South African Art Times September 2011

The South African Art Times: SA’s leading visual arts publication | September 2011 | Free | Read daily news on www.arttimes.co.za

ART TIMES

She’s Back!

Photo:Gallery John Hodgkiss Exclusive interview with Linda Givon about her new Photo: John Hodgkiss

Decorative & Fine Arts Forthcoming auction Cape Town 18 & 19 October 2011 including

Lippy Lipshitz’s AFRICA R40 000 - 50 000 PUBLIC VIEWING 14-16 October from 10am to 5pm at The Great Cellar, Alphen Hotel, Alphen Drive, Constantia FOR AUCTION ENQUIRIES AND CATALOGUES CONTACT Cape Town 021 794 6461 ct@stephanwelzandco.co.za Next sale in Johannesburg 15 & 16 November 2011 closing date for submissions: mid-September 2011 Johannesburg 011 880 3125 jhb@stephanwelzandco.co.za

www.stephanwelzandco.co.za

HORSE Multiple viewS Of a Singular beaSt An exhibition of 60 South African artists curated by Ricky Burnett

8 September to 30 October 2011

2 & 6 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 011 788 4805 www.circaonjellicoe.co.za www.everard-read.co.za

ART TIMES | NEWS / EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL

SEPTEMBER 2011 Daily news at www.arttimes.co.za Editor: Gabriel Clark-Brown

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Send Artwork To: Designer / Proof reader Trixi Woolf art@arttimes.co.za Contributors: Wilhelm van Rensburg Jenny Altschuler Lloyd Pollak Nushin Elahi Eugene Vorster Cate Wood Hunter Basil Brody John Bauer Matthew Partridge Michael Smith (Artthrob) John Hodgkiss Letters to the Editor: editor@arttimes.co.za PO Box 15881, Vlaeberg, 8018.

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Global Art Information

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What happens after seven years of strong financial markets that have driven up artists prices suddenly, through some political or economic crisis, causes art collectors and public to simply load-shed a huge amount of top end art by “sure thing artists” onto the SA art market trading floor – all at the same time, with a seemingly diminishing amount of public buying power.

It seems that August’s Goodman Gallery auction has been a test case, to be followed by this year’s second half summer season art auctions with mouth watering catalogues that are thicker, as load-shedding of art public becomes the order of the day, - in order to maintain a pursued lifestyle.

The hushed Goodman Gallery auction results illustrate a definitive turning point in SA art market history.

Kindly and “sure thing” artists, such as William Kentridge could be seriously challenged. For the first time we see market forces deciding with their auction paddles – seeking out both what a “sure thing” artist’s good and mediocre work periods are, as well as to a definitive resolve of just who are “sure things”. Good works by good artists are finding high end, stable prices from buyers, while mediocre art and artists are culled off the market floor by the absence of the auction paddle.

It is said that while Picasso had warehouses crammed full of mediocre stuff; his very clever dealer held back, keeping so-so stuff away, out of the market, thereby maintaining a high standard and also sky high prices. This created a market demand outweighing the supply. Imagine if Rhodes and De Beers had been art dealers!

It seems right that every few years a “culling” by paddle rationalisation should happen. In any given time agents and dealers push their stock, and in good times artists spawn out stuff to hungry investors wanting a glam and sexy investment.

The whole recession process lends itself to the rationalisation of testing market prices and market value process, which may be a good thing. It’s like someone who goes into cake shop and eats every tart available, only to realise that he has blown all his money, and needs to pay his bills. Once he has paid off the bills, he knows more wisely on what to buy after physically engaging and tasting and hence knowing way more about his purchases than ever before. Perhaps many of our older collectors have been through many artists and as many recessions, to buy well.

What could happen is that buyers would realise that not every Kentridge is a masterpiece, nor every artist a blue chip investment. If they look at more defined periods of the artists life to buy into (such as Kentridge’s earlier 1980-90’s works e.g. Iris and heads prints) these are rising in value faster than much of his other churned out work such as his latest Nose series. This series (making up a total of 30 images x 50 in each edition) of 1500 prints if sold at the quoted price of ZAR 25K (each) gives the seller a rough amount of ZAR R37 million plus infla-

tion and US dollar based prices. In Kentridge’s defence, he has shown us all, for the first time, that South African artists within the country, can make an international market for themselves, by dreaming big, working exceptionally hard, plus breaking through provincial barriers never achieved before. Maybe with this international market following, Kentridge can sleep and work better. While many artists dream, only few will awaken.

What I am interested in is why do certain “sure thing” artists sometime simply drop off the market floor, leaving buyers’ walls, with an excess of wrapping paper and canvas, such as in the case of Gwelo Goodman who ended up overpriced himself. SA artist Edward Roworth, who fell out of political favour after standing his high ground to became No-worth Roworth overnight. All this of course can, and probably will change after a while: Roworths will someday soon be the next big auction catalogue find.

It seems that the real money on auctions were being made a year ago just before the effects of the recession hit these shores (remember the claims “recession proof!”)

The sellers of the Irma Sterns whose prices rocketed were the real surprise winners, rather than the buyers now who are spoilt for choice, at a steal of a price, during a hold back period.

On a more sober note, stories of art forgery are increasingly passing over my desk, of folk who go to small town auctioneers and internet auction place where some still sticky oil paintings of past masters flash like online lotteries. Lots of people seem to be desperately looking for a bargain to sell on further down the line, are getting caught out by their own driven greed. Rather meet up with the buyer, ask for a second opinion, make sure the stuff that you want is guaranteed to be what the seller says it is.

I would like to give my thanks to Linda Givon for her interview, and her being on our cover, apparently the second time she has been on a major art magazine cover.

This is coming up to being my 65th edition of The SA Art Times, and we have been working hard on daily updates (never been done before in SA) on the website www. arttimes.co.za, for almost a year now. On this note I would like to thank a lot of people for their kindness and patience in assisting us in getting things right. It is a great humbling experience that one engages with the most amazing and creative people every day, and we look forward to being around still for our 100th.I would like to point out that this SA Art Times is heavier in advertising than most months, however we look forward to next month were we will carry a good ration of advertising and content.

Please visit us at The Joburg Art Fair 2011. Ross Douglas and his team have kindly invited us back into a breezy corridor, where we appreciate meeting all our fans, and will try to behave like Red Hot Branded people, amongst the movers and shakers of the market floor. Bravo there Ross and team!

Gabriel Clark-Brown

Just a little, smallish errata The photographer who took this picture of Dale Yudelman, punning his own pun there by Millerton Market, is none other than by Jenny Altschuler (and Not Dale!). Dale as every AT reader knows is the winner of the Ernest Cole Award 2011. If you find any counter - revolutionary oopses that excapes our proof reader: Trixi Woolf, please let us know to: editor@arttimes.co.za

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

WATER, THE [DELICATE] THREAD OF LIFE: STANDARD BANK GALLERY / NEWS | ART TIMES

Water, the [Delicate] Thread of Life public’s understanding of science, but they can engage with it and create images which suggest alternative ways of seeing. Conversely, an artist who tries to explain science, such as the biomorphic nature of water, has a daunting challenge ahead of him.

Paul Stopforth, Bather I, 1986. Oil and beeswax on board

Wilhelm van Rensburg One is inadvertently tempted to speculate that the average visitor to the exhibition, Water, the [Delicate] Thread of Life at the Standard Bank Gallery has more scientific knowledge about water and little knowledge about contemporary art. Scientists today weave incredible stories, invent extraordinary hypotheses and ask difficult questions about the meaning of life. They have profound insights into the workings of human beings and the workings of nature and the universe, challenging the ways in which we construct our own identities and the identities of nature and of the universe. They create visual images and models, among other things, that are gruesome, baffling, and beguiling. They say and do things that are ethically and politically challenging and shocking. Science could well be the new art. Can we say the same of contemporary artists? Are they as challenging and as shocking as scientists? Or don’t they need to be that way at all?

Water is certainly a challenging subject for both science and art. The political agenda of scientists is to provide water security for the future. The artistic agenda of artists seems to be rather fluid. One of the objectives of this exhibition is to show that in our clever, curious and materialist world, ‘art’ is as vital to our existence as ‘science’. If scientists don’t always ‘get it’ when it comes to contemporary art, an increasing number of artists are beginning to ‘get’ science and to integrate their understanding with their practice.

Such artists are Karel Nel , Marcus Neustetter, Georgia Papageorge, Thomas Mulcaire, Simon Bannister and Strijdom van der Merwe approach their work from an empirical and/or conceptual viewpoint, rather than a metaphorical and/or visual or cultural viewpoint that one would normally associate with fine artists and with traditional artists, or, as the catalogue signals in more politically correct terminology, “past and present Black Southern African thought and practice”. I don’t want to argue that art can be directly about science, or more specifically, about water. Lectures, books, and demonstrations may well better fulfill the task of explaining and interpreting science. If art is about anything, it is a reflection of human experience in complex ways and it usually is created by an inventive person with an unusual look at things, communicating these perceptions, understandings, insights and intellectual content with visual alacrity.

Artists don’t have to contribute anything to the SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Penny Siopis, Still Waters, 2009. Ink and glue on canvas

Two of the most compelling works on exhibition are site specific ones, respectively created by Karel Nel and Marcus Neustetter. Referencing a divination bowl by Trevor Makhoba, Nel’s work, Reflective Field also emanates from a water container: light travelling through the water is reflected from the circular ceiling of the Gallery. Nel, who is part of the COSMOS project - more than a 100 scientists mapping the evolution of galaxy clusters - questions the very object of his study: is the sky a reflection, or where else does its ‘matter’ exist?

“Both art and science question the nature of reality, and both have sometimes constructed a remarkably similar view of the world” he says. Neustetter uses science to create his art: he recorded the sound of the aurora borealis in its visual absence when he was at the North Pole, and uses light reflection and vibration though water to create it anew. The work has a pithy title: And yet it revolves It refers to Galileo’s saying: “Believe what you want, the earth keeps on revolving”.

An encyclopedic catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with Dixon writing extensively about the intersection of art and science from an art historical point of view and analyzing each of the carefully selected works on display. Nessa Leibhammer writes about fluids and the ancestors; Cyril Coetzee about water and biomorphism; and Caroline Crump, about the science of water.

Knowledge about contemporary art is generated in bucketsful of water on this show.

Until 1 October, “Water, the [Delicate] Thread of Life” a group exhibition comprises work by a host of artists, such as Deborah Bell, Penny Siopis, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Jackson Hlungwani, Walter Oltmann, Norman Catherine, William Kentridge, Georgie Papageorge, Simon Max Bannister, Alan Crump, David Goldblatt, Andrew Verster, Noria Mabasa, Strijdom van der Merwe, Moshekwa Langa, Marcus Neustetter, Karel Nel, Willem Boshoff and Durant Sihlali.

Through their collective artworks, the exhibition traces water’s role on earth, from sustaining life and fuelling economies to its presence in belief systems, religions and rituals.

Cnr of Simmonds & Frederick Str.’s, Jhb. T. 011 631 1889 www.standardbankarts.co.za 07

ART TIMES | NEWS / AYANA VELLISSIA AT MOMO GALLERY, JOHANNESBURG

(Top) Maria de l Latte II 2011

Ayana Vellissia Jackson’s Projection Surfaces “Ayana V. Jackson’s practice is part of a growing interest in exploring African identity beyond a centralized dialog that has, up to now, positioned African-American and Black British life as indicative of all African Diasporic experience. Through her images, Jackson not only asks questions about the social, economic, and political role Africans in the Americas play in their communities, in their society, and in the global African/ Diaspora, but also the platforms available for engagement with their cultural heritage.” Bisi Silva, Contact Sheet, 2001 Ayana V. Jackson (born May 14, 1977) is an American photographer and filmmaker. Born in New Jersey, USA, she received her B.A. in 08

Sociology from Spelman College in 1999. In 2005 at the invitation of Professor Khatharina Sieverding, she studied critical theory and large format printing at the University of Arts Berlin. She is most recognized for her focus on Contemporary Africa and the African Diaspora, principally the series African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth.

Known for approaching her subjects in a manner that is equal parts personal, technical, and intense, Ayana Vellissia Jackson’s images provide viewers with compelling glimpses of a human condition that overflows borders.

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

AYANA VELLISSIA AT MOMO GALLERY, JOHANNESBURG / CNEWS TIMES M Y| ART CM MY CY CMY

Strange fruit Her current exhibition titled, Projection Surface, is a survey of three bodies of work that explore photography and iconography.

The first series, Maria del Latte, presents the Virgin Mary as patron saint of the surrogate mother, the nanny, and the wet nurse, while the second, Povporn, addresses representation of the impoverished body in photography. The last in the series, Black Madonna questions the celebrity adoption trend. Curated by Ingrid LaFleur, each of the included works consider ways the body of the “under privileged” is activated as a surface upon which the spectator can attach subjective meaning.

