his second exhibition this year.

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Crackerjack, Long Street, oil on board, 36cm x 66cm, 2021

His archive is of particular interest as a record of buildings or businesses which now only exist as memory. Thus this latest exhibition, aside from demonstrating Kramer’s usual painterly accomplishments, posits something far more serious. It shows and engagement in a much deeper dialogue with memory and local history that speaks directly to a highdensity urban population than has previously been the case.

Aside from the Long Street subjects, nowvanished shopfronts from other parts of the CBD are also raised, as if from the dead, by Kramer’s brush. Petersen’s famous barber shop on Parliament Street (which also did a brisk trade in theatre make-up and joke accessories) and the famous Topolino Café on Kloof Street were places that were once definitive of the City’s character.

There is something quietly theatrical about these latest pictorial resurrections. On one level, they seem like empty, painted stage sets awaiting the re-arrival of actors to repopulate them. However, the ‘drama’ that actually unfolds in them is far more subtle, as Kramer deftly performs and demonstrates his repertoire. Manipulations and accentuations of colour, light and shadow lift these final painted images onto a higher level of reality than exists in the mundane photographs that served as their source.

Above: Petersons, Plein Street, Cape Town, oil on canvas, , 60cm x 60cm, 2021 Opposite Page: Topolino Cafe, Kloof Street, oil on linen canvas, 80cm x 80cm, 2021

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Express Bargain Centre, Darling Street, oil on canvas

There is, of course, a strong element of nostalgia underpinning the presumed objectivity of these works. Kramer confesses his admiration for Long Street’s surviving Victorian-era buildings, many with cast-iron pillars and decorative balconies that feature what South Africans have come to term broekie lace. While the latter serve as useful compositional and framing devices, the realist in Kramer is resilient enough to resist restoration of their damaged and missing elements. Unlike the well-known Désirée Picton-Seymour (1923-1991), who made pristine reconstructions in her detailed illustrations of Cape Town’s Victorian buildings, Kramer prefers their abject condition. His work, to use a descriptor once applied to the American realist Edward Hopper’s famous painting Early Sunday Morning (1930), is possessed of a ‘hideous beauty’ that does not pay homage to Victorian ideals of the ‘good’ and the ‘lovely’.

Looking at Long Street and other city paintings follows hard on the heels of Kramer’s last exhibition of platteland scenes held in JulyAugust in Prince Albert. A striking difference in his approach to the handling of pictorial space is seen by a comparison of these two exhibitions. The Prince Albert paintings showed him grappling with wider vistas, deeper perspectives, higher skies and the merciless glare of Karoo light. These new city paintings, on the other hand, show him drawing again

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on his accomplished sense of compositional formalities and a rendering of much shallower spaces. Whereas his Prince Albert exhibition essentially dealt with ‘buildings in landscape’, the present show marks a return to the idea of the ‘building as still-life’. In the Long Street paintings, the infinitude of blue sky is eliminated. Façades and pavements are once again established parallel and much closer to the picture plane. Although this show marks a reprise of what he has always done best, Kramer still regards this more confining approach as an ‘exciting challenge’. He deals, as he says, with ‘the facades of buildings with their varying colour combinations and textures; the way light and shadows fall, the verticals and horizontals formed by pillars and balconies, breaking the works into geometric shapes’.

Thus, while Kramer’s fascination with the abstract possibilities underlying his deliberately narrow choice of subject matter and his realist style continues, he has by no means exhausted its possibilities. Despite recent sorties into wider and deeper spaces, this new exhibition affirms his significance as a key South African realist who is sustained by his command of formal pictorial construction.

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THROUGH THE WINDOW

A COLLECTION OF VISUAL NARRATIVES From 6 November 2021 to 26 February 2022.

Gallery hours: Tuesday - Friday 10h00 to 17h00. Saturday 10h00 to 14H00.

Covid-19 regulations are strictly adhered to.

142 Jan Smuts Avenue Parkwood | T: 011 447 0155/98 E-mail: info@gallery2.co.za | www.gallery2.co.za

PAUL WEINBERG

EARTHSONGS – Exhibition And Book Launch 5 November – 05 December 2021 The Melrose Gallery JHB themelrosegallery.com

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arthSongs explores and celebrates spiritual connections to the land in South Africa. While the ownership of “land” in this country is a highly contested issue, people have long marked and celebrated their spiritual connections to the land in ways that signify and reimagine what it means for a variety of its inhabitants. Such meaning-making often etches the landscape, turning it into a natural canvass through which layered stories, manifest or buried, are expressed.

Weinberg has traversed the breadth of the South African landscape to portray its deep and intrinsic meaning and encapsulate the inter-connections of cultures and peoples across the spectrum of time. He traces these intersections from the first peoples, the San and Khoi, whose domain this land was for centuries, to those who came from elsewhere on the continent and from across the seas. In quiet ways beyond the news and headlines, people of all traditions, persuasions, faiths and spiritual engagements partake in formal and informal rituals that mark the land in ways that align with their beliefs. They may go on pilgrimages, or re-ritualise places of archaeological, historical and cultural significance. Such rituals may take place in makeshift places of worship, in caves, next to rivers, or in churches, temples and mosques.

Associate Professor, Hlonipha Mokoena, will open the exhibition and writes in the introduction to the book, “Paul Weinberg’s photographs reflect our human desire for sanctuary. When the eye meets the stillness of a river estuary, or the isolation of a San rock painting, or the pantheon of deities decorating a Hindu temple, it is not “god” that comes to mind but the image of the believer, the faithful, the acolyte who comes to this place to seek the soothing balm of absolution.

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Earthsongs, Digital Archival print on, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 84 x 119 cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 artist’s proofs

Earthsongs, Digital Archival print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 84 x 60 cm, Edition of 10

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The places that Weinberg photographs have not necessarily been consecrated by an organised body — priests, imams, rabbis, izangoma; they are places that history itself has chosen as relics; wailing walls, kramats, amaliba (graves in isiZulu), groves, caves and hills.

This assortment is a testament to how broad the spirit ranges in search of divinity; it is an affirmation of the psychological thirst for a higher being who intercedes in our mundane and not-so-mundane human affairs.”

In some instances, these spiritual sites are well-known, like Mount Nhlangakazi, the endpoint of a 50 km pilgrimage for thousands of followers of the Ibanda lamaNazaretha (Shembe Church). In others, as in the case of Twee Rivieren, where a small statue at the confluence of the Swart and Liesbeek rivers in Cape Town pays homage to the brave Goringhaiqua Khoi who defeated the first colonisers in 1510, these sites are less known. The lesser-known sites often tell stories of contest and simultaneous spiritual significance that need to be told more volubly and heard more widely.

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His moving imagery harnesses the spiritual rituals of a cross-section of southern Africa’s belief systems – indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, African Zionist, Roman Catholic, Buddhist and more. As you encounter these visuals, you will have the unique opportunity to gaze differently, and with deference, at the world we inhabit.

This project complements and expands on the extensive book he did on rituals and spiritual practice called Moving Spirit (1996–2006).

EarthSongs eloquently draws together the ethereal or intangible realm of belief and ritual with the very tangible soil that makes up our landscape. As the title indicates, it chants the songs of the people who inhabit this southern stretch of African earth.

