LOOKING AT LONG STREET AND

Group B Winner, Ayobola Kekere-Ekun

Group C Winner, Michael Biebo

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 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

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.

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

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 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.