These works function as a continuation of Jackson’s concentration on complex identities birthed by our rapidly expanding global community.

Her work on Contemporary African and African Diasporic societies finds itself at the intersection of the social sciences, reportage, and fine art fields.

She has exhibited in association with Institute Française (Paris), Rush Arts (New York), Galerie Peter Herrmann (Berlin), Primo Marella Gallery (Milan), the Enthoven Family Trust (South Africa), the Franklyn H. Williams CCC/African Diaspora Institute (New York), San Francisco Mexican Museum, Museo del Hombre (Santo Domingo), and the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (New York). She has lectured and conducted workshops at university and arts institutions in the US, Dominican Republic, Colombia. Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Her work can be found in the World Bank, Alcatel Lucent Foundation, and Wedge (Toronto) permanent collections.

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Ayana Vellissia Jackson’s Projection Surfaces Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg Opening Thursday 25 Aug www.gallerymomo.com 09

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ART TIMES | NEWS / REVIEW: CHRISTIAAN DIEDERICKS

Christiaan Diedericks: balancing heaven and earth

Vexed to Nightmare

By Eugene Vorster A major new exhibition of works by prominent contemporary artist Christiaan Diedericks will open at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery on Wednesday, 7 September 2011, at 18h30. It includes a riveting new series of works entitled Balancing Heaven and Earth, as well as from previous collections Beautiful World, Cold Sweat and others.

A desire to transcend a dystopian world was hinted at in the artist’s previous collection. In the intriguing objet d’art of the present collection entitled Muse, the central figure, personifying both artist and muse, is portrayed without a mouth. It is given

voice, however, through the transformative symbol of an overlying butterfly, alluding to the artist’s own ongoing transformation.

Balancing Heaven and Earth absorbs the viewer’s attention at the outset and is presented in a variety of mediums, including colourful Lyra pencil, water colour, gold, silver and copper leaf, glass engraving and thread. The ubiquitous use of the latter medium in stitching in this collection is a poignant illustration of the artist’s attempt to fix or to heal (as depicted in Elementary Values, where a nurturing mother figure stitches a broken heart together).

The threading, of course, also alludes to the “slender threads” that “weave a remarkable tapestry”, as observed by Robert A. Johnson in his extraordinary memoir Balancing Heaven and Earth and the inspiration for the title of this exhibition.

They are often loose, indicating that no true work of art is ever quite complete and that its interpretation is an infinite process.

The myriad of interpretations that is inherent to a Christiaan Diedericks work is illustrated nowhere better than in the pivotal work of the collection, King of Fools. The striking central character wears a crown of chicken feet, the latter alluding to foolishness and perhaps, obliquely, to voodoo. He is neatly attired in a business suit, but his intense frustration and anger threatens to burst out of his clothes and drive him to the edge of chaos.

It appears that he is incapable of expressing his anger and suppressed emotions and obsessions adequately. An aspect of the central character’s emotional complexity in King of Fools, namely the violent patriarchal dominance of society, finds further resonance in the work World Without End. In this instance the frustration and need to dominate is expressed disturbingly in the abuse of the youth. Whether physical, sexual or emotional, this violence is unleashed upon a defenceless young man like the ravenous pack of dogs that dominates the background of the work. The victim’s face has the appearance of a mask. He presents this mask to the world to hide his shame, but as the title of the work suggests, his traumatic experience will be etched onto his mind for the whole of his life. World Without End communicates timeously with the groundbreaking Afrikaans film premiered

at the Cannes Festival recently called Skoonheid (Beauty), which comments unflinchingly on the topic of male rape.

The male figure in the top left corner of King of Fools re-iterates the concept of the defiant gay, or individual, man. He is claiming his own body and taunts society by turning a traffic cone into a phallic, taunting object, thereby using a symbol of society’s artificially imposed order, turning it around and pointing it back at them.

The female figure to the right of the abovementioned work symbolises commercialism, the obsessive quest for eternal beauty and the falseness behind it all. With closer examination, however, her vulnerability is apparent, but she is incapable of finding comfort in her external environment.

From the bare feet that dangle indifferently from the top part of the work, hangs a hand grenade. An almost palpable and anticipatory tension is thereby created and the allusion to war is clear. The futility of war is manifested movingly in the work Vexed to Nightmare, based on the true story of an American soldier deployed in Afghanistan. An extract of the last letter he wrote to his family forms part of the work. In this he wrote about the effect that the surrounding atmosphere of death was beginning to have on him and how it permeated every aspect of his life, much like the blood red skull that looms ominously over a large part of the work. He was killed in action the day after he wrote the letter.

In King of Fools, as in the entire body of work that forms the basis for this new collection, Chris Diedericks explores the tensions between the individual’s true nature and the masks he wears, between the individual and society and, finally, the tensions that exist in the space between Heaven and Earth. He guides us through a unique creative world that exists between these opposites, towards a hopefully more utopian place, and he does so undauntingly and with consummate skill.

Exhibition: Balancing Heaven and Earth Artist: Christiaan Diedericks University of Johannesburg Art Gallery Wednesday, 7 September 2011, at 18h30

the loop art foundry

t 27(0)13 7582409 f 27(0)11 5075747 theloop@worldonline.co.za www.theloopartfoundry.co.za & www.thelooponline.co.za

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SA ART TIMES. September 2011

SIENER VAN RENSBURG LOST PORTRAIT FOUND/ FANIE ELOFF SHOW / NEWS | ART TIMES

Siener van Rensburg’s lost portrait found for Eloff show The famous South African clairvoyant, Siener van Rensburg, who had an enormous influence on the military decisions of the Boer General Koos de la Rey during the Anglo Boer war, was sculpted by Fanie Eloff the grandson of President Paul Kruger, in 1917. During the writing of a book on the complete works of Fanie Eloff the whereabouts of this long lost sculpture was traced to a family member in Cape Town.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Eloffs parents persuaded him to return from France to South Africa where, upon his arrival, he was arrested and incarcerated in the Johannesburg Fort due to his family’s involvement in the 1914 Rebellion. Eloff asked Van Rensburg to pose for a portrait, while incarcerated in the Johannesburg Ford for their involvement in the 1914 Rebellion.

Eloffs female family members where allowed to bring the men food in the Fort, and through this they smuggled in some clay for him to sculpt with.

Eloff created the clay Van Rensburg during their internment and later carved it in South African marble himself, in 1917. It has a height of 290mm. The only other time the work was exhibited was at the joint Eloff / Pierneed exhibition at Elangeni in 1941.

This is the only sculpture done of Van Rensburg during his life time.

This portrait will be on display from 8 September to 30 November in the Mapungubwe Gallery at the University of Pretoria as part of a retrospective exhibition on Eloff’s work.

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

The only photo of Van Rensburg we have is the one where Van Rensburg stands next to the clay portrait.

Exhibition: Fanie Eloff (1885 - 1947) Opens: 7 September 2011: 15:00 Mapungubwe Gallery, Old Arts Building, Hatfield Campus, University of Pretoria, Lynnwood Road, Pretoria Tel: 012 420 2968 11

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ART TIMES | NEWS / GALLERY BUZZ

GREATMORE OPEN STUDIO’S FUNDRAISING EVENT & KENTRIDGE TALK, WOODSTOCK, CAPE TOWN

William Kentridge, Jill Trappler, Dathini Mzayiya, and the outgoing Director: Kate Tarratt Cross / Mr & Ms Estelle Jacobs and Kate. A well attended evening by artists and art patrons

THE LAUNCH OF NEW FRED PAGE BOOK, PORT ELIZABETH, EASTERN CAPE

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Cecil Kerbel and Jeanne Wright with the Fred Page book, Stephan Welz and Basil Brady, Stephan Welz, Jeanne Wright

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Mr and Mrs Herald Kaplan and Laurie Scheckte / Team from Fogarty’s Bookshop / The opening speach by Robyn Sharwood/ Fred Scott, Cecil Kerbel and Jeanne Wright

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OPENING OF DEJA VU 4 TWO: RON BELLING GALLERY: HUNTER AND RUTH NESBIT, PORT ELIZABETH, EASTERN CAPE

Hunter and Ruth Nesbit and friend / Clayton Holliday & Mary-Rose Dold/ Bobby Wisnevitz, Rosemary and Bill Allchurch

ART TIMES | FEATURE / 2011 DAKAR BIENNALE REVIEW

Dak’Art – a unique platform for African artists Marilyn Martin Considering the controversy and murkiness around South Africa’s participation in the Venice Biennale, not to mention the minimal impact of the actual exhibition and the lost opportunity to celebrate our visual arts, it is good to reflect on what can happen when artists and their gallerists can take responsibility for participating in an international biennial – without having to rely on governments, directors of biennials or international curators.

The Dakar Biennale (Dak’Art) has for 20 years provided a unique platform for artists to be part of a major biennial – any artist, living on the continent or in the diaspora, who has citizenship of an African country, may send in a portfolio of his or her work.

In January 2010 – 10 years after I was first involved in Dak’Art – I was invited to be one of five African curators. The continent was divided into five regions and the relevant submissions were sent to the curators for assessment and provisional selection; we could add artists of our own choice. I was allocated southern and East Africa, including the islands off the coast (Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion) and I received submissions from Angola and Namibia – 48 portfolios from 14 countries, including 23 from South Africa. After consulting African curators and artists, I added Mulugeta Gebrekidan (Ethiopia), Peterson Kamwathi (Kenya), Dan Halter (Zimbabwe/South Africa) and rosenclaire (South Africa/Italy).

We assessed all the portfolios before our meeting in Dakar in March to make the final selection. Time constraints are a given in the organisational structure of Dak’Art, as the opening was on 7 May; appropriate spaces are another.

To celebrate 20 years of Dak’Art, there was also a retrospective exhibition of major prize winners of the past. As a result, we could only select 28 artists from the 400 entries received, which was rather unfair on the artists and gallerists who took the trouble to submit portfolios. Originally there were to be five artists from each region, but in the end we decided to select the best and only artists who had never before participated in Dak’Art. This meant that we were taking chances, but also that we could avoid one of the negative aspects of international shows – seeing the same artists over and over again.

Of the proposals I made to my fellow curators, 11 from six countries were accepted (actually 13, as Rosenclaire – Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky – and the Essop twins work together): Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, South Africa and Zambia. Six (Hasan and Husain Essop, Dan Halter, Svea Josephy, Nandipha Mntambo, Cameron Platter, Rosenclaire) were from South Africa and with good reason. Our infrastructure for the visual arts is unrivalled on the continent, giving our artists a head-start in their education, creative endeavours and promotion of their work nationally and internationally.

While some of our artists have left our shores, others from African countries have settled here – Dan Halter was born in Zimbabwe and Nandipha Mntambo in Swaziland; Serge Alain Nitegeka is from Burundi. Quite a few of the artists have South African connections: Nirveda Alleck of Mauritius studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and worked at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg; 16

Peterson Kamwathi participated in a Thupelo workshop at Rorkes Drift and is represented in die Art for Humanity Women and Children print portfolio.

Selection processes are never perfect and we faced a number of challenges, not least of which was the unevenness of the entries (hackneyed, traditionalist and clichéd African art) and the fact that we came from five different countries: Cameroon (Maréme Malong Samb), Nigeria (Kunle Fulani), Senegal (Sylvain Sankalé), Tunisia (Rachida Triki) and South Africa. For the first time, all the curators lived in Africa, but there were different approaches to art and this was reflected in our selections and in the exhibition.

There were disappointments but also revelations of names and talents previously unknown to us, in particular the main prize winner, Moridja Kitenge Banza, born in the DRC, living in Nantes, France. Generally speaking, painting dominated (an unusual phenomenon in contemporary biennials), photography and video were strong but sculpture weak and printmaking (with the exception of Kamwathi) absent. Most proposals for installation demanded a great deal without necessarily being interesting. With a number of artists coming from the diaspora, many works dealt with identity and migration, while some artists, resident on the continent, reflected on tradition, history and contemporary challenges, such as restriction of movement, exclusion, discrimination against women and the plight of children.

The contemporary and retrospective exhibitions revealed the decline of the visual arts in West Africa and the shift of the creative focus to North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia) and South Africa. Both confirmed that artists who live and work in the diaspora often have an educational and technical advantage, but that their lives in exile are not necessarily easier. Dak’Art certainly put some artists on the international map – laureates of the past Viyé Diba, Moustapha Dimé, Abdoulaye Konaté and Mounir Fatmi are all in Okwui Enwezor’s and Chika Okeke-Augulu’s recent book Contemporary African Art since 1980.

Dak’Art is beset by many problems (organisational, administrative, financial) but it remains an extraordinary achievement on the African continent and in a country where there is little infrastructure for the visual arts, not even an art museum. With all our money and the means at our disposal, we in South Africa have failed to sustain an art biennial since the efforts made in Johannesburg in 1995 and 1997 and the Cape Africa Platform (CAPE), initiated in 2007.