The exhibition and book (published by ESI) can be viewed by the public from 5 November to 5 December 2021 at The Melrose Gallery (Melrose Arch, Johannesburg) and online on www.themelrosegallery.com.

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BODY – PLACE – SPACE

3rd Year Student Exhibition / Artist Proof Studio JHB. Opening 4 November 2021

Above: Emmanuel Matlala, Tlantlhagane, Linocut, 25x35cm, 2021 Opposite Page: Lungile Mbelle, The Healing, Etching, 99.6x69.5cm, 2021

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or the past 18 months art students across the country have had to adapt to hybrid communication learning, with reduced contact studio time, WhatsApp engagements and scheduled online meetings. They have attempted to navigate - often in isolation the challenging terrains of developing and underpinning a concept that is relevant and engaging. Whilst simultaneously navigating all that comes with surviving the social and economic instabilities and inequalities of living in South Africa.

This has been compounded with the harsh realities of a worldwide pandemic.

This space has become an incubator for them to re-examine their own identities, through an investigation of their culture’s ideologies, practices, personal and collective histories.

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22 artists are represented in this exhibition.

Some celebrate and honour fundamental aspects of their cultural identities whilst others question prevailing patriarchal traditions. In many of the pieces, the ‘personal’ is laid bare.

This is sometimes explored through representations of the body or a particular place and space. The notion of ‘home’ as a state of mind or something less representative and tangible emerges in the senior student work.

This exhibition is a showcasing of work from three levels of senior Artist Proof Studio students. It marks and narrates a journey experienced by many through lockdown and beyond of introspection, probing and reconciliation.

Opening 4 November 2021 View and Buy online www.artistproofstudio.co.za Sponsored by Absa

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Thembalethu Ndebele, Ukube nganginge mzulu, ngaba ngaba yini, Linocut, 41.2x31cm, 2021

Nadine Mathenjwa, Isi’thunywa I, Etching, 24.8x18.6cm, 2021

Mashir Kresenshum, Sugar Cane Labourer, Etching and Linocut, 35x25.2cm, 2021

Gugu Mnguni, 2009 I, Linocut and Watercolour, 54x37.2cm, 2021

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ABE OPPERMAN GALLERY 11 Huguenot Street, Franschhoek Tel:+27 82 551 9708 www.abeopperman.com

Art, antiques, objets d’art, furniture, and jewellery wanted for the Grande November Auction

Maggie Laubser, Geese and Flowers, oil on canvas mounted on board SOLD R350,000 View previous auction results at www.rkauctioneers.co.za

011 789 7422 • Bram Fischer Centre, Lower Ground, 95 Bram Fischer Driver Cnr George Street, Ferndale, 2194

I TALK TO THE TREES

Attie Esterhuizen Solo Exhibition The Ladder, Cape Town, Opens 1st November 2021 www.theladderon136.com

Above: Attie’s portraits. Opposite Page: We The Living

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ollowing his two previous sold-out exhibitions, I TALK TO THE TREES is his latest collection of artworks, exploring the journey of life in turbulent times as a walk through an empowering, neverending forest.

Using a combination of gold leaf and mixed media on oil pastels, Attie engages with trees as a metaphor for life. We strive to remain strong and firmly rooted during difficult times, while we must adapt and be flexible, as branches in the changing winds.

“Many people have been experiencing challenging times over the past eighteen months, and the forest has always been my sanctuary,” says Attie. “The trees stand like supporting, steady pillars of strength, listening unconditionally and patiently as we seek to ground ourselves, while their gently, evermoving branches embrace us and remind us to be kind to ourselves, accept ourselves and weather the intense seasons.”

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Born in Johannesburg 1988, Attie is an internationally acclaimed composer and visual artist, having composed most of his work abroad in Paris and New York. He attended the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and continued his studies in Boston and New York. Attie moved to Paris where his musical works were performed by world renowned orchestras, and it is there that his love for the visual arts blossomed. In 2012 Attie produced an animation film which was nominated or won over 50 international awards including the award for Best Artistic Direction at the San Diego Film Festival.

The Ladder Traditional Arts Studio aims to nurture the appreciation of traditional arts and craftsmanship from around the world. Through workshops and exhibitions, they help study and apply what we learn from art traditions of the past and present, and re-discover the beauty of the order of nature and re-apply this beauty and harmony to our daily lives and broader community.

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Above: Meet Me There. Opposite Page: I Am Not A City Boy 1.12.09 PM

The Dream Tree

I TALK TO THE TREES will be presented from Monday 1 November 2021 at The Ladder, 136, Bree Street, Cape Town. Opening times are Monday to Friday 7am to 4pm and on Saturdays from 8am to 2pm.

For further information, theladderon136.com Opposite The Liquor Store

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PRINCE ALBERT OPEN STUDIOS THE SUMMER EDITION 30 December – 02 January 2022 princealbertopenstudios.co.za

Di Smith getting inspiration from her environment.

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ince its inception in 2017, The Prince Albert Open Studios has established itself as a unique and commendable biannual event on the South African visual art calendar. It is the brainchild of celebrated master printmaker, Joshua Miles and his wife Angela, who drew inspiration from their years of involvement in the successful BBos art-route in Baardskeerdersbos.

Having evolved to embrace its own distinct Karoo flavour, The Prince Albert Open Studios winter and summer events have grown into two very different experiences. The Winter event is a-buzz with over 30 studios open over 4 days offering a plethora of fascinating visits to artists working in a wide range of media and genres with extra days for workshops.

The Summer event is an altogether more mellow affair. You could compare it to Karoo slow cooking… taking more time to extract the maximum flavour… an experience to be savoured and dallied over. Less studios are open, and allowance is made for a siesta in the heat of the day with studios re-opening later in the afternoons.

As before, the highly regarded Prince Albert Gallery plays a key role with a group show that highlights one work from each participating artist. This serves as a great appetiser and helps visitors to prioritise those studios which excite them the most. The opening of the Group Show will take place on 29th December at 6pm.

Heleen de Haas land art

Prince Albert Gallery

The important aspect of Prince Albert Open Studios, which has remained as a firm guideline in decision-making, has been the fact that it is run independently by the local artists for the local artists. Tempting as it has been to pursue opportunities to grow, get funding, bring in big names and generally follow the prevailing urban trends, the group has stuck firmly to that founding principle thus keeping the experience authentically local. The exception to this, is generous media sponsorship from The Art Times, that has been extremely supportive of the event without exerting any pressure to conform or change to suit any agenda.

For visitors, a stay in the magical creative hub of Prince Albert is always a treat, with majestic surroundings, wonderful accommodation

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and foodie options and authentic Karoo charm. This is enhanced by the opportunity to be welcomed by artists into their personal creative spaces.

This January, visitors can engage with and see the latest work of: Collette Hurt, Deidre Maree, Di Johnson-Ackerman (guest artist Paul Ackerman), Di Smith, Di van der Riet Steyn, Erika van Zyl, Heleen de Haas, Joshua Miles, Karoo Looms, Kashief Booley/Striking Metal, Kevin de Klerk, Maruanda Wynne, Prince Albert Community Trust (Exhibiting Elcado Blom, Selwyn Maans,, Nathan Maans, Jeffrey Armoed), Prince Albert Gallery (guest artist Lisl Barry), Sue Hoppe, Watershed Gallery.

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NIC FREDMAN A Retrospect ive

30 October to 30 November 2021 6 Spin Street, Cape Town Opening Saturday 30 October 11am

I Talk to the Trees The third exhibition by

ATTIE ESTERHUIZEN A collection of mixed media on oil pastels.

Following his two previous sold-out exhibitions, I Talk To The Trees is Attie Esterhuizen’s latest collection of artworks.

From 1 - 30 November 2021 The Ladder, 136 Bree Street, Cape Town.

Opening times: Monday to Friday 7am to 4pm Saturdays from 8am to 2pm.

Visit www.theladderon136.com

CELEBRATING 35 YEARS AT THE UNISA ART COLLECTION

Sethembile Msezane, Chapungu, The Day Rhodes Fell

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ince its inception in 1986, the Unisa Art Gallery has evolved into becoming one of South Africa’s significant exhibition galleries. The Unisa Art Gallery is privileged to own an intriguing permanent collection made up of some of the most prolific contemporary South African and international artists.

The Unisa Art Gallery hosts a range of exciting exhibitions each year, focusing on diverse and relevant aspects in the arts relevant globally, with a specific emphasis on Africa Proclaimed as one of the most unique public collections in South Africa, The Unisa Art Collection features an array of artworks inclusive of paintings, drawings, graphics, photography, woven tapestries, appliqués, sculpture, and multimedia works from established and emerging South African and African artists at large.

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The Unisa Art Gallery remains focused on acquiring and exhibiting compelling works by both established and peripheral South African and African artists like Gerald Sekoto, Walter Battiss, David Goldblatt, Irma Stern, Nicolas Slovo and Angela Buckland, as well as engaging works by Roger Ballen, Nandipha Mntambo, Aida Muluneh, Muholi Muholi, Steven Cohen and other significant artists whose art serves as individual expressions of diverse South African and African identities.

Aligned with the developmental vision of the University of South Africa, the Unisa Art Gallery collection is a grand reflection of enthralling artistic renditions and expressions that form part of the greater African agenda in the context of both transformation and globalisation, highlighting diverse narratives and identities eminent in contemporary art.

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K Chiurai, The Minister Of Finance, 2009

Justine Dingwaii, This is not a Black Swan

Aida Muluneh,The 99 Series: Part One, 2014, Archival digital print on cotton rag

Muholi Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama series: Fezekile IV, Cincinnati, 2016

Book Review:

LUAN NEL - MALTA BELLA

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UAN NEL (Malta Bella) is an insightful look into the work of artist Luan Nel. Known for his paintings of the natural world as well as his performance work as Donatella Visagie amongst others. The book broadly covers all three decades of this artists output. Nel subscribes to an art practice that consistently catches the audience unawares with its poetry as well as with an attention to detail and timing. It is no ordinary monograph with essays by leading art writers and interviews with artists and activists covering areas of identity, our South African context and the queer archive.

ONTHOU-VERGEET. Installation, Tillburg, The Netherlands, 2000, Fundament Foundation

Striking that this is not the unfolding of one academic reading of an artist’s work.

It includes an insightful and touching collection of essays by authors - Alexandra Dodd, Brenton Maart, Wilhelm van Rensburg, Robin Sassen and interviews with artists, Moshekwa Langa, Ilya Rabinovich, and Social Justice lawyer and activist Keval Harie.

Adding to the multiple voices, this publication finds itself not looking at an artist whose practice is centered around one theme, but rather at an oeuvre that explores various themes executed in many different mediums like painting, installation, photography and performance.

Despite branding being the ultimate measure for much that is considered cultural production today, Nel’s diverse output holds together without the need to endlessly repeat.

It is refreshing to find such diversity all by the same artist. Nel’s agility to jump medium and work on various themes at the same time is beautifully illustrated throughout the book.

What binds the different works is Nel’s ability to create work that teases meaning and surprises.

Alexandra Dodd says it well: “Principally, Nel is a painter who revels in creating installations.

Often the two come together. But his genius lies in variation, multiplicity, recombination, and the evolution of his own private set of codes. Privacy and expressiveness might seem paradoxical impulses, but in Nel’s work they are intrinsically related.”

We gain a better understanding of the artist and his work by looking at it through many lenses.

In the end we are left with an impression of a whole person with many interests and much

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Spier Light Art, Luan Nel, Swell., 2019-2020

to speak about. Luan Nel’s book consists of a multitude of different stories and points of view, each explored in depth and with finesse.

“When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end?

Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?” - From Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) – quoted from Peter Handke’s Song of childhood.

LUAN NEL (Malta Bella) is available through Nel Gallery at admin@nelart.co.za It is priced at R400 a copy, shipped anywhere within South Africa.

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Luan Nel, Four Twenty Twenty, Oil on canvas on board, 82x120cm, 2020

ABE OPPERMAN Finding joy in the smallest corners of life A

fter completing his art diploma from art school in Pretoria during the 80’s Abe studied a further 2 years of fashion design and then followed a 25-year career in the floral art industry. He turned his creative talent towards the canvas in 2007. The initial and continued support from those who connect with his work on a deeper level as a creative in the field of floral design, has propelled his desire to pursue and evolve his message in the form of painting, sculpture and ceramics.

Abe`s work is neither purely figurative, sentimental, or ever political. It is a visual narrative and commentary that is mostly the storytelling of tales past and present. Textural and abstract expressions is often interwoven as part of his artistic expression. Abe is influenced by memories of past happenings sparked by occurrences in his present daily life. He works in a style that he has developed over a long period of time. Often presented in black and white only. As the expression demands it, he easily leaps into bright textural renderings. In recent years, color, which he loves, is presented more purposefully - as his desire to bring joy and respite to anyone who observes his work, is heightened.

Despite the multi-faceted hardship created by the lockdowns in response to Covid 19, Abe found the time to be rather fruitful. A time in which he has been able to explore, reflect and experiment with greater freedom and importantly, without distraction. The period of isolation was a great time of retrospection, consideration and challenging himself, his technique, and his abilities with new mediums.

Abe will be presenting his next exhibition at the Abe Opperman Gallery in Franschhoek, during November 2021. The exhibition is undoubtedly brought about by his considerations and feeling of gratitude for freedom, beauty in its many forms and finding joy in the smallest corners of life, even in the mundane. His simple carefree childhood, flowers and trees are ever present in his work while whim and fantasy, remains a standard ingredient in conjuring up the characters of his visual tales. Visit www. abeopperman.co.za

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See the stars, Size: 1,28m x 1,78m, Charcoal and mix media on Arches paper framed

Above: Odeon, 1,5m x 1,4m, Acrylic/mix media on canvas Opposite Page: Andrea, A rendition of a photograph by Peter Hujar, Size: 1,8m x 1,6m, Oil on canvas

Touch, 1,53m x 1,33m, Acrylic/mix media on velvet

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THROUGH THE WINDOW A Collection of Visual Narratives A Group Exhibition Gallery2 JHB 06 November – 26 February 2022 www.gallery2.co.za

Above: Imile Wepener, Death’s Nostalgia, Gouache and Gliter on Fabriano, 25 x 35cm, 2021 Opposite Page: Neil Badenhorst, King Jimmie, Digital media, 42 x 29.7cm, 2020

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n this exhibition we invited each artist to explore the idea of story-telling, explaining a narrative, through visual mediums. Each artist we invited has a unique and individual style which we feel is open to the possibility of the narrative. Whether the ‘story’ is distinct or of an abstract nature, this exhibition is open to all kinds of interpretations: drawings, illustrations, artists’ books, sculptures etc.