It was a great honour and pleasure to have been part of Dak’Art 2010 – to get to know and work with curators from the continent and to learn about artists from other African countries and the diaspora. Dak’Art still honours the memory and ambitions of the great poet and first president of an independent Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Titles: Dan Halter: Mealie Pip 2008 Laser-etched white maize kernel / Hasan and Husain Essop, Night before Eid (2009),photograph / Mulugeta Gebrekidan: Boundaries bound (detail) 2008 Mixed media collage, nails and barbed wire on canvas / Rosenclaire, Investissez dans l’immatériel (2010) Originally conceived in neon; here mounted on the façade of the main exhibition building in vinyl on plexiglass / Mouna Jemal Siala, Fate (2009), photo-installation

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

You’re are either / in

The SA Art Information Directory 2012

or simply / out of it

Now in its 9 th edition The SA Art Information Directory is the white and yellow pages of the SA Visual Art Community, as well as the leading source of consistent reliable SA art information. Unlike ageing websites and the commings and goings of art, we keep our lists crisp and fresh.

Submit your details for free if you are an arts professional, gallery, art school, etc.

We print 2 500 copies for a free distribution of the Directory to a highly select local and international list of leading infrastructure galleries, institutions, art organisations and decision makers in 2012. In addition to the free distributed copies, 500 copies are available for purchase.

Our advertising rates are agreeable, and our coverage, with the national SA Art Times very extensive.

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Eugene is looking forward to chatting with you in how we can get your business well exposed.

Look us up at www.saaid.co.za or call us for a chat at 021 424 7733

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SOUTH AFRICAN

GALLERY GUIDE Art Lovers admiring the surrealist art of Fred Page at the Fred Page book launch, Port Elizabeth. See more at www.fredpage.co.za Photo: Basil Brady

Experience the abundance of South African artistic talent by prominent South African Artists.

TRANSCODE // DIALOGUES AROUND INTERMEDIA PRACTICE COLLEEN ALBOROUGH / CELIA DE VILLIERS & INTUTHUKO SEWING GROUP / FRIKKIE EKSTEEN LAWRENCE LEMAOANA / CHURCHILL MADIKIDA / SELLO MAHLANGU , / GWEN MILLER MARCUS NEUSTETTER / CAROLYN PARTON / NATHANIEL STERN / MINNETTE VARI / FABIAN WARGAU

Curated by Gwen Miller

PIETER VAN DER WESTHUIZEN Oil on Canvas, 90 x 75 cm, ‘Hanover Street’

www.artandwine.co.za anton@artandwine.co.za Tel/fax: 058 256 1298 Cell: 082 341 8161 279 Main Road, Clarens

This exhibition is presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a practice-led Dlitt et Phil degree and hosted by the UNISA Art Gallery and the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology

7-30 September 2011 UNISA Art Gallery

Kgorong Building, Main Campus Preller Street, Pretoria, 0003 Tel: (012) 441 5683 ukun1@unisa.ac.za // www.unisa.ac.za/gallery Gallery Hours: 10:00 - 16:00 Tuesday - Friday

Free State

FREE STATE, GAUTENG, MPUMALANGA | GALLERY GUIDE

Bloemfontein Oliewenhuis Art Museum 15 August – 30 October, “The White Monday Disaster” (Main Building) A series of exquisite woodcut prints created by Cecil Skotnes.

25 August – 11 Sept, “23rd Sophia Gray Memorial Lecture and Architecture Exhibition 2011: Learnt in translation” by Peter Rich (Main Building).

9 September, “Construct your Skin” (Sculpture Garden) 20 September – 6 November, “Zak Benjamin: Retrospective” (Main Building) 23 September – 9 October, “Freshford House Museum Photographic competition and exhibition” Free State Heritage in Pictures (Reservoir) 16 Harry Smith Str, Bloemfontein. T.051 447 9609

Clarens Art & Wine Gallery on Main The Gallery houses an exquisite collection of art by well-known artists like Gregoire Boonzaier, J.H. Pierneef, Pieter van der Westhuizen, Erik Laubscher, Jan Vermeiren, Marjorie Wallace, Eben van der Merwe, Conrad Theys, Hennie Niemann, Hannetjie de Clercq, ceramics by Laura Du Toit, sculpture by Fana Malherbe & Jean Doyle, glass by David Reade & Shirley Cloete and numerous others.

279 Main Str, Clarens T. 058 256 1298 or Anton Grobbelaar.

C. 082 341 8161 anton@artandwine.co.za www.artandwine.co.za

An image from Dave Southwood’s N1 Show at The Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg. See www.johannesburg.goethe.org for more

Blou Donki Art Gallery A vibrant contemporary art gallery, housing a wide variety of contemporary artworks, functional art, steel sculptures, bronzes, handmade glass and specializing in photography.

Windmill Centre, Main Str, Clarens T. 058 256 1757 manager@bloudonki.co.za www.bloudonki.co.za Johan Smith Art Gallery The gallery permanently exhibits a wide variety of classical and selected contemporary art works featuring Johan Smith, Elbè van Rooyen, Elga Rabe, Graham Carter, Nicole Pletts, Gregoire Boonzaier, Otto Klar, and various others. Specializing in ceramics, the gallery supports artists such as Hennie Meyer, Karen Sinovich, and Heather Mills, among others. Collectable bronzes, and handmade glass by David Reade, also available.

Windmill Centre, Main Str, Clarens T. 058 256 1620 manager@bhm.dorea.co.za www.johansmith.co.za

Gauteng Johannesburg Alice Art Upcoming exhibitions: 3&4 September, Esté Mostert. 10&11 September, Harry Erasmus.

17&18 September, Elsbeth.

217 Drive Str, Ruimsig. T. 083 331 8466/ 083 377 1470 aliceart@global.co.za www.aliceart.co.za Art Afrique Art Afrique specialises in fine collectable African art by a wide variety of southern African artists.

Shop no. U45, Legacy Mall, Cnr Maude & 5th Streets, Sandton T. 011 292 7113 art@artafrique.co.za www.artafrique.co.za Artspace –Jhb 3 September– 1 October, “(Man)nerism” featuring sculpture by Louis Olivier.

1 Chester Court, 142 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, Jhb. T. 011 880 8802 artspace@wol.co.za www.artspace-jhb.co.za Christie’s International Auctioneers.

Gillian Scott Berning, Independent Consultant. T 031 207 8247 Gillian.gsb@mweb.co.za www.christies.com

The White Monday Disaster series

by Cecil Skotnes Oliewenhuis Art Museum A series of exquisite woodcut prints called The White Monday Disaster, created by Cecil Skotnes - one of the main pioneers of modern art in South Africa, is currently on show as part of the Permanent Collection on the first floor at Oliewenhuis Art Museum.

Cecil Skotnes collaborated with well-known South African poet, playwright, editor, and novelist, Stephen Gray to create the White Monday Disaster series, which took the form of what the artist called a ‘block book’. By this, Skotnes implied a work in which the content was to be conveyed through prints and words simultaneously. Comprising 13 prints and 13 stanzas in ballad form, this work commemorates the heroic efforts of Wolraad Woltemade, who, on horseback, rescued 14 of the shipwrecked from the ship the Jonge Thomas, when it sank in Table Bay in 1773, before he himself drowned.

Cecil Skotnes was born in East London in 1926. He studied painting and drawing in Florence, Italy after World War II and at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1947 to 1950 on his return to South Africa. Skotnes moved to Cape Town in 1978 where he resumed painting after decades as a print-maker. He died on 4 April 2009 at the age of 82. The White Monday Disaster series will be on show until the end of October 2011.

Mbongeni Buthelezi maNyauza

Silent messages to my mother

Johannesburg Art Gallery 4 Sep - 15 Jan 2012

CIRCA on Jellicoe 8 September – 31 October, “Horse: Multiple Views of a Singular Beast” An Exhibition of works by 60 artists curated by Ricky Burnett 2 Jellicoe Ave. T. 011 788 4805 gallery@circaonjellicoe.co.za

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

21

GALLERY GUIDE | FREE STATE, GAUTENG, MPUMALANGA David Brown Fine Art A two week show from the 20th September, “Works on Paper” by the artists from the Artist Proof Studio Newtown and The Blue Door Studio –Collin Cole and students.

T. 011 783 7805 david@dbfineart.co.za www.davidbrownfineart.co.za David Krut Projects Until 10 September, “Skin” photography by Gary Schneider and “Naked Pressure” an exhibition of prints by Senzo Shabangu.

140 Jan Smuts Ave., Parkwood, Jhb. T. 011 447 0627 www.davidkrutpublishing.com Everard Read Jhb 8 September – 31 October, “Horse: Multiple Views of a Singular Beast” An Exhibition of works by 60 artists curated by Ricky Burnett 6 Jellicoe Ave, Rosebank, Jhb. T. 011 788-4805 gallery@everard.co.za www.everard-read.co.za Gallery 2 Over the last 17 years, Gallery 2 (previously known as Gallery on the Square) has established itself as one of South Africa’s leading fine art galleries. Built on a strong affection for the arts, it strives to promote a cross-section of both established and emerging contemporary South African artists across a variety of disciplines, as well as supporting various local development projects.

140 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood. T. 011 447 0155/98 gots@mweb.co.za www.gallery2.co.za Gallery AOP Until 3 September, “Take a walk with me” Linocut prints by Sandile Goje.

44 Stanley Ave, Braamfontein Werf (Milpark) T. 0117262234 www.artonpaper.co.za Gallery MOMO Until 19 September, “Projection Surface” a solo exhibition of photography & mixed media installations by Ayana Vellissia Jackson.

22 September - 17 October, a solo exhibition of paintings by Ransome Stanley.

52 7th Avenue, Parktown North, Jhb. T. 011 327 3247 info@gallerymomo.com www.gallerymomo.com The Gerald A Lee Gallery CC For Genuine African Art Contact Jason - 0828514783 By private viewing in Johannesburg. Or at the Waterfront in Cape Town

Johannesburg Art Gallery Until 30 October, an exhibition of selected work of the top artists from a 3 year art programme based in rural northern KZN. Artists exhibiting: Lucky Jambi, Nhlanhla Mabaso, Nokuthula Gumede & Muzi Nomandla to name a few…

King George Str, Joubert Park, Jhb. T. 011 725 3130 tinym@joburg.org.za www.joburg.org.za Manor Gallery “Black Like us 8” Exhibition runs until September 3rd.

Little Artists Exhibition will open on Sunday 11 September at and closes on Friday 23 September. Artists include: Keletso Matlakala and Ndivhuo Mununqufhala and Bheki Mtetwa Norscot Manor Centre, Penguin Drive, Fourways. T. 011 465 7934 gallery@wssa.org.za www.wssa.org.za Resolution Gallery Until 17 September, “S’phara Phara” an exhibition of new work by photographer Chris Saunders.

Unit 4, 142 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, Jhb. T. 011 880 4054 info@resolutiongallery.com www.resolutiongallery.com Standard Bank Gallery Until 1 October, “Water, the [Delicate] Thread of Life” a group exhibition comprises work by a host of artists, such as Deborah Bell, Penny Siopis, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Jackson Hlungwani, Walter Oltmann, Norman Catherine, William Kentridge, Georgie Papageorge, Simon Max Bannister, Alan Crump, David Goldblatt, Andrew Verster, Noria Mabasa, Strijdom van der Merwe, Moshekwa Langa, Marcus Neustetter, Karel Nel, Willem Boshoff and Durant Sihlali. Through their collective artworks, the exhibition traces water’s role on earth, from sustaining life and fuelling economies to its presence in belief systems, religions and rituals.

Cnr of Simmonds & Frederick Str.’s, Jhb. T. 011 631 1889 www.standardbankarts.co.za Stephan Welz & Company Auctioneers of Decorative & Fine Arts.

13 Biermann Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg. T. 011 880-3125 jhb@stephanwelzandco.co.za www.stephanwelzandco.co.za

Goodman Gallery Until 24 September, “SWAT” by Willem Boshoff.

163 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, Johannesburg T. 011 788 1113 jhb@goodman-gallery.com www.goodman-gallery.com Grahams Fine Art Gallery The gallery houses one of the finest collections of art in South Africa, their focus is on absolute quality and are proud to offer an extensive selection of works for sale.

Unit 46, Broadacres Lifestyle Centre, Cnr Cedar & Valley Rds, Broadacres, Fourways, Jhb. T. 011 465 9192 sarah@grahamsgallery.co.za www.grahamsgallery.co.za Grayscale Gallery Until 7 Sept, “Taxi” an exhibition of sculpture & prints by Gordon Froud.

33 De Korte Str, Braamfontein, Jhb. T. 011 403 0077 www.pressurecontrol.co.za/NET 16 Halifax Works by Michael Heyns, Leon Muller & Mimi van der Merwe can be viewed by appointment in Johannesburg at 16 Halifax Str, Bryanston.