Illustration is a known medium used for storytelling, understood as merely a depiction of an idea. However, through time it has been looked at with more sensitivity allowing the image-making process to be interpreted with more nuance and complexity.

Featured Artists include; Katja Abbott, Audrey Anderson, Bruce Backhouse, Neil Badenhorst, Maaike Bakker, Collin Cole, Kevin Collins, Karin Daymond, Maggie de Vos, Kaelik Dullaart, Bronwen Findley, Carmen Ford, David Griessel, Phila Hillie, Jenifer Hull, Diana Hyslop, Sanele Jali, Kobie Nieuwoudt, Maria Lebedeva, Balekane Legoabe, Bruce Mackay, Shenaz Mahomed, Malebona Maphutse, Collen Maswanganyi, Abe Mathabe, Sean McMahon, Ilse Nieman, Kobie Niewoudt, Buhle Nkalashe, Kyra Papé, Fiona Pole, Gregg Price, Linda Rademan, Kagiso Reuben, Nina Torr, Adele van Heerden, Imile Wepener, Zhi Zulu

The exhibition will run for the duration of November, December 2021, January and February 2022.

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Above: Adele van Heerden, Fontainebleau, Ink and Gouache on Drafting Film, 30.5 x 22 cm, 2020 Opposite Page: Phila Hillie, Exhale 2, Medium, 42 x 27.9cm, 2021, Framed

Maggie de Vos, Nice and Easy 1, Digital Print, Edition of 3, 35 x 45cm, 2021

Maaike Bakker, Make your own adventure, Print on Archival Paper, Edition of 3, 2021

Linda Rademan, Out of the dark intot the light, Mixed media, 68 x 48cm, 2021.

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Business Art

BASA’S DEBUT ONLINE NURTURES REAL SKILLS FOR ARTS ENTREPRENEURS Divided into three phases, Kickstarter, Hlanganisa and Catalyst, the current iteration of the Programme has engaged 648 participants to date, and awarded grants to the value of R2 700 000 to seed exciting creative ideas.

A broad cross-section of young emerging artists was selected from the 1 885 applicants who submitted their videos, residents of both rural or peri-urban areas nationally, between the ages of 18 and 35. Beginning with the Kickstarter phase of the programme, 358 participants from all nine provinces took part in the online workshops, and 180 of these were then chosen to progress to the Hlanganisa phase of the programme.

Mr Vusumuzi Mkhize (DSAC) Boitumelo ‘Tumy’ Motsoatsoe, BASA Head of Programmes

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he arts economy holds promise for creative entrepreneurs to be their own boss and create further employment, but business skills are key to making the transition from idea to successful enterprise.

Now in its second iteration, Business and Arts South Africa’s (BASA) Debut Programme transfers enterprise development skills to artists from all nine provinces through an intensive knowledge and mentorship programme. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic officially hit South Africa, compelling the Debut team to forge new ways of assisting artists with limited opportunities. Thus far, the programme has had to rely heavily on digital platforms due to the lockdown restrictions and will follow a gradual evolution into a mixed-model approach as the context changes. At present, this has translated to the programme running exclusively via WhatsApp, Facebook and Zoom. The result has been a lean, agile approach to online engagement, with the programme reassigned to an entirely digital space.

According to Mr Vusumuzi Mkhize, DirectorGeneral of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture (DSAC): “the Debut Programme’s primary vision continues to align to the current drive from the entire sector’s commitment to uplift, support and bringing relief to creatives.”

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The programme is currently in the Hlanganisa Phase, where participants have been introduced to a responsive way of testing services or products and developing a new business venture online. This phase also includes mentorship sessions with provincial mentors/facilitators as participants work towards the inaugural Debut Programme Online Art Fair Week (15–19 November). This is an opportunity for the participants to showcase and take their products to an online market.

Ultimately, Hlanganisa’s primary aim is to ensure participants emerge at the conclusion of the phase equipped to take their product to market.

Says Boitumelo ‘Tumy’ Motsoatsoe, BASA Head of Programmes: “Through intentional collaborations with experienced, young facilitators, provincial liaisons as well industry experts, the programme catalysed a narrative shift where participants began to see themselves as assets, equipped with ideas and innovations for their own communities.”

For more information visit: https://basa.co.za/programmes/

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Business Art

STRAUSS & CO

LIVE VIRTUAL AUCTION Johannesburg, 7-9 November 2021 www.straussart.co.za

Johannesburg Auction Week features two masterpieces of mid-century SA painting Strauss & Co is pleased to announce details of Johannesburg Auction Week, a vibrant programme of curated sales exploring a century of change in South African art.

The forthcoming three-day live virtual sale (7–9 November 2021) features two highly important paintings by JH Pierneef and Alexis Preller, exceptional works on paper by contemporary master William Kentridge, as well as five paintings by Vladimir Tretchikoff.

Johannesburg Auction Week also includes an 18-lot mini-session exploring the persuasive influence of classical African Art and early European Modernism on post-war South African artists.

“Johannesburg Auction Week is the culminating live sale in Strauss & Co’s programme for 2021 and an important statement of intent,” says Susie Goodman, Strauss & Co executive director. “This tentpole event includes two spellbinding pictures from the 1950s: JH Pierneef’s late-career masterpiece Bushveld, Pafuri, from 1952, and Alexis Preller’s seminal Adam and Eve, painted in 1955. It is a privilege for Strauss & Co to be handling these important works made at a transitionary moment in South African art history when the influence of Africa loomed large in the creative imagination.”

Painted five years before Pierneef’s passing, Bushveld, Pafuri (estimate R8 – 10 million) portrays a scene from the north-eastern reaches of South Africa, in the leafy floodplains near the meeting of South Africa with Mozambique and Zimbabwe. This remarkable work, which balances decorative complexity and powerful verticality with riotous colour, leads an impressive consignment of 15 Pierneef lots. These lots include three linocuts, one watercolour and a striking trove of 11 oils.

William Kentridge, Drawing from Other Faces (Drive-In Screen), charcoal and red conté on paper sheet size: 57 by 79cm, R 1 800 000 - 2 400 000

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Noteworthy oils include the pastel-hued composition Mountain Landscape near Clarens (estimate R2.5 – 3 million) and atmospheric Rainclouds over the Mountains, Hangklip between Stutterheim and Queenstown, Eastern Cape (R1.2 – 1.6 million). Doring Boom (Thorn Tree) captures Pierneef working with an autumn palette, while Pienaarsrivier depicts one of the artist’s favourite haunts (estimate R900 000 – 1.2 million for each).

These four works will be offered with Pierneef’s show-stopping Bushveld, Pafuri in Strauss & Co’s premier session on Monday, 8 November 2021. This catalogue session also includes lots by important Thirties Generation pioneers John Koenakeefe Mohl, George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto, as well as an in-session focus on how classical African art and Modernist painting directly impacted South Africa art in the years after 1945.

George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba, Open Air Concert, oil on board, 33,5 by 43,5cm, R 350 000 - 500 000

Lavishly illustrated and contextualised in the print catalogue, this in-session focus will feature paintings and sculptures by, among others, Walter Battiss, Sydney Kumalo, Alexis Preller, Lucas Sithole, Cyprian Shilakoe, Cecil Skotnes and Edoardo Villa. Highlights include mask forms by Sithole and Villa, incised panels

by Skotnes and two figural compositions by Kumalo, notably Mythological Rider (estimate R1 – 1.5 million). The highlight is undoubtedly Preller’s large oil Adam and Eve (estimate R7.6 – 8 million).

“Alexis Preller’s Adam and Eve is one of the artist’s mid-career masterpieces,” says Alastair Meredith, a senior art specialist and head of Strauss & Co’s art department.

“Monumental and lyrical, rich and gorgeously coloured, timeless yet jaw-droppingly unique, symbolically loaded and joyously intricate, the painting is a beautiful snapshot from Preller’s very personal vision of Africa.”

Strauss & Co is pleased to present five paintings by Vladimir Tretchikoff, one of the most popular and financially successful artists in the world during his heyday from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Red Lilies (Amaryllis) and The Tropical Flower (estimate R700 000 – 900 000 for each), both from the later 1940s, form part of a consignment of four flower studies and one figure work. The graceful Ballerina (estimate R700 000 – R1 million) showcases the painter’s striking aptitude for colour and fine sense for form.

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Vladimir Tretchikoff, White Orchids, oil on canvas 85 by 66cm, R 600 000 - 900 000

David Goldblatt, Semi-Final of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition (Saturday Morning at the Hypermarket), silver gelatin print on paper image size: 46 by 45cm, R 300 000 - 350 000

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Alexis Preller, Adam and Eve, oil on canvas 102 by 76,5cm, R 7 600 000 - 8 000 000

Sydney Kumalo, Mythological Rider, bronze with a dark brown patina, height: 72cm; width: 92cm; depth: 42cm, R 1 000 000 - 1 500 000

Edoardo Villa, Standing Figure, bronze with a green patina, height: 125cm; width: 50cm; depth: 40cm, R 500 000 - 700 000

Jacob Hendrik Pierneef, Bushveld, Pafuri, oil on artist’s board, 59,5 by 74cm, R 8 000 000 - 10 000 000

Johannesburg Auction Week commences on Sunday, 7 November 2021 with a session presented by Strauss & Co’s flourishing wine department, and is followed on the same day by two sessions presented by the art department.

There is a strong focus on contemporary art in these sessions. The photography selection includes works by David Goldblatt, Zanele Muholi and Mikhael Subotzky. Notable sculptors represented include Willem Boshoff, Wim Botha, Frances Goodman, Chris Soal and Angus Taylor. Lisa Brice, who is currently included in an important painting showcase at London’s Hayward Gallery, has an early 1990s work in the catalogue too.

William Kentridge’s charcoal and red conté Drawing from Other Faces (Drive-In Screen) (estimate R1.8 – 2.4 million), from the artist’s 2011 stop-motion film Other Faces, leads the contemporary drawing selection. Also by Kentridge, Anamorphic Drawing (Telephone) is a remarkable example of the artist’s experimental use of perspective and reflection (estimate R15. – 2 million). Diane Victor’s charcoal and chalk triptych Nastagio Degli Onesti and the Difficult Decision (estimate R700 000 – 900 000) is a virtuoso work of classical ambition.

Sam Nhlengethwa’s

1992 charcoal It Left Him Cold (estimate R40 000 – 60 000) quotes an important earlier collage depicting murdered activist Steve Biko.

Johannesburg Auction Week concludes on Tuesday, 9 November 2021 with two sessions devoted respectively to the ceramic sculpture of Hylton Nel and Nico Masemola, and the property of a single-owner collector. Nel, a renowned ceramicist based in Calitzdorp, is an influential mentor of a new generation of talent.

Masemola, a former apprentice of Nel’s, died in 2015. He was one of the most talked about artists in Strauss & Co’s successful ceramics showcase in November 2020. Professor Jan K Coetzee is a respected collector and well-known participant in South African intellectual life. In 2019 he launched his debut monograph, Books & Bones & Other Things, with an exhibition of his work at Everard Read Circa Gallery.

Strauss & Co will preview works in Johannesburg Auction Week at its dedicated exhibition space at 89 Central Street, Houghton, Johannesburg.

Covid-19 regulations apply. Johannesburg Auction Week will commence at 10am on Sunday, 7 November and conclude at 7pm on Tuesday, 9 November 2021.

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Business Art

STEPHAN WELZ & CO. www.swelco.co.za

T

he air at the viewing of the Stephan Welz & Co. Premium October Auction was of excitement and anticipation as viewers came through our doors in their hundreds for the first time since life was turned upside down by Covid19. The auction saw collectors breathing a sigh of relief as they could safely and comfortably view works of interest which would be going under the hammer. The sale saw the benefit of traditional viewing, mixed with the ease of online bidding. Spirited online bidding resulted in some very pleasing results for artists such as John Piper, Alexis Preller, William Kentridge, Gerard Sekoto, A.R. Penck, and the exciting sale of Anton van Wouw’s The Thinker, offered on auction for the first time at Stephan Welz & Co. Our November Premium Online sale continues this trend with some exciting works which have never been offered on auction before, presenting collectors with some unexpected, yet recognisable, examples of some of South Africa’s most celebrated artists. Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Still life of chrysanthemums in an oriental vase, wonderfully captures the artist’s ability to create texture, interest and the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat surface. Morrie Shain, owner of the Crescent Pottery Studio and all-round art lover, owned the work for over 50 years, and appreciated the piece for its generous layering of impasto. This work offers collectors the opportunity to invest in a characteristically ‘Tretchikoff’ work, never exposed to the market before.

Not only has Walter Battiss’ Figure on pink never been seen on auction, but offers Battiss lovers an unexpected example of the artist’s paintings. This work alludes to the artist’s more delicate, yet often chaotic ink drawings of intertwined figures. The artist’s use of line is bold and unapologetic, but maintains the fluidity and movement that he is known for.

Battiss’ depiction of a topsy-turvy figure painting with his toes highlights his disregard for art world traditionalists, challenging concepts of fine art and techniques with a rebellious sense of humour.

Walter Whall Battiss (South African 1906 - 1982): Figure On Pink, signed, oil on board, 40 by 52,5cm excluding frame; 44,5 by 56,5 by 1,5cm including frame, R 100 000 – R 150 000

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Pieter Hugo Naudé (South African 1896 – 1941): Hex River, signed, oil on board, 35 by 45cm excluding frame; 56 by 66 by 5cm including frame, R 150 000 – R 200 000

Maud Frances Eyston Sumner (South African 1902 – 1985): Warehouses On The Thames, signed, oil on canvas, 66 by 92cm excluding frame; 73,5 by 99,5 by 5,5cm including frame, R 150 000 – R 200 000

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Irma Stern (South African 1894 – 1966): Portrait Of A Woman, signed and dated 1927, charcoal on paper, 47 by 34,5 cm excluding frame; 70 by 57 by 2,5cm including frame, R 150 000 – R 200 000

Pranas Domšaitis (South African 1880 - 1965): Three Figures signed, oil on paper laid down on board, 53,5 by 46cm excluding frame; 62 by 55 by 2cm including frame, R 40 000 – R 60 000

Vladimir Grigoryevich Tretchikoff (South Africa 1913 – 2006): Still Life Of Chrysanthemums In An Oriental Vase signed, oil on canvas 62 by 75cm excluding frame; 97 by 110 by 6,5cm including frame, R 500 000 – R 800 000

Our specialists are pleased to present another unexpected example from a wellloved South African favourite: District 6 by Gregoire Boonzaier. Boonzaier is known for his depictions of District 6 from a ‘first person perspective’, where he would paint scenes from the streets of these areas and capture a snippet of daily life. However, the work available on our upcoming sale depicts District 6 with a sense of detachment, looking down on the houses and streets from above, the view intersected by a blossoming tree.