Dana MacFarlane 082 784 6695 www.16halifaxart.co.za In Toto “POW: Perfect Heroes, Noble Causes and other Half Truths” by Bruce Donald will be on show from the 1st September to the 7th October 2011.

6 Birdhaven Centre, 66 St Andrew Str, Birdhaven. T. 011 447 6543 megan@intotogallery.co.za www.intotogallery.co.za Isis Gallery Featuring Modern African Contemporary Art and Ceramics by leading Artists: Junior Fungai, Derric van Rensburg, Errol Westoll, Brian Rolfe, Ulrich Schwanecke and Hynes Matshoba. Works can be viewed by appointment.

Shop 163, The Mall of Rosebank. Contact Daniel Erasmus T. 011 447 2317 info@isisgallery.co.za www.isisgallery.co.za

22

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

FREE STATE, GAUTENG, MPUMALANGA | GALLERY GUIDE The Ringmaster of the Imagination, biography on Fred Page will be launched in Johannesburg on the 7th of September. Dr. Fred Scott will be talking at the event.

He is a well acclaimed collector. Jack Rosewitz, Deputy Chairman of Stephan Welz & Co (Pty) Ltd will be the emcee on the evening. Cecil Kerbel (publisher and friend of the artist) will do a speech followed by Jeanne Wright (art biographer).

Date: Wednesday, 7 September 2011 Venue: 13 Biermann Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg Time: 18:30 -20:30 Opening dates: Opening on the 7th of September, closed event by invitation only.

Invitation requests: ivan@greaterthan.co.za Exhibition dates: 8th and 9th exhibition open to the public. www.fredpage.co.za Stevenson Johannesburg Until 16 September, an exhibition of new and recent video works

by Dineo Seshee Bopape.

62 Juta Street, Braamfontein, Jhb. T. 011 326 0034 jhb@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Strauss & Co. Fine Art Auctioneers & Consultants.

Country Club Johannesburg, Corner Lincoln Rd & Woodlands Drive, Woodmead.

T. 079 407 5140 jhb@straussart.co.za UJ Art Gallery 7 – 28 September, Christiaan Diedericks “Balancing Heaven and Earth (with apology to Robert A. Johnson)” With this exhibition Diedericks challenges viewers not only about art, but also their personal (dis)comforts about gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, body politics, desire, geography, place and memory.

Cnr Kingsway & University Rd, Auckland Park, Jhb. T. 011 559 2099 aedempsey@uj.ac.za www.uj.ac.za/artscentre The White House Gallery The gallery has a wide ranging portfolio featuring renowned masters such as Chagall, Marini, Miro, Moore, Portway, Pasmore, Stella, Picasso, Dine & Hockney - to name a few. Also the more affordable works of up and coming artists in Britain and France, along with globally acclaimed South African artists.

Shop G11 Thrupps Centre,Oxford Road, Illovo,Johannesburg. T. 011 268 2115 www.thewhitehousegallery.co.za

Pretoria Alette Wessels Kunskamer The Alette Wessels Kunskamer operates as an Art Gallery and Art Consultancy, specialising in South African art as an investment, dealing in Old Masters, and selected contemporary art.

Maroelana Centre, 27 Maroelana Str, Maroelana, Pretoria. T. 012 346 0728 www.artwessels.co.za Association of Arts Pretoria Until 7 September, an exhibition of paintings by Willie van Rensburg.

Until 14 September, an exhibition of ceramics by Minette Zaaiman.

173 Mackie Str, Nieuw Muckleneuk, Pretoria. T. 012 346 3100 artspta@mweb.co.za www.artsassociationpta.co.za Fried Contemporary Until 1 October, “Aperture.” The participating artists are: Nicola Grobler - Bronze sculpture installation and Ink Drawings, Strijdom van der Merwe - Video and printed Video Stills, St John Fuller - photography (Ilford multi-grade photographic paper (pearl) as well as works by Kai Lossgott.

430 Charles St, Brooklyn, Pretoria. T. 012 346 0158 art@friedcontemporary.com www.friedcontemporary.com Front Room Art & Artists Sun 4 Sept – Sat 1 Oct, “Bloom : a celebration of Spring” an exuberant exhibition of paintings and garden sculptures. Participating artists: Retha Buitendach, Caryn Childs, Frans Cronje, Lesley Deysel, Olusola Johnson, Nan Spurway, Marina Louw, Minette van Rooyen & others.

116 Kate Ave Rietondale. Jennifer Snyman 082 451 5584 www.frontroomart.co.za

Pretoria Art Museum Until 2 October, Weaver’s Guild 60 Years Anniversary Exhibition.

1 Sept to 2 October, Sasol New Signatures Competition Exhibition.

7 Sept to 2 October, an exhibition of paintings by Michael Selekane (supported by Ifa Lethu).

T.012 344 1807/8 art.museum@tshwane.gov.za www.pretoriaartmuseum.co.za Salomi Prinsloo Signature Gallery 1 -12 September, “The Land: Exploring Realities of Co-Existence” Paintings by Salomi Prinsloo as an exploration of interactive ecological issues.

397 Roslyn Str, Waterkloofglen, Pretoria. T. 012 9985783 C. 0828780441 salomiprinsloo@gmail.com www.salomiprinsloo.com St Lorient Fashion and Art Gallery Opening Saturday 3rd September, “Rooftop lll” curated by Gordon Froud, featuring the following artists: Lucas Thobejane, Sanna Swart, Craig Muller, Kay Potts and Sybrand Wiegers. Closes 25th September.

492 Fehrsen Street, Brooklyn Circle, Brooklyn, Pretoria. T. 012 4600284 anastasi@iafrica.com www.stlorient.co.za University of Pretoria 7 September - 30 November, an exhibition of the sculptures by Fanie Eloff (1885 - 1947).

Mapungubwe Museum, Old Arts Building, Hatfield Campus of the University of Pretoria. T. 012 420-2968 marie.breedt@up.ac.za www.up.ac.za UNISA Art Gallery 7-30 September, “Transcode// Dialogues Around Intermedia Practice” a group exhibition.

Kgorong Building, Ground Floor, Main Campus, Preller Str, Pretoria.

T. 012 441 5683 ukun1@unisa.ac.za www.unisa.ac.za/gallery

Mpumalanga Dullstroom Art @ sixty seven A selection of fine art, ceramics and blown glass art pieces, by well-known local artists.

Shop no9, 67 Naledi St, Dullstroom, Mpumulanga. T. 013 254 0335 mikek@boardwalkmanor.co.za www.shopat67.com Dimitrov Art Gallery Lifestyle Complex, shop no.4 on Cnr. Teding Van Berkhout & Hugenote/ Naledi Street, Dullstroom, Mpumalanga T. 013 254 0524 C. 082 679 5698 info@dimitrovartgallery.co.za www.dimitrovartgallery.co.za The New Dimitrov Art Gallery is situated in the Trams Alley shop no.1 , along the R 540 ( Naledi Drive ).

Opening exhibition “Expression of Freedom” by renowned artist Dimitrov.

White River The Artists’ Press Professional collaboration, printing and publishing of original hand-printed artists lithographs, by the Artists’ Press. Also artists books, monotypes & letterpress prints, particularly for artists working in SA. Waterfield Farm near White River, Mpumalanga T. 013 751 3225 print@artistspress.co.za www.artists-press.net The Loop Art Foundry & Sculpture Gallery A collaboration and network for the avid art patron and collector as well as a full service facility for the artist. This is the place where you will find a unique and superior item or have something commissioned that you have always envisioned.

Casterbridge Complex Corner R40 & Numbi Roads White River T. 013 758 2409 www.tlafoundry.co.za

Gallery Michael Heyns The Gallery has moved to 194 Haley Str, Weavind Park, Pretoria.

Contact for more info: T. 012 804 0867 michael@michaelheyns.co.za www.michaelheyns.co.za

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

23

GALLERY GUIDE | WESTERN CAPE / CAPE TOWN

Western Cape Cape Town Absolut Art Gallery Permanent exhibition with the best Masters and Contemporary artists. Namely : JH Pierneef, Gerard Sekoto, Hugo Naude, Adriaan Boshoff, Frans Oerder, Tinus de Jongh, Gerard Bhengu, Ephraim Ngatane, Cecil Skotnes, JAE Volschenk, Conrad Theys, William Kentridge, to name a few.

Shop 43 Willowbridge Lifestyle Centre, Carl Cronje Drive, Tyger Valley, Bellville.

T. 021 914 2846 www.absolutart.co.za.

Alliance Française Cape Town 2 – 17 September, “Metamorphosis” an exhibition of works using various artistic techniques by Nyaniso Lindi.

155 Loop Str, CT. T. 021 423 5699 capetown@alliance.org.za www.alliance.org.za Art b 24 August – 30 September – Vuleka Exhibition of Selected works from the 2011 Vuleka Art Competition.

The Arts Association of Bellville, The Library Centre, Carel van Aswegan Str, Bellville.

T. 021 918 2301 info@artb.co.za www.artb.co.za/gallery.htm Artvark Gallery Until end September, “Gugulethu Men” sketches by George Frederik Myburgh.

48 Main Rd, Kalk Bay T. 021 788 5584 artvark@iafrica.com www.artvark.org Barnard Gallery Opening 8 September, “Reality or illusion” by Maeve Dewar until 18 October.

55 Main Str, Newlands. T. 021 671 1666 www.barnardgallery.com Blank Projects.

Opening 8 September @ 18:00 “Independent Publishing Project” by Jonah Sack and Francis Burger. Exhibition closes 1 October.

113-115 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock, CT. T.072 1989 221 info@blankprojects.com www.blankprojects.com Cape Gallery Until 10 September, “Wild Life Exhibition” a group exhibition showcasing some of the finest interpretations of the love of the land.

Opening Sunday 11th September at 4.30 p.m. A Group Exhibition. Participating Artists include: Adolfo Mcque, Geoff Price, John Robert, Louis Ströh van der Walt, until 1 October.

60 Church Str, CT. T. 021 423 5309 web@capegallery.co.za www.capegallery.co.za Carmel Art Dealers in Fine art, exclusive distributers of Pieter van der Westhuizen etchings.

Visit the new gallery at Cape Quarter Square, 27 Somerset Rd, Green Point.

T. 021 4213333 www.carmelart.co.za Casa Labia Until 9 October, “Intimate Surfaces - An ArtSideIn Exhibition” Main Featured Artists: Makiwa Mutomba (oil on canvas with palette knife),Nicole Susan Pletts (oil on canvas), Sol Smook (oil, acrylic & mixed media on canvas) and Sue Greeff (oil on canvas, mixed media & charcoal on paper).

Africa Nova at Casa Labia Cultural Centre, 192 Main Rd, Muizenberg.

T. 021 788 6068 info@casalabia.co.za www.casalabia.co.za Cedar Tree Gallery Contemporary Fine Art Gallery at Rodwell House.

Rodwell Rd, St. James, CT. T. 021 797 9880 cedartreegallery@gmail.com www.cedartreegallery.co.za The Cellar Private Gallery The Cellar Private Gallery of Art deals exclusively in original & investment art, offering works by a variety of renowned & upcoming SA artists.

12 Imhoff Str, Welgemoed, Bellville T. 021 913 4189 info@thecellargallery.co.za www.thecellargallery.co.za Christie’s International Auctioneers.

Juliet Lomberg, Independent Consultant. T. 021 761 2676 jlomberg@iafrica.com www.christies.com

24

Commune.1 Gallery Opening 1 September until 13 October, “Umlungu” featuring large scale installations by Christopher Swift.

64 Wale Str, CT. T. 021 423 5600 info@commune1.com www.commune1.com Constantiaberg Art Society Until 8 September Constantiaberg Art Society will be holding its 20th Anniversary Exhibition in the Sanlam Hall at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens showcasing members work. Entrance to the exhibition is free after paying entrance to the garden; Tuesday is pensioners day with free entry into Kirstenbosch.

Inquiries: Yvonne Martin 082 455 8727 or 021 712 0956 David Krut Projects Cape Town Until 1 October, “Countermeasures, Part 2” paintings by Johannesburg artist Mary Wafer.

Montebello Design Centre, 31 Newlands Ave, CT. T. 021 685 0676 alastair@davidkrut.com www.davidkrutprojectscapetown.com Ebony Visit the new gallery for a fantastic selection of art and some very exciting new furniture designs.

67 Loop Street. Cape Town. T. 021 876 4477 info@ebonydesign.co.za www.ebonydesign.co.za Erdmann Contemporary /Photographers Gallery Until 24 September, “Present History II” featuring: Paul Weinberg, Jurgen Schadeberg, Willie Bester, Johann Louw, Jan Neethling, Laurina Paperina, Nicola Vinci, Erik Chevalier & many more, in multiple mediums.

63 Shortmarket Str, CT. T. 021 422 2762 galleryinfo@mweb.co.za www.erdmanncontemporary.co.za Everard Read CT 8 – 22 September, “From Lion’s Head to Meiringspoort - The Cape Pierneef Sites”

by Carl Becker. J H Pierneef’s Station Panels, done in the early 1930s, are cornerstones of South African landscape painting. They were initially situated in the old Johannesburg Station as adverts to travel the Union of South Africa. But did these alluring places ever really exist? And how have they changed? Taking up Pierneef’s invitation 80 years later, painter Carl Becker set out to find out. Searching for the elusive Cape Pierneef sites, the artist sometimes found only traces of the original place. But in others, the Pierneefian grandeur remains.

3 Portswood Rd, Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, CT. T. 021 418 4527 ctgallery@everard.co.za www.everard-read-capetown.co.za 34 Fine Art 13 - 17 September exclusive preview in Cape Town of Micro Cluster Picnic Asha Zero Solo Exhibition.

20 September - 22 October, New Arrivals - Group Exhibition.

2nd Floor, The Hills Building, Buchanan Square, 160 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock.

T.021 461 1863 info@34fineart.com www.vgallery.co.za / www.34fineart.com G2 Art New artists and artworks by Nicole Pletts, Samantha Brown, Benjy Furawo, Khayalethu Witbooi, Hendrik Gericke, Gareth Humphreys, Frans Groenewald and Kristen McClarty, together with regular contributors Roelie van Heerden, Vanessa Berlein, Gilbert Pearse, Andrew Sutherland, Mongezi Gum, Anthony Gadd & Jenny Merritt to name a few, as well as beautiful sculpture by Victor Harley, Steven Andrews & Uwe Pfaff amongst others.

61 Shortmarket Str, CT. T.021 424 7169 di@g2art.co.za www.g2art.co.za Gill Allderman Gallery The Gallery has 7 rooms which carry a mix of works by various artists.

During September: David Meyer - a collection of acrylic, oils and mixed media. Bright clean lines define Meyers work, David Liknaitsky – sculptures, Jill Trappler - ink on canvas, Donna McKellar - oil Karoo landscapes, Dathini Myziya - charcoal, paint, wash on paper, Judy Conway - acrylics on canvas, Leboana Lefuma - ceramic sculptures, Simon Stone - 30 x 30 oils on card/linen, Alice Sarembock, Val de Klerk and others.

Concord House (Pam Golding Building), Cnr Main & Summerly Rds, Kenilworth.

C.083 556 2540 gallery@new.co.za www.alldermangallery.co.za Goodman Gallery Cape Until 10 September, “EAT ME” a group show featuring the following artists: Ghada Amer & Reza Farkondeh, Joel Andrianomearisoa, Reza Aramesh, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Kendell Geers, Frances Goodman, Sigalit Landau, Kalup Linzy, Gavin Turk, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas and Tracey Rose.

3rd Floor, Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock. T. 021 462 7573/4 cpt@goodman-gallery.com www.goodman-gallery.com

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Anton Kannemeyer new lithographs

Peekaboo, hand-printed lithograph, 57.5 x 57.5 cm. Edition 25.

The Artists’ Press

Box 1236, White River, 1240 7HO 083 676 3229 PDUN#DUWLVWVSUHVV FR ]D ZZZ DUWSULQWVD FRP

Gallery

Art Times Anton Aug 2011 advert.indd 1

19/08/2011 9:41 AM

Red, Black and White

(Bosman’s Crossing)

presents - The Memory of Strength a collection of Body prints

by Marna Lourens Opening with a performance by Marna

on 8 September 2011 @ 18h00

Speaker - Carina Stander

Exhibition ends 23 September

The Antique Warehouse

5A Distillery Road Bosmans Crossing

Stellenbosch

Tel: +27 21 883 9730

www.pierrabe.co.za

thewarehouse@mweb.co.za

The Cape Gallery, 60 Church Street seeks to expose fine art that is rooted in the South African tradition, work which carries the unique cultural stamp of our continent.

Featured above is artist Louis Ströh van der Walt

THE CAPE GALLERY

Open: Mon - Fri: 9h30 - 17h00 Sat: 10h00 - 14h00 Tel: 27 21 423 5309 Fax: 27 21 424 9063 E-mail: cgallery@mweb.co.za Web: www.capegallery .co.za

American express, Mastercard, Visa & Diner cards are accepted. Reliable arrangements can be made to freight purchaces to foreign destinations.

WESTERN CAPE | GALLERY GUIDE Hout Bay Gallery New artworks by Sarah Danes Jarrett, David Kuijers, Koos De Wet and many more.

Open 7 days a week.

71 Victoria Ave, Hout Bay. T. 021 790 3618 F. 021 790 3898 info@houtbaygallery.co.za www.houtbaygallery.co.za iArt Gallery 6 September-26 October, “Hartland” by Stephan Erasmus.

71 Loop Str, CT. T. 021 424 5150 info@iart.co.za www.iart.co.za iArt Gallery Wembley Until 21 September, “Victor Victor” by David Brits.

28 September - 26 October, “A House is not a machine for living” by Liam Mooney.

Wembley Square, Gardens, CT. T. 021 424 5150 info@iart.co.za www.iart.co.za

Irma Stern Gallery Opening Sat 3 September at 11am, “Confluence” an exhibition of ceramics by Ian Garrett and paintings by Rae Hearn, until 24 Sept.

Cecil Rd, Rosebank, CT. T. 021 685 5686 www.irmastern.co.za Iziko SA National Gallery Until 11 Sept, “Through the Lens of Durban’s Veteran Photographer” photography since 1945 by Ranjith Kally.

Until 25 September, “Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter” a retrospective exhibition of works

by Vladimir Tretchikoff.

7 September 2011 until 29 January 2012, “Ever Young” photography by James Barnor.

25 September - 7 November, Standard Bank Young Artist For Visual Art 2011: Nandipha Mntambo.

25 Queen Victoria Str, CT. T. 021 467 4660 www.iziko.org.za Iziko Michaelis Collection Ongoing, Dutch treat: Dutch works from the 17th–20th centuries in Iziko collections Iziko Michaelis Collection, Old Town House, Greenmarket Square, CT. T. 021 481 3800 hproud@iziko.org.za

REALM

07/09 - 01/10/2011

91 Kloof Street | CPT M| +27 82 679 3906 info@salon91art.co.za www.salon91art.co.za

image: “castle” by gabrielle raaff for “realm”

Infin Art Gallery A gallery of work by local artists.

Wolfe Str, Chelsea Village, Wynberg. T. 021 761 2816 & Buitengracht Str. CT. T. 021 423 2090 www.infinart.co.za

AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY GABRIELLE RAAFF & LORENZO NASSIMBENI

Iziko Good Hope Gallery (The Castle) Ongoing exhibition of oil paintings, furniture, ceramics, metal & glassware from the William Fehr Collection.

Buitenkant Str, opposite the Grand Parade, CT. T. 21 464 1262 kmooney@iziko.org.za Iziko SA Museum Until November, “Made in Translation: Images from and of the Landscape.”

25 Queen Victoria Str, Gardens, CT. T. 021 481 3800 info@iziko.org.za

1st oor Cape Quarter Square 27 Somerset Road, Green Point Ph: 021 421 3333

email: carmel@global.co.za website: www.carmelart.co.za

wide selection of works by leading South African contemporary artists

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Delivery Worldwide Restorations Art Courses Valuations Art Shop Framing Books SA Art

Tel: 044 874 4027 • www.artaffair.co.za 79 Market Street, George • GPS 33°57’42.66’’S | 22°27’24.54’’E

WESTERN CAPE | GALLERY GUIDE Johans Borman Fine Art Currently showing a selection of works by SA Masters Hugo Naudé, Maggie Laubser, Gerard Sekoto, Walter Battiss and Cecil Skotnes. New works by Walter Meyer, Jacobus Kloppers and Hussein Salim.

In Fin Art Building, Upper Buitengracht Str, CT. T. 021 423 6075. art@johansborman.co.za www.johansborman.co.za Kalk Bay Modern From 7-14 September, “Bathini Abantu: What are the people saying?” by Imiso Ceramics.

1st Floor, Olympia Buildings, 136 Main Rd, Kalk Bay. T.021 788 6571 kbmodern@iafrica.com www.kalkbaymodern.com Lindy van Niekerk Art Gallery A large selection of artworks by new and prominent South African artists and SA old Masters.

31 Kommandeur Rd, Welgemoed, Bellville. T. 021 913 7204/5 lindy@artpro.co.za, www.artpro.co.za Martin Osner Fine Art Gallery Archival photographic prints, mixed media & collectable imaging.

Shop A14, Cape Quarter Piazza, 72 Waterkant Str, Green Point, CT. T. 021 790 6494 info@martinosner.com www.martinosner.com Michaelis Gallery Opening 22 September, “A Conversation with the Bolus Collection: Science, sensibility, sensuality” closes 13 October.

Opens 22 September until 3 October, “Threshold” an exhibition of environmentally conscious art.

UCT, 31 – 37 Orange Str, CT. T. 021 480 7170 nadja.daehnke@uct.ac.za www.michaelis.uct.ac.za MM Galleries MM Galleries offers a platform that showcases a wealth of talented artists whose works are affordable and of high quality; the art is available in a mix of mediums with options to suit all budgets.

Shop 3, 31 Palmer Rd, Muizenberg, CT. T. 021 788 8370 www.mmgalleries.co.za

Rose Korber Art On view until 30 September is a superb selection of recent lino-cuts by William Kentridge.

These rivetting works, in black and white, are a welcome return to this powerful medium by the maestro, after some twenty years. Also on show, until the end of September, is “The Language of Colour” an exhibition featuring oils, watercolours, mixed media and collage by noted Cape Town abstractionist, Cynthia Villet, who has been described by writer, Roger Lipsy, as ‘one of the foremost artists of her time, a brilliantly creative, poetic spirit in the tradition of Paul Klee, Ben Nicolson and Jules Bissier’.

48 Sedgemoor Rd, Camps Bay, CT. T. 021 438 9152 C.083 261 1173 roskorb@icon.co.za www.rosekorberart.com Rust-en-Vrede Gallery Until 8 September, In Salon A: Kiki Kemp: “The artist’s confession” works in Ink on Korean paper, In Salon B: Talitha Deetlifs: “She is beautiful” Lead sculptures of the feminine form and In Salon C: Marianne Burger: “Being in Africa” mosaic works.

In The Office Showcase: Ceramic work by Hennie Meyer.

In the Cube: Ceramic Jugs by various potters.

13 – 30 September: Wendy Gaybba & Veronica Reid: “Being” and Sonja Frenz: “Life in Colour.” In the Office Showcase: Ceramics by Alessandro.

In the Cube: Hennie Meyer & Students.

10 Wellington Rd, Durbanville. T.021 976 4691 www.rust-en-vrede.com Salon 91 Until 3 September, “Figuring Difference” a group exhibition of painters: Lara Feldman, Patsy Groll & Daniel Popper to name a few.

Opening 7 September at 19h30 “Realm” watercolour and ink on paper by Gabrielle Raaff & Lorenzo Nassimbeni until 1 October at 2pm 91 Kloof Str, Gardens, CT. T 021 424 6930 info@salon91art.co.za www.salon91.co.za South African Jewish Museum Until 27 November, “Zapiro: Jiving with Madiba” an exhibition of work by the well-known cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, all of which depict or otherwise involve Nelson Mandela.

88 Hatfield Str, Gardens, CT. T. 021-465-1546 info@sajm.info www.sajm.info

Gallery hours: Monday – Friday 08:00 – 17:00 saturdays by appointMent. tel 021 887 3385 e-mail 101dorp@slee.co.za

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

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GALLERY GUIDE | WESTERN CAPE South African Print Gallery A wide selection of fine art prints by South African masters and contemporary printmakers. Until 08 September, recent prints by Jane Eppel.

Hats Off Show: Work from The Cavisham Press 10 September - 06 October 109 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock, CT. T. 021 462 6851 info@printgallery.co.za www.printgallery.co.za StateoftheArt.co.za Online Art Gallery A curated online art gallery bringing you original and affordable artwork created by selected Fine Arts students and graduates emerging from South Africa’s most prestigious art schools. With an extensive selection of styles and genres to reflect your taste, budget and requirements, and a range of services to support your choices, buying art couldn’t be any simpler. T. 0724709272 info@StateoftheArt.co.za www.StateoftheArt.co.za Stephan Welz & Company Auctioneers of Decorative & Fine Arts.

The Great Cellar, The Alphen Hotel, Alphen Drive, Constantia. T. 021 794 6461 ct@stephanwelzandco.co.za www.stephanwelzandco.co.za Stevenson Cape Town Until 3 September, “Second Nature” an exhibition of new photographs by Guy Tillim.

8 September – 15 October, Conrad Botes solo exhibition and a Forex Project show by Keren Cytter.

Ground Floor, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock, CT. T. 021 462 1500 cpt@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Strauss & Co. Fine Art Auctioneers & Consultants.