Boonzaier was enamoured with the bustling melting pot of cultures found in the area, and documented this aspect, as well as the political turbulence which eventually tore it apart, with sensitivity and dignity. District 6’s symbolic nature is combined in this example with the recognisable symbol of a blossoming tree, indicating new life and growth.

Accompanying these rare works, is Maud Sumner’s Warehouses On The Thames, which illustrates a period in the artist’s career, between 1947 and 1953, while living between London and Paris, where Sumner’s style was drastically altered. Upon her return to Europe after waiting out World War II in South Africa, the artist was met with a shift in art practice towards abstraction, which had slowly taken over the European art scene. Sumner began to favour more simplified planes of vibrant colour and geometric shape, and created a hauntingly intense series of views of the Thames River during this period of experimentation. The artist’s use of contrasting light, shadow, and uncomplicated geometry to depict buildings and bridges along the river, paired with a considered palette, results in evocative, moody works that contain a certain freshness and depth. Warehouses On The Thames wonderfully illustrates Sumner’s individual depiction of uniquely European scenes during this period.

These works will be offered alongside works by the likes of Hugo Naude, Edoardo Villa, Pranas Domšaitis, Irma Stern and David Shepherd on the upcoming November Premium Online Auction. To view the available lots, register or bid, visit www.swelco.co.za. For condition report requests, and to book your viewing appointment, contact us on 0118803125 or support@swelco.co.za.

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Gregoire Johannes Boonzaier (South African 1909 – 2005): District 6, Tree In Blossom, signed and dated, 1933, oil on canvas, 56 by 63,5cm excluding frame; 73 by 79,5 by 7cm including frame, R 200 000 – R 300 000

ARTGO NOV 2021

NEW GALLERIES, ONGOING SHOWS AND OPENING EXHIBITIONS Balekane Legoabe, Tide Pools, 2021.

Mixed media on archival paper, 30 x42cm, Gallery 2

ARTGO: NOVEMBER 2021

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

EXHIBITIONS 2021

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY Artful Chance Encounters 29 June - 16 January 2022

THE JOHANNESBURG STATION PANELS Pierneef’s Journey ICONography The symbols of Rembrandt, Rorke’s Drift and Ardmore

3 August - 28 November 2021

PORTRAIT 100 Portrait Award / 2021

4 September - 28 November 2021

Bonnie Ntshalintshali (1967-1999) Daniel and the lions Serigraph 8/50 Rupert Art Foundation Collection

Stellentia Road, Stellenbosch Tue – Fri: 10:00 – 17:00 Sat – Sun: 10:00 – 16:00 info@rupertmuseum.org 021 888 3344 www.rupertmuseum.org

THE LADDER 136, BREE STREET, CAPE TOWN TALK TO THE TREES ATTIE ESTERHUIZEN 01/11/2021 UNTIL 30/11/2021 WWW.THELADDERON136.COM/

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ABE OPPERMAN GALLERY

NEW SUMMER EXHIBITION, 11 HUGUENOT ST

131 A GALLERY, CAPE TOWN OLIVIÉ KECK - PLAYING WITH CATASTROPHE OPENING 6PM TO 8PM, 04/11/2021 4/11/2021 TO 6/12/2021 WWW.131AGALLERY.COM

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THE ARTIST PROOF STUDIO BODY – PLACE – SPACE 3RD YEAR STUDENT EXHIBITION 04/11/2021 UNTIL 31/01/2022 VIEW AND BUY ONLINE WWW.ARTISTPROOFSTUDIO.CO.ZA

MELROSE GALLERY JHB PAUL WEINBERG EARTHSONGS – A NEW EXHIBITION AND BOOK 05/11/2021 UNTIL 05/12/2021 THE MELROSE GALLERY JHB WWW.THEMELROSEGALLERY.COM

GALLERY 2 THROUGH THE WINDOW A COLLECTION OF VISUAL NARRATIVES 06/11/2021 UNTIL 26/02/2022 WWW.GALLERY2.CO.ZA

RK CONTEMPORARY TAMLIN BLACK, MARLISE KEITH & HANNEKE BENADE JUMP 07/11/2021 UNTIL 27/11/2021 RKCONTEMPORARY.COM

ARTGO: NOVEMBER 2021

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

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SURFACE GROUP EXHIBITION FROM THE ROOIELS AREA AT OLD LUTHERAN CHURCH, 138 DORP STREET, STELLENBOSCH OPENS 07/11/2021 AT 11:00 AM 07/11/2021 UNTIL 23/01/2022

THE CAPE GALLERY LOOKING AT LONG STREET AND OTHER CITY PAINTINGS… JOHN KRAMER OPENS 08/11/2021 WWW.CAPEGALLERY.CO.ZA

PRETORIA ART MUSEUM SASOL NEW SIGNATURES EXHIBITION OF WINNING WORKS 11/11/2021 UNTIL 09/01/2022 WWW.SASOLNEWSIGNATURES.CO.ZA

SAADA JOHANNESBURG SUMMER FAIR 2021 THE SOUTH AFRICAN ANTIQUE, ART & DESIGN ASSOCIATION / 13/11/2021 - 14/11/2021 10:00 – 18:00 DAILY THE MASLOW HOTEL, CORNER RIVONIA ROAD & GRAYSTON DRIVE, SANDTON / FREE ENTRY WWW.SAADA.CO.ZA

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UNISA ART GALLERY Kgorong Building, 274 Preller St, Muckleneuk, Pretoria Unisa Art Gallery aims at showcasing innovative and intriguing exhibitions that encourage debates and academic engagement.

Aida Muluneh,The 99 Series: Part One, 2014, Archival Digital Print N Cotton Rag

Paul Weinberg, EARTHSONGS, Exhibition and book launch 5 November, 05 December 2021 The Melrose Gallery JHB

ARTGO: NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2021

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

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RUST-EN-VREDE GALLERY AND CLAY MUSEUM CERAMICS SA WESTERN CAPE REGIONAL EXHIBITION 14/11/2021 UNTIL 10/12/2021 WWW.RUST-EN-VREDE.COM

NEL A BOOK ON THE THIRTY-YEAR ART PRACTICE OF LUAN NEL WILL BE LAUNCHED AND A BROAD SELECTION OF THE ARTIST’S WORK WILL BE ON DISPLAY FOR FOUR DAYS ONLY. OPENING 24/11/2021 AT 6PM 24/11/2021 UNTIL 29/11/2021 WWWNELART.CO.ZA

CAPE PALETTE ANNUAL SUMMER SHOW CURATED GROUP EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN ART 25/11/2021 UNTIL 10/01/2022 WWW.CAPEPALETTE.CO.ZA

LA MOTTE MUSEUM SPECIAL EVENT 27/11/2021 CREATE YOUR OWN TAPESTRY WITH ANDIE REEVES RESERVATION IS ESSENTIAL WWW.LA-MOTTE.COM