26 September, Auction of South African Art, Furniture, Silver, Ceramics & Jewellery.

Day Sale at 4pm, Evening Sale at 8pm, The Vineyard Hotel, Newlands, Cape Town.

The Oval, 1st Floor Colinton House, 1 Oakdale Rd, Newlands. T. 021 683 6560 ct@straussart.co.za www.straussart.co.za Worldart Until 3 September, “Urban aesthetic” by artists Ricky Lee Gordon, Paul Senyol & Linsey Levendall of Bison. The exhibition will consist of four large paintings – one work by each artist and a fourth which is a collaboration.

54 Church Str, CT. T.021 423 3075 charl@worldart.co.za www.worldart.co.za

Franschhoek Ebony The Ebony Gallery shows classic and contemporary artworks by some of the most recognised and collectible South African artists.

4 Franschhoek Square, 32 Huguenot Str, Franschhoek. T. 021 876 4477 info@ebonydesign.co.za www.ebonydesign.co.za Galerie L’ Art A permanent exhibition of South African old masters & contemporary art.

Shop no 3, The Ivy, Kruger Str, Franschhoek T. 021 876 2497 www.galart.co.za The Gallery at Grande Provence Opening on Sunday, 11 September at 11h00, “How To” by eminent artist and academic, Emma Willemse and distinguished artist, Hester Viles, with artworks executed in a wide range of materials, techniques and formats. ‘The Shop’ at the Gallery, will showcase the avant-garde, Dillon and Jada, prêt à porter collection which include a range of Vivienne Westwood shoes.‘The Cathedral’ at The Gallery, will showcase a selection of large scale paintings and sculptures by Henry Hopkins, Gavin Rissi, JP Meyer and Johann Moolman among others.Main Rd, Franschhoek. T. 021 876 8630. gallery@grandeprovence.co.za www.grandeprovence.co.za Is Art Until 6 September, “Evolution” an exhibition of new works by Andre Stead.

16 Huguenot Str, Franschhoek. T. 021 876 8443 isart@lqf.co.za www.is-art.co.za

George Strydom Gallery SA and Master artists on display until October 2011.

Painting, sculpture, photographs, jewellery, ceramic & glassware on show by the following artists: Simon Stone, Brad Gray, Hanneke Benade, Gregory Kerr, Greg Schultz, Leigh Voigt, Piet van Heerden, Pierneef & Erich Mayer.

79 Market Str, George. T. 044 874 4027 info@artaffair.co.za www.artaffair.co.za

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Hermanus Abalone Gallery During September: Main gallery: Group exhibition with Gail Catlin, John Clarke, Christo Coetzee, Hannes Harrs, Judith Mason, Lynette ten Krooden, Carl Roberts, Susanna Swart. Annex: Graphic and photographic exhibition with Cecil Skotnes, Pippa Skotnes, Lucky Sibiya, EL Loko, Andrew Verter & Lien Botha (photography).

2 Harbour Rd, The Courtyard, Hermanus. T. 028 313 2935 info@abalonegallery.co.za www.abalonegallery.co.za Originals Gallery The art studio and gallery of Terry Kobus. See the artist at work in his studio and view his latest paintings in an intimate gallery space.

Shop 22 Royal Centre, 141 Main Rd, Hermanus. T. 083 259 8869 originals@hermanus.co.za www.originalsHermanus.blogspot.com Shelley Adams Studio & Gallery A permanent exhibition of artworks by Shelley Adams in her personal studio space.

She also offers ongoing art courses, crit classes and workshops.

19A Royal Centre, Main Rd, Hermanus. C. 072 677 6277 www.shelley-adams.com Walker Bay Art Gallery View the wide selection of paintings, sculpture & ceramics by established as well as up and coming South African artists.

171 Main Rd, Hermanus. contact: Francois Grobbelaar 028 312 2928 francois@walkerbayartgallery.co.za www.walkerbayartgallery.co.za

Klein Karoo Sheena Ridley Open Studio and Sculpture Garden Sculptures and Paintings N9 Langkloof near Uniondale, Klein Karoo T. 083 5892881 www.ridley.co.za

Knysna Dale Elliott Art Gallery Exhibition of new images of the Garden Route by Dale & Mel Elliott Woodmill Lane Shopping Centre, Knysna.

Anneline: T. 044 382 5646 dale@dalelliott.co.za www.daleelliott.co.za Knysna Fine Art During September, “New Acquisitions:” Egon Tania, Claire Menck, Herman van Wyk and Nico Masemolo.

Thesen House, 6 Long Str, Knysna. T. 044 382 5107 C. 082 5527262 gallery@finearts.co.za www.finearts.co.za

Langebaan Bay Gallery Local artists work exhibited. Featured Artist for September is Gerda Claassen, well known for her Abstracts mixed with Realism.

6 Marra Square, Bree St, Langebaan. Contact: Daphne 073 304 8744 baygallery@xsinet.co.za www.baygallery.co.za

Oudtshoorn Artkaroo Gallery A selection of authentic Karoo fine art by various established and emerging artists.

107 Baron van Reede, Oudtshoorn. T.044 279 1093 janet@artkaroo.co.za www.artkaroo.co.za

Paarl Hout Street Gallery The Hout Street Gallery specialises in South African paintings and fine art and offers an extensive range of ceramics, sculpture, creative jewellery, glass, crafts and functional art.

270 Main Str, Paarl. T. 021 872 5030 zetler@icon.co.za www.houtstreetgallery.co.za

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HENK SERFONTEIN URBAN TENSION Recent paintings

27 Oct - 25 Nov Galeria Alex Telese, Barcelona, Spain www.alextelese.com www.henkserfontein.com

The South African

Print Gallery Leaders in the selection of SA master investment fine art prints. presents:

New releases:

Hats Off Show: 25 Years of Linocuts from The Cavisham Press 10 September - 06 October with Julia Meintjes Fine Art.

Alice Goldin Selected work from a colourful life time of printmaking 12 November - 08 December 2011

109 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock Art Strip, Tel 021 4626851. www.printgallery.co.za

Anton Kannemeyer: Peekaboo : Hand painted lithograph, Edition of 25

Photos by Basil Brady

Nico Swart SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Ashwin Ramhith

Basil Brady and Roly Pattle

Jimmy Smith and Willemien Green

Theresa Alvarez and Dominique Platt

Roly Pattle, Theresa Alvarez and Eddie Byron

Theresa Hardman and Ian Visser 34

WESTERN, EASTERN AND NORTHERN CAPE | GALLERY GUIDE

Piketberg (West Coast) AntheA Delmotte Gallery Until 25 October, a group exhibition with AntheA Delmotte, Clare Menck, Mary Duncan & Jeanette Unite. 47 Voortrekker Str, The Old Bioscope, Piketberg.

C. 073 281 7273 anthea@lantic.net

Plettenberg Bay Lookout Art Gallery A fine selection of interesting contemporary paintings, sculptures & blown glass.

The Courtyard, Lookout Centre, Main Str, Plettenberg Bay. T. 044 533 2210 mwdawns@mweb.co.za www.lookout-art-gallery.co.za

Pringle Bay

Pringle Bay Art Route 10 & 11 September, Local artists’ and crafters’ studio doors are now open in the picturesque little coastal village of Pringle Bay! You are invited to come and meet them personally to view their work and discuss their philosophies and experience their way of living. They are eagerly waiting to share their creativity and passion. Share in the artists’ and crafters’ love of their surroundings which is inevitably also their inspiration.

Contact person: Ina le Roux T. 028 273 8941/082 462 3409 inaleroux@global.co.za

101 Dorp Gallery 12-30 September, “Nudes from the Nineties” by Jan Visser.

101 Dorp Str, Stellenbosch. T. 021 887 3385 www.slee.co.za Gallery Red, Black & White Gallery Red, Black and White presents “The Memory of Strength” a collection of body prints by Marna Lourens. Opening with a performance by Marna on the 8th September at 6pm. Exhibiton ends 23 Sept.

At the Antique Warehouse, 5A Distillery Rd, Bosmans Crossing, Stellenbosch.

T. 021 883 9730 www.pierrabe.co.za Stellenbosch Art Gallery An extensive selection of paintings, sculpture, handmade glass & ceramics by selected Western Cape artists are on offer to the discerning buyer.

34 Ryneveld Str, Stellenbosch. T. 021 887 8343 www.stellenboschartgallery.co.za

Villiersdorp Elliott Art Gallery Themed Boland and Overberg Exhibition by Dale and Mel Elliott 80 Main Rd, Villiersdorp. T. 028 840 2927 dale@daleelliott.co.za

Somerset West

Wilderness

Marzé Botha Art Gallery Dealers in original South African Art situated in the Wine Cellar of the Lourensford Wine Estate.

Lourensford Rd, Somerset West. T. 021 847 2300 C. 082 847 1022 info@mbgallery.co.za www.mbgallery.co.za

Beatrix Bosch Studio Unique works in leather as well as paintings & photography can be viewed at her studio.57 Die Duin, Wilderness. T. 044 877 0585 www.beatrixbosch.co.za

Stellenbosch

Art on 5 Permanent exhibition of paintings and ceramics by Maryna de Witt, Pera Schillings & Karen Kieviet. 7b Andringa Str., Stellenbosch. T. 021 887 7234

Eastern Cape East London Ann Bryant Gallery Until 4 September, The East London Fine Art Society presents: “The Peep Show Exhibition” an exhibition of works in miniature at the Ann Bryant Coach House.

Open for public viewing at the Coach House from 12 September until 17 September, The East London High School’s Art Exhibition. This exhibition brings together the best artworks from Grades 8 to 12 submitted by High Schools in our region. The show includes painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics and mixed media work.

Opening on Thursday 29 September at 18h30, Brian Hammond Solo Exhibition in the Ann Bryant Coach House. The exhibition concludes Saturday 15 October A former matriculate of Potchefstroom Boys’ High Brian de Villiers Hammond paints in oils creating landscapes, expanses, and skies.

9 St. Marks Rd, Southernwood, East London. T. 043 722 4044 annbryant@intekom.co.za www.annbryant.co.za Malcolm Dewey Fine Art Ongoing exhibition of oil paintings by Malcolm Dewey plus works by a selection of local artists.

Floradale Centre, Beacon Bay, East London. T. 043 7481229 art@dewey.co.za www.originalart.co.za

Pharoah Art Gallery Following the fire that destroyed the gallery in June last year the newly opened gallery features an exquisite collection of Peter Pharoah’s fine art originals & prints including rich colourful portraits, unforgettable African wildlife and bold textured abstracts that are inspired by his travels around Africa.

Wilderness Centre, George Road, Wilderness T. 044 877 0265 C. 076 976 2629 www.peterpharoah.com

work by Eastern Cape artists.

12 – 23 September, in the Lower Gallery: an exhibition by Peter Midlane & Jackie Griffin-Jones and in the Upper Gallery: a solo exhibition by Stephanie Beste.

36 Bird Str, P.E. T. 041 585 3641 gallery@epsac.co.za www.artecpe.co.za Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum Until 4 September, “2011 Standard Bank Young Artist: Nadipha Mntambo” in recent work Mntambo has shifted her focus to the art of bullfighting and her medium to video and photography. The title Mntambo’s award exhibition “Faena” refers to the series of final passes performed by a matador preparatory to killing a bull in a bullfight.

Until 18 September, “Rediscovering Fred Page” an exhibition of works by Fred Page to celebrate the launch of new Fred Page book titled Ringmaster of the Imagination (2011) by Jeanne Write and Cecil Kerbel.

Until 2 October, “Interiors” exploring the theme of interiors including still life, portraits and narrative. Works by George Pemba, Maud Sumner, Christine Dixie, Rob Duker and Marc Shoul will be included.

10 September 2011 – January 2012, “Painting on Paper” an exhibition exploring works on paper from the Art Museum’s permanent collection.

1 Park Drive, Port Elizabeth. T. 041 5062000 artmuseum@mandelametro.gov.za www.artmuseum.co.za Ron Belling Art Gallery An exhibition of collected works called “Something Beautiful” and curated by Clayton Holliday from 6 September until 6 October.

30 Park Drive, P.E. T. 041 586 3973 ronbelling@mweb.co.za www.ronbelling.co.za

Vincent Art Gallery The gallery houses an exceptional collection of fine arts, sculptures, blown glass, ceramics, exclusive jewellery and decor items.

2 Donald Rd, Vincent, East London. T. 043 726 4356 vinceart@lantic.net www.vincentartgallery.co.za

Northern Cape

Port Elizabeth

William Humphreys Art Gallery 31 Aug- 2 October, “Clare Menck: Hidden Life” 20 years of painting (1990-2010) Cullinan Crescent, Kimberley. T. 053 831 1725

ArtEC (Previously EPSAC) Until 9 September in the Lower & Upper Gallery, ArtEC Annual Exhibition: the “flagship” exhibition of the year, the adjudicated annual highlights the highest standard of

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Kimberley

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Nic Bladen at Everard Read, CT

By John Bauer : Nic Bladen performs the most magical tango combining bronze and silver, naturally heavy materials, resulting in the lightest wisps of botanical beauty.

Rodin was accused of life casting by his enemies but if he had life cast like Nic Bladen the room would have been silent and it would have been seen as a virtue. In this age of technical absenteeism Bladen makes waves by creating works that we could not do ourselves. I assume he does not write reams of literature outlining his concepts, it is unnecessary. He is at the forefront of a market dubbed “Well you could try” it is a reaction to artists who outsource their works to students or their unsuccessful peers delivering a more and more jaundiced product. Nic unlocks the magical world of what we see everyday but never look at. He decontextualises plants allowing their roots to

expand into the room. I found myself unable to resist sniffing a flower, however I may have looked, in that moment I cared not. I had to test the illusion, to see if my mind would trick me into recognizing a heady scent. Nic’s bronzes redefine the botanical art genre, this is history in the making, and the impact of this show has set new standards and revived hope in our jaundiced hearts. Photo: Pierre van der Spuy “Rare”, an exhibition of nature studies incorporating botanical art by acclaimed Cape Town-based artists Lisa Strachan & Nic Bladen Everard Read, 3 Portswood Rd, Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, CT. T. 021 418 4527 www.everard-read-capetown.co.za) The works on this exhibition fit into two series; the first continues in the technique of highly burnished vessels with mussel-shell impressions for which he has gained much acclaim and the coveted VITA Craft Award. The second series works with raised contours of design. Hand-built storage pots from ancient Greece inspired these new forms and motifs. Traditionally this form of raised decoration was not merely for beautification but served to strengthen large storage vessels. However, as his vessels don’t reach the same large proportions, Ian explores these eloquent tactile arabesques purely for their expressive quality.

Ian’s interest in his family history led him to discover that his grandmother, who had grown up in India, was of part Indian descent. These works are a musing upon the influence of Indian culture on Europe; and an exploration of his own identity in finding inspiration in them. His earlier vessels were often minimalist, with very simple lines and motifs, however this current work has an explosion of pattern and embellishment. The small polished circles in the burnished series echo shisha mirrors incorporated in richly embroidered fabrics of India. The warm terracotta colours evoke the rich colours of spices and ochres of Indian earthen architecture. He is also inspired by raised wall motifs found in the tribal mud architecture of Kutch in Western India. This mud architecture was almost always white-washed which also inspired the series of white vessels that form part of the raised pattern series.

Confluence Irma Stern Museum, CT

In working out the surface design for each vessel Ian takes a mathematical, musical and visually aesthetic approach. The profile curve of the vessel recurs like a refrain upon the surface within the shape of the motif, integrating form and design. This visual harmony is further enhanced by dividing and repeating patterns in smaller diminishing echoes across the surface of the vessel. Ian plays with and investigates the abstract language of pattern making and precognitive primal recognition. Meaning is derived from layers of associations and influences – which in turn have risen from his wide interests and reading as he investigates deeply. Ian sees his own identity as layered and this is reflected in the accumulation of references and inspirations that form a confluence within his work.

By Cate Wood Hunter : The exhibition of Ian Garrett ceramics, titled ‘Confluence’ on show in September at the Irma Stern Museum, shows the maturation of various influences into a sophisticated reflection of the artist’s varied ancestry and personal interest in archaeology. For the last twenty years he has focused on the purity of ceramic form and its eloquent description through decoration. His ceramic vessels may be read as a mapping of his biography through motifs that form part of an ongoing history.

The vessels are pit-fired - a transformative alchemical event / ritual / art happening that is an essential element of his making process. Each piece is imbued with a precious or miraculous quality that he cannot predict or control and forms an antidote to his perfectionism. The vessels spend so much time within the hands of the artist, being built, decorated and burnished that they seem to absorb the energy of concentration centered upon them that they resonate with this literally and figuratively.

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

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KWA ZULU NATAL | GALLERY GUIDE

Kwazulu- Natal Durban

Underberg

The African Art Centre Until 2 September, an exhibition of mixed media artworks by Dina Cormick entitled “Honouring the Stories within Every Woman – Images for the Journey.”

7 September – 10 October, “Birds of a Feather” featuring a special range of telephone wire, beaded and embroidered birds, jewellery and sculptures produced by crafters supported and mentored by the Development Team of the African Art Centre.

94 Florida Rd, Durban. T. 031 312 3804/5 africanartcentre@afri-art.co.za www.afriart.org.za

The Underberg Studio Set in a delightful garden facing the mountains, the gallery specializes in South African Fine Art landscape photography & Ceramics. Owned by photographer Lawrance Brennon and his potter wife, Catherine Brennon, the gallery is regularly updated with their latest work. The garden and gallery will be featuring the work of sculptor Sarah Richards during the Underberg Open Gardens Festival (28 – 30th October).

21 Ridge Rd, Underberg. Signage from R617 T. 033 701 2440 / 072 141 9924 / 082 872 7830 www.underbergstudio.co.za

ArtSPACE Durban Until 10 September, “Further” - Sculptures and paintings by Sarah Richards and “extra-ordinary” - Photography by Sally Giles.

12 – 24 September, “Means of Passage:” - Paintings by Grace Kotze’s Art Students and “Into the Light” - Photography by Peter Bendheim for the Community Chest.

26 September – 15 October, “Sifundakwabadala” (Learn from the Elders) - Paintings

by Sibusiso Duma and “The Space In between” - Print, video and sound by Wayne Reddiar and Sita Suzanne.

3 Millar Rd, Stamford Hill, Durban. T.031 312 0793 info@artspace-durban.com www.artspace-durban.com Christie’s International Auctioneers.

Gillian Scott Berning, Independent Consultant. T 031 207 8247 gillian.gsb@mweb.co.za www.christies.com

KZNSA Gallery From 13 to 30 September in the main gallery and the multi-media room: Peter Rich “Learnt in Translation.” This exhibition traces the development of Rich’s work to date, showing architectural drawings, models, photographs as well as the sketches that form the inspiration to his architectural design work. In the park gallery: Andrew Nair, “Withdrawings” Graphite pencil drawings on paper, of incredible detail and beauty.

166 Bulwer Rd, Glenwood. T. 031 277 1705 gallery@kznsagallery.co.za www.kznsagallery.co.za Tamasa Gallery A small commercial gallery, Tamasa exhibits a broad variety of contemporary KZN artists. 36 Overport Drive, Berea, Durban. T. 031 207 1223

Pietermaritzburg The Blue Caterpillar Art Gallery The gallery exhibits a wide range of styles and mediums covering both established and up and coming artists from South Africa and beyond.

At Butterflies for Africa, 37 Willowton Rd, Pietermaritzburg. T. 033 387 1356 art@butterflies.co.za/ bluecaterpillarart@hotmail.com www.butterflies.co.za Tatham Art Gallery Until 18 September, “Meeting the Makers: Contemporary Craft of KZN” an exciting and groundbreaking exhibition of crafters from throughout KZN including established designers such as Andrew Early, Egg Designs & Sibusiso Mbhele to unknown artists from remote parts of the province.

Cnr of Chief Albert Luthuli (Commercial) Rd & Church Str. (Opposite City Hall) Pietermaritzburg. T. 033 342 1804 www.tatham.org.za

Umdloti The Audrey Rudnick Gallery Surrealist Paintings, Sculptures and Pod People by Audrey Rudnick.

77 North Beach Rd, Shop no.10 Upper Level, Umdloti Centre, Umdloti.

T. 031 568 2445 audrey@thehoozoo.com www.audreyrudnick.com

9973 Initiative

The Collective 5 September –1 October, “Follow Your Art” – Group Show (Danti Daxi & the Otherwise). First Opening: 5 September, Comic Workshop by Allistair Laird & Warren Raysdorf: 10 & 11 September, Second Opening: 19 September.

48b Florida Rd, (entrance in 4th Avenue) Greyville, Durban. T. 031 303 4891 thecollectivedurban.blogspot.com

Vulindlela Nyoni AFRICAN ART CENTRE 94 Florida Road, Morningside, Durban 4001 Mon. - Fri. 8.30 am-5 pm. Sat.- 9am-3pm T: 031 312 3804/5 F: 031 312 3818 africanartcentre@afri-art.co.za www.afriart.org.za

Vulindlela Nyoni at the African Art Centre Section 21 Not for gain company

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The SA Art Times This month’s circulation is 10 0000 printed copies, distributed nationally, with multi readers and focused distribution 4-5 000 copies read online 16 000 weekly e-mail newsletters sent out Average of 36 000 Art Times prompts on Facebook 12 000 individual readers to the AT website We cover the Joburg Art Fair and Tulbagh Art Fair this month All above records legit A memorable way of getting your art nationally seen, to suit your pocket.

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Judith Mason: Rictus Sardonicus Wilhelm van Rensburg : One of the most striking images in the latest suite of drawings by Judith Mason is of an elongated jack-saw, with real, worn teeth in the place of its own teeth in what appears to be an extended lower jaw bone with a curling bit of lower lip. Suspended in mid-air above this saw is a small fret-saw, or jigsaw, with a twisted blade. The drawing is one in a series of open-mouthed sketches, many with snarling bared teeth in what looks like a set, sardonic smile, or grimace. “The Rictus Sardonicus drawings” says Mason, “are a response to a delightful file of rictus tooth x-rays sent to me by a collector friend, Dr Shaun Beecroft, who is a trauma surgeon in the U.K. These anonymous images suggested distinct personalities, and not just skeletal heads, as some of them presented themselves as mischievous or monstrous, and the fracturing and occasional prosthetic hardware added an extra frisson to the subject matter. When I drew from them, using the plates and a light table, I began to see that some sets of teeth conveyed power or malice, and when I juxtaposed sets of teeth against or opposite each other, particular narratives suggested themselves.” The teeth of the jack-saw are more than just a mere visual pun.

One can almost hear the barking commands coming out of a wide open mouth, with a double set of teeth, in a drawing entitled “Mouthpiece: Commandant”. “The teeth in the Commandant are his fighting force, giving effect to his words” says Mason. Or they could be the words from the mouth in another drawing, “Mouthpiece: Manipulator”, with entangled figures dangling like puppets on a string from the bared teeth in the gaping mouth of what was the face of a human being. But look at the eyes of the Commandant: they are weary and vulnerable, belying what comes out of his mouth.

Eyes, incidentally, do appear between the teeth of an open mouth in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, acting as point of convergence of the external and internal worlds, and symbolizing the protection of the inner spirit.

Mason is concerned about her own eyes: “My drawing style has changed a bit. Partly because I have taken such a lot of time, several months, on each drawing, using pencils which range from 3B to 6H in each work, and probably because I am in dire need of cataract operations and have had to discipline myself to get all the marks as ‘right’ as I can.”

The eyes of the Commandant ‘hear’ the voices of the people. They ‘see’ the power of these voices. Look, for instance, at another one of Mason’s singular drawings: “Mouthpiece: The laughter of others”. Repeated sets of grimacing teeth form a type of vortex, swallowing the viewer entirely, yet at the same time suggesting the opening out of the petals of a delicate flower. This is perhaps the central paradox in Judith Mason’s drawing: the mouth, the teeth, the tongue, the voice all combine into very powerful speech, the product of mana, or psychic energy. Yet, the mouth, these teeth can equally powerfully devour, destroy and consume. Creativity ameliorated and tempered, softened and hardened, by destruction, in other words. .

How devastating, then, when looking at yet another drawing of hers in which the mouth, the teeth are absent: “Mouthpiece: Saying no”: a vulnerable self-portrait with the mouth erased, or never drawn, for that matter. “The mouth-less self-portrait” she says, “is a comment on my inclination to say yes and regret the consequences.” However, it signifies much more: it references her moral obligation for visual, aesthetic articulation, rather than a reluctant verbal undertaking.

The Rictus Sardonicus suite of drawings holds up ironic images of the role of the artist in contemporary society. “Mouthpiece: Artist aka sacred shroud seller”, and “Mouthpiece: Prophet”. In terms of the former drawing Mason comments wryly, “I enjoy employing humour in art work, along the lines of a ‘comic novel’ rather than a swiftly realized cartoon. Such is my intention in my portrayal of the artist as creator and seller of mandilions. The history of religious relics inspires me, not so much devotion, as great admiration for generations of entrepreneurs throughout the ages who created objects of veneration for the gullible/innocent. Some of them, like the shroud of Turin, possess great gravitas.” “Unlike the other drawings,” Mason goes on to say, “ ‘The Prophet’ is toothless, his mouth is a foul and gaping orifice, inhabited by flies, to suggest the damnation he promises.” The mouth of “The Prophet” is a rotting trap, containing its own destruction and the destruction of others.

It is akin to what in slang terms is called a ‘bugchaser’, a person who seeks sexual partners who are HIV positive for the purpose of having unprotected sex and becoming HIV positive himself.