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THE VIEWING ROOM ART GALLERY AND ST. LORIENT PRICES TO GIVE CHEER: ART TREASURE TROVE SMALLER BUT STUNNING ARTWORKS ON EXHIBITION, GOING FOR LOW PRICES SO THAT EVERYONE CAN GET A SPECIAL GIFT THIS HOLIDAY. 27/11/2021 UNTIL 08/01/2022 WWW.THEVIEWINGROOM.CO.ZA

PRINCE ALBERT OPEN STUDIOS THE SUMMER EDITION THE MAGICAL CREATIVE HUB OF PRINCE ALBERT IS ALWAYS A TREAT 30/12/2021 UNTIL 02/01/2022 WWW.PRINCEALBERTOPENSTUDIOS.CO.ZA

SALON NINETY ONE THE ISLAND CHLOE TOWNSEND, JOH DEL, KIRSTEN BEETS, LUCY STUART-CLARK,TARA DEACON 01/12/2021 UNTIL 23/12/2021 WWW.SALON91.CO.ZA

ART@AFRICA CAPE TOWN CELEBRATING AFRICA IN ALL ITS DIVERSITY AFRICAN HORIZONS SOLO EXHIBITION BY KOBUS WALKER 02/12/2021 UNTIL 12/01/2022 WWW.ARTATAFRICA.ART

SUMMER SALON 2021 PRESENTS A SELECTION OF NEW EXCITING PRINTS END OF NOVEMBER TO END FEBRUARY 2022 See more online at www.printgallery.co.za

Diane Victor: The Pyramid Scheme Printed at Artists’ Press, White River, South Africa Three colour lithograph, Edition size: 35 76 x 56.5 cm paper size

ARTGO: NOVEMBER 2021

ONGOING SHOWS

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AITY- ART IN THE YARD BLOOM A SOLO EXHIBITION BY VANESSA BERLEIN UNTIL 14/11/2021 WWW.ARTINTHEYARD.CO.ZA

OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM PHATSHOANE HENNEY NEW BREED ART COMPETITION EXHIBITION 2021 SHOWCASING NEARLY 50 ARTWORKS BY 40 UPCOMING FREE STATE ARTISTS 05/10/2021 UNTIL 14/11/2021 WWW.NASMUS.CO.ZA/OLIEWENHUISTEMPORARY-EXHIBITIONS/

OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM ĀVĀHANA – INVOCATION, A SOLOEXHIBITION BY AMITA MAKAN 05/10/2021 UNTIL 14/11/2021 WWW.NASMUS.CO.ZA/OLIEWENHUISTEMPORARY-EXHIBITIONS/

EVERARD READ FRANSCHHOEK JACO ROUX | LUCINDA MUDGE | ARABELLA CACCIA 23/10/2021 UNTIL 15/11/2021 EVERARD-READ FRANSCHHOEK.CO.ZA

DEEPEST DARKEST KIFF KHAYA RUAN JOOSTE SOLO EXHIBITION NOVEMBER 2021 WWW.DEEPESTDARKEST.COM

NEL EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES PHILIP STEELE PAINTS DECEASED MALE EROTIC STARS. UNTIL 20/11/2021 WWW.NELART.CO.ZA

SA PRINT GALLERY THE PRINTING GIRLS @ SA PRINT GALLERY GROUP EXHIBITION 09/10/2021 UNTIL 20/11/2021 WWW.PRINTGALLERY.CO.ZA & WWW.THEPRINTINGGIRLS.CO.ZA

CAPE PALETTE CLICK EXHIBITION SHOWCASINGS ESTABLISHED AND UP AND COMING LOCAL PHOTOGRAHERS 101 MEADE IN GEORGE 21/10/2021 UNTIL 21/11/2021 WWW.CAPEPALETTE.CO.ZA

OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM HOPE: AN EXHIBITION CURATED BY RETIRED PRINCIPAL CONSERVATOR AT OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM, LINDA WHEELER 04/10/2021 UNTIL 21/11/2021 WWW.NASMUS.CO.ZA/OLIEWENHUISTEMPORARY-EXHIBITIONS/

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Paul Weinberg’s

EarthSongs 5 NOV - 5 DEC The Melrose Gallery 10 The High Street Melrose Arch

themelrosegallery.com

TheMelroseGallery

themelrose_gallerysa

Amita Makan, Leucospermum lineare (Detail) 05/10/2021 UNTIL 14/11/202 Nasmus / Oliewenhuis

ARTGO: NOVEMBER 2021

ONGOING SHOWS

ART@AFRICA CAPE TOWN

SALON NINETY ONE WHAT A BLOOMING MESS A SOLO EXHIBITION OF OIL PAINTINGS

BY EMMA NOURSE 27/10/2021 UNTIL 27/11/2021 WWW.SALON91.CO.ZA

THE GALLERY AT GLEN CARLOU

THE GALLERY AT GLEN CARLOU IT’S [NOT] BLACK & WHITE A COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITION OF CERAMICS AND DRAWINGS WITH JP MEYER & ERIKA SUTER 17/10/2021 UNTIL 28/11/2021 WWW.GLENCARLOU.COM/ART-GALLERY

FYNARTS GALLERY

EBONY CURATED FRANSCHHOEK BORDEAUX HOUSE LOOKING IN STEPHEN ALLWRIGHT & RICHARD BUTLER BOWDON NOVEMBER 2021 WWW.EBONYCURATED.COM

EBONY CURATED FRANSCHHOEK BORDEAUX HOUSE ORDER AND CHAOS DRIAAN CLAASSEN NOVEMBER 2021 WWW.EBONYCURATED.COM

ECLECTICA CONTEMPORARY OFENTSE SESHABELA SMOKING GUN NOVEMBER 2021 WWW.ECLECTICACONTEMPORARY.CO.ZA

REFLECTION | REFRACTION | DISPERSION A SOLO EXHIBITION BY ANNAMIEKE ENGELBRECHT 17/10/2021 UNTIL 28/11/2021 WWW.GLENCARLOU.COM/ART-GALLERY

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ON THIN ICE EXHIBITION CELEBRATING MARINE BIODIVERSITY AND REFLECTING ON HUMANKIND’S PERSPECTIVES ON OUR OCEANS, OUR PLANET AND ON THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS. 28/10/2021 UNTIL 28/11/2021 WWW.ARTATAFRICA.ART

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BIO DIVERSITY ANDRÈE BONTHUYS & JENNY STRONG A CELEBRATION OF OUR RICH AND UNIQUE, BUT FRAGILE, LOCAL BIOMES, THE COURTYARD, HARBOUR ROAD, HERMANUS 28/10/2021 UNTIL 29/11/2021 WWW.HERMANUSFYNARTS.CO.ZA

Karin Daymond, The Height of Summer, Oil on Canvas, 45 x 60cm, 2021, Gallery 2

ARTGO: NOVEMBER - JANUARY 2021

ONGOING SHOWS

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NIC FREDMAN: A RETROSPECTIVE THE DARK ROOMS WOODSTOCK ANTHILLS ARTEFACTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONS SMALL LANDSCAPES 6 SPIN ST. CAPE TOWN 30/10/2021 UNTIL 30/11/2021 WWW.NICFREDMAN.COM

UNISA ART GALLERY CELEBRATING 35 YEARS CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN A ND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS NOVEMBER 2021

PRINCE ALBERT GALLERY AND THEY CAME RUNNING A PORTFOLIO OF IMAGES OF THE SURI TRIBE IN ETHIOPIA BY SAMANTHA REINDERS UNTIL 01/12/2021 WWW.PRINCEALBERTGALLERY.CO.ZA

SMAC GALLERY CPT ALEXANDRA KARAKASHIAN CONSOLATIONS 09/10/2021 UNTIL 04/12/2022 WWW.SMACGALLERY.COM

PALETTE GALLERY FRANSCHHOEK 40 HUGUENOT RD ART REFLECTS BOTH THE ROOTS OF THE FRENCH FARMING AREA AND THE MODERN CULTURAL TOWN OF FRANSCHHOEK ONGOING WWW.PALETTESCULPTUREGALLERY.CO.ZA

NORVAL FOUNDATION CONGRESS: THE SOCIAL BODY IN THREE FIGURATIVE PAINTERST TREVOR MAKHOBA, GEORGE PEMBA & STHEMBISO SIBISI 02/10/2021 UNTIL 10/01/2022 WWW.NORVAFOUNDATION.ORG

UCT IRMA STERN MUSEUM RIGHT MUKORE & MTHOBELI AARON BAKANA: WOOD SCULPTURES 20/09/2021 UNTIL 26/02/2022 WWW.IRMASTERNMUSEUM.CO.ZA

LA MOTTE MUSEUM

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ABSA L’ATELIER 2021

CELEBRATES DIVERSE TALENT FROM ACROSS THE AFRICAN CONTINENT ABSA IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS (SANAVA ONLINE EVENT HOSTED ON THE ABSA ART HOTSPOT / NOVEMBER 2021 WWW.ARTHOTSPOT.ABSA.AFRICA

THREADS OF SYNERGY SOUTH AFRICAN TAPESTRY ART TAPESTRIES BY THE STEPHENS TAPESTRY STUDIO OF ARTISTS ROBERT HODGINS, WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, SAM NHLENGETHWA, CECILY SASH AND CECIL SKOTNES. UNTIL WINTER 2022 WWW.LA-MOTTE.COM/PAGES/MUSEUM

ĂŬĞƐ DĚĂ͕ &ĂŵŽ ^ĞƌŝĞƐ ϴ͕ ĐƌLJůŝĐƐ ŽŶ ĐĂŶǀĂƐƐ ĂŶĚ ŵŝƌƌŽƌƐ͕ ϱϬ͘ϴ dž ϰϬ͘ϲϰ Đŵ͘

Mirrors and Washboards

Zakes Mda Solo Exhibition and Book Lauch of Wayfarers’ Hymns

16 October till 27 November 2021

Opening 11:00-14:00

HAMBA KAHLE, DREW LINDSAY: WE HAVE ALL LOST A GOOD SOUL, PERHAPS WHEN WE NEEDED HIM MOST Johannesburg artist Drew Lindsay. (Photo: Gail Wilson)

By Stephen Faulkner / Published 18 Oct 2021 dailymaverick.co.za

D

rew Lindsay was a community artist for most of his adult life.

He established, ran and lived at the Spaza Art Gallery in Troyeville, one of the poorest parts of Joburg, and which for almost 20 years has been home to countless art workshops, exhibition openings, music and poetry events, comedy, dance classes, sublime food and gatherings of every description.

In the middle of a pandemic, when so many have passed away in circumstances too terrible to contemplate, often leaving behind, as one friend expressed in poetry, “the sour taste, of not being able, to say goodbye” — it seems especially difficult to bid farewell to someone who was so very special to so many people, but I am going to try.

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On 13 October 2021, we had a call from Cati, our friend and neighbour of more than 20 years about the passing of Drew (Andrew) Lindsay, a lifelong friend of hers, from what appears to have been a repeat of an episode of heart failure. Many friends outside South Africa will probably have never heard of Drew, but a walk around Joburg and many other locations countrywide will find evidence of his work.

He was a community artist most of his adult life. He established, ran and lived at the Spaza Art Gallery in Troyeville, one of the poorest parts of our city, and which for almost 20 years has been home to countless art workshops, first-time and more established exhibition openings, a tea garden, music and poetry events, comedy, dance classes, sublime food and gatherings of every description.

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Artwork by Drew Lindsay in Bertrams, Johannesburg. (Photo: Dionne MacDonald) Perhaps most importantly of all, The Spaza was a place where people from all backgrounds, and especially those who had very little, could enjoy a space where creative activity and thinking, contemplation and sometimes raucous Sunday afternoons were open to them.

Along with so many others, I made many lasting and deeply valued friendships under Drew’s roof and via his infectious facilitation and enthusiasm. He was a terrific artist in his own right, but was always “too busy” and, frankly, far too humble to really promote himself. His collaborative art projects, involving many of those he helped train, are all over this city and beyond. Marvellous mosaics and rich murals and glorious sculptures of footballers and miners, and so much more. His alternative maps of our city were artworks in themselves!

But there was also so much not in the public arena. His dance classes at old-age homes for those who were physically or mentally challenged are a case in point. My motherin-law, recently deceased, loved his classes despite the onset of dementia. Drew would call, excited and thoroughly delighted after a class, and say, “Gwen was so animated today and giggled for almost the whole session.” There was never a question of payment. Ever.

More recently, his mosaic and postermaking classes with recyclers and wastepickers built on his extensive creative work in the workers’ movement, for which he had a very special affection. His quiet and gentle demeanour was simply irresistible.

And he made art accessible. I would hazard a guess that more people in Joburg have

artworks in their homes that originated at or via The Spaza than any other gallery.I do hope his oldest and dearest friends in the arts community will be able to catalogue all of the work he initiated and a record of his contribution can be made. He would blush at the very thought, I am sure.

As all creatives know, the world of the arts is a very precarious one. It demands so much, by so many, for so little. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Drew invariably put other people’s needs before his own. A serious heart complaint a few years ago did not deter him, despite the concerns of those who loved him. When recovered, he started up again with a head full of ideas and was busy right up to the point of his departure.

It is not only the gentle six-footer’s presence among us that we shall miss, but also the knowledge that he literally made life worth living for so many. And what a life!

Just a few days ago, he put up two small mosaics on our street, one opposite the house of another artist he was very fond of who tragically passed away some years ago, and one opposite our home, a little mosaic dog. Both now stand to remind us that we have all lost a good soul, perhaps when we needed him most.

Hamba kahle, Drew. Go well, in love and solidarity. DM Stephen Faulkner is a lifelong trade union activist.

PRINT AUCTIONS SPECIALIST FINE ART PRINT AUCTIONS ONLINE SALE 4 Following the last 3 successful sales we are thrilled to announce that our Sale 4 will take place from Friday 19 – Tuesday 30 November sale For more information e-mail info@printauctions.co.za Or Call us on Tel: 021 300 0461 Tuesday www.printauctions.co.za

Gregoire Boonzaier, Moon Flowers, Lino Cut

JOHANNESBURG AUCTION WEEK: A CENTURY OF CHANGE

Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art and Fine Wine LIVE VIRTUAL AUCTION Johannesburg | 7-9 November 2021 +27 11 728 8246 | jhb@straussart.co.za | www.straussart.co.za

Zanele Muholi, MuMu XIX, Newington, London R 250 000 - 350 000