Artist: Exhibition: Opens: Where:

Judith Mason Rictus Sardonicus 10 September 2011 GALLERY AOP, Johannesburg

ARTLife THE SOUTH AFRICAN

Helmut Starcke: Ritual, 2011 Acrylic on canvas (detail). Photo: Julian Kruger. The Exhibition was held at The University of Stellenbosch Art Museum, Stellenbosch

ARTLife |

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| ARTLife

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

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Over the last 15 years, Gallery 2 (previously known as Gallery on the Square) has established itself as one of South Africa’s leading fine art galleries. Built on a strong affection for the arts, it strives to promote a cross-section of both established and emerging contemporary South African artists across a variety of disciplines, as well as supporting various local development projects.

In May 2010, the gallery relocated to what has become known as the ‘Art Strip’ on Jan Smuts avenue in Parkwood, Johannesburg, and rebranded as Gallery 2. It continues to draw on the ever-present talent and energy of South Africa’s visual artists, finding its niche within the South African art market, as well as providing an environment that is enjoyed and supported by artists, private and corporate patrons alike.

Gallery 2 looks to mediate between formalist ideals and the theoretical artistic discourse of contemporary art. It is our goal to promote a re-appreciation of not only the aesthetic but also a return to the essence of production in art as well as any conceptual discourse that the work may signify.

John Moore: The Ferryman, Hard-Ground Etching, 114cm x 200cm

Artists associated with Gallery 2, amongst others, are: Paul Blomkamp, Hannelie Coetzee, Wilma Cruise, Karin Daymond, Bronwen Findlay, Kate Gottgens, Phillemon Hlungwani, Grace Kotze, Dumisani Mabaso, Nelson Makamo, Colbert Mashile, Hermann Niebuhr, Annette Pretorius, Carl Roberts, Jenny Stadler, Reney Warrington Contact Details: Gallery 2: 140 Jan Smuts Avenue Parkwood Johannesburg Tel.: 011 447 0155/98 Web: www.gallery2.co.za e-mail: gots@mweb.co.za

Jenny Stadler: Buffalo Bill, Mixed Media on Canvas, 140cm x 160cm

Kate Gottgens: Merry Hell, Oil on Canvas, 92cm x 130cm

Gallery 2 140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood Tel.: + 27 11 447 0155/98 Web: www.gallery2.co.za Mail: gots@mweb.co.za

Discovery, oil on canvas, 120 x 20 www.karindaymond.com +27 (0)83 301 8887 daymond@nelweb.co.za

00cm

KARIN DAYMOND

T H E L A N D S C A P E O F

Delmas Dawn (400x300)

Vaalrivier Dawn (400x300)

In the South Africa painting aesthetic, some would argue that the landscape holds pride of place. The works of Pierneef and Walter Meyer are emblematic of what the country embodies, with sweeping vistas, colours that are almost indescribable, and a horizon line that both beckons and mystifies. The American Regionalist tradition follows a similar path, with painters like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton bending the collective midwestern farmscapes to their visual will. The urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, which slightly pre-date the Regionalists, are often even more informative of the American painting tradition.

It is into this latter class that the paintings of Daniel Human fit.

Human’s landscapes are eerily similar to what we see around us in South African vistas, when one is not really searching for anything specific, but is confronted with an arresting image that locks into our psyche.

Human has been painting since he was 9 years old,

and his early works show a strong eye for composition and detail, especially in works like ‘Tannie with Chickens.’

This work, which was done when Human was 16, was completed during studies toward a Fine Art diploma which the artist started when he was 12, and completed when he was 17.

With his love of the long road, his favourite being the N6 to East London, Human would scour the land for scenes and vistas.

Currently he is working on numerous landscapes, some which he calls “peri-urban landscapes”, sporting radar towers, street-lamps, stop signs, power pylons and methane-tinted skies. He seems to be fascinated by the interesting colours produced by the early-morning smog on the highway to Joburg, by veld fires in winter and by the glow that the towering Highveld cumulus-nimbus clouds pour down on a landscape.

The current series Human is working on, which are landscapes of industrial and semi-industrial views around

A N A R T I S T

Bashewa Road (600x400)

Jozi Thunderclouds (470x500)

Nottinghill Road Cold Morning (600x400)

Pretoria Radio Masts (600x400)

Clarens Dawn (420x300)

Lynnwood Rd (470x430)

Gauteng, have a quality that suggests a dynamic new visual direction for the artist. In these paintings, he is unlocking an inner aesthetic which draws us as viewers into his visual interpretation of scenes with which we are strangely familiar. However, the familiarity of the landscapes is veiled by the emotive use of sfumato-like brushwork, which takes the work in a different direction, away from the traditional

interpretation of this subject matter.

This series is an exciting portent of things to come from this artist, as he is finding a style which he is very comfortable to explore and expand, both as an artist, and a son of South Africa.

Written by Tim Mostert, American Art Historian and well known cartoonist, creator of Speedy and Papsak.

Daniel Human 282A Mamanthane Street, Erasmusrand, Pretoria 082 412 5868 / D@it.co.za

Zwartkops Dusk (450x350)

Veld Fire (440x300)

Paradise

Experience the Artist, Glendine with Alice Art Gallery Desolate landscapes of the soul Glendine captures the elusive vastness of the Namib and Karoo with a beautifully balanced use of detailed line work and generous swaths of sky and texture. Her landscapes are inspired by crumbling and deserted homesteads, rusty windmills and dust-laden red sunsets.

Glendine’s more abstract masterpieces focus on personal experiences of loss and gain and are mostly selfportraits. She also does expressive portraits of women like Frida Kahlo, Ingrid Jonker and Helen Martins whose lives influenced society in a powerful and lasting manner. Glendine is able to communicate an array of emotions, while her studies of women are sad, passionate, lonely and haunting. To highlight the intimacy of her work the artist often combines images and words to convey a personal image and touch.

Her relationship with God is revealed in her latest works depicting death, life and heaven after suffering a deep personal tragedy.

She studied and taught Fine Arts and currently lives in De Rust in the Klein Karoo. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in South Africa and in New York. Her work adorns homes and embassies in the UK, USA, Australia and South Africa.

Glendine’s work is on display at Alice Art Gallery in Ruimsig. You may well be surprised by her latest work in bold colours and daringly different subjects. Invest in a Glendine Painting from Alice Art and surround yourself with an inspiring interpretation of the world around you.

For further enquiries contact Alice Art Gallery at (011) 958 1392, 083 377 1470 aliceart@global.co.za, www.aliceart.co.za

Selfportret

Karoo landscape

Tree of life

ARTLife | A MONSTEROUS DAVID BROWN GIFT TO UCT

David Brown : A Key Moment in our history Graven in steel A magnificent gift of sculpture to UCT

All photo’s Jim Wolf

On the third of November, 1991, a stranger pitched up out of the blue at sculptor David Brown’s studio. No sooner did he see the mass of sculptures, than he wet his lips in amazement, and promptly commissioned David to create the most ambitious sculptural ensemble of his entire career.

By Lloyd Pollak His “Dialogue at the Dogwatch”, recently installed at the middle campus at UCT, comprises four separate fascist figures manning lumbering engines of war, or presiding over towering observation posts, searchlights, platforms and ladders. It rises up to a height of 6.5 meters, and the spaces between the figures extend as far as 15 meters, so that when it is described as half as big as rugby field, this is not hyperbole.

The only other monument of comparable scale in the Mother city is Rhodes Memorial (1912), a not entirely dissimilar synthesis of architecture and sculpture expressive of a very different ethos. While “Dialogue at the Dogwatch” portrays the death rattle of apartheid and the Nationalist state, Rhodes Memorial is a soaring flight of triumphal imperialism. Eight solemn lions guard a Doric temple ranged around G. F. Watt’s all-conquering equestrian effigy of Cecil John Rhodes gazing proprietorially over this remote pocket of the British Empire.

Almost a century separates these two monumental landmarks, and during that period, nothing of commensurate grandeur has graced our city. Such enterprises are so astronomic in cost that we simply cannot afford them. It was only through the munificence of Charles Diamond, the dream patron who came knocking at David’s door, that the university recently acquired the sculptural complex as a gift. Diamond, an expatriate South African and graduate of UCT, founded the international investment company Iconostat, and this is the source of his wealth.

Soon after Diamond commissioned the piece, he flew David to England to survey the site. His former residence, ‘Hennerton House’, near Henley on Thames, is a Regency seat set in a seven acre English riverside garden

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

bordered by ancient elms. The Deco and antique Japanese furniture, the Warhol’s, Lichenstein’s, Yves Klein’s and Julio Gonzalez’s cramming the house, and the garden punctuated by Henry Moore’s and Victorian garden sculpture, discreetly intimated that money was no object. Brown experimented with crates, stepladders and boxes on the broad lawns in order to grasp the character and potential of the space. 15 months later he installed the work.

Its raw power and aggression was in absolute contradistinction to the mellow pastoral mood of the country garden with its mossy marble nymphs, dryads and fauns.

The sculpture’s shuddering impact owes much to Brown’s insistence on executing every single detail – all the cutting, drilling, welding and polishing – himself, rather than leaving it to hired executants. He regards his way of drilling a hole, or soldering metal together, as handwork as deeply personal as a brushstroke. They manifest his unique touch and make every inch of his sculpture as individual as his thumbprint.

Violence and aggression are the hallmarks of “Dialogue at the Dogwatch” which is indebted to German Expressionism and the immense physical force of Ernst Barlach’s carved wooden figures. The Sturm und Drang emerges explosively from the sculpture’s new site, an open piazza surrounded by formal terraces, walkways, pergolas and steps. The contrast between the reserve of the collegiate architecture and the manically overwrought bronze figures in the grip of incipient panic and hysteria, charges the space with wracking tension. A sense of imminent catastrophe invades the campus, for the sculpture portrays the immediate prelude to the climax - the split second before it takes place. The final event is largely left to our imagination, and it reverberates far more thunderously in our minds than it would if enacted before our eyes.

A plaque describes the work as “a sculptural tableau-vivant set at the dogwatch, that time at sea when the light is fading, the day gives way to dusk, and the stars appear in the night sky.” Its substance is an imagined “silent conversation in a turbulent yet hopeful period of political transition.” The sculpture captures the febrile mood of hope, fear and tension that swept over the country before the ANC took power, when no one knew what the future held. Although the work possesses universal meaning as a parable about the inevitability of retribution awaiting wrong-doers, it is also grounded in a particular place and a particular time. This is Brown’s Gotterdammerung, his twilight of the Gods, revealing how the apartheid’s night finally came down.

Although ‘Dialogue at the Dogwatch’ comprises four components set far apart, it nevertheless defines the cardinal points of a laager, albeit a highly pregnable one. One warrior stands alone, while the other three are scattered amongst look-out posts, searchlights and ladders where they execute some defensive manoeuvre. The distances that separate the isolated men from each other, invoke a last stand, establishing them as embattled ‘bittereinders’.

Brown’s four militarists are generic, rather than particularized. Pose is open: the figures bend their knees, part their legs and stretch out their arms, and the splaying of their squat, dumpy anatomies gives them the regressive air of heavy, earthbound, troglodytes. All sport cumbersome boots, knee-guards, mittens, goggles or eye shields, and their uniform is a bizarre amalgam of armor, corsetry and prosthetic equipment. This thick, leathery battledress exposes as much of their flesh as it covers, furnishing scant protection. The exposed areas of flesh are criss-crossed with fine incised lines imbuing the skin with the pachydermous toughness appropriate to weathered veterans of a rough and tumble world of combat and duress. One soldier wears a codpiece.

The shorts of his mates centre on a chunky mount encircling their exposed genitalia, and emphasizing their sexual organs in the way a ring emphasizes a gemstone. The dangling phallus and scrotum represent the men’s Achilles heel, their soft underbelly of vulnerability, and its lewd blatancy cocks a snook at the censor-ridden ethic of the crumbling Nationalist state.

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A figure with a propeller attached to his back stands at the summit of a rusting metal tower. His arms are outstretched before him in a diving pose, and he is about to launch himself into space. His brother in arms occurs opposite him seated on a traditional dunce’s stool rising from a tank-like, military apparatus.

The fourth combatant is perilously poised on the tip of a platform atop the highest, tower. His arms are outstretched as if he were playing blind man’s buff and feeling his way in the dark. His tilted head looks skywards, as he martials all his forces to make a supreme effort, and cast himself – wittingly or unwittingly – into the void. Like the figure with the propeller, he is a doomed Icarus, an incarnation of either foolhardy hubris or the Freudian death drive.A fearful engine of war, part plough, part reaping machine, with a huge, serrated blade, stands by the tower. It suggests the men assault the very earth itself.

Dark associations with the Grim Reaper and the biblical warning ‘what ye sow, shall ye reap’, leech onto it, steeping it in baleful overtones of death and last judgment. The silvery expanses of this stainless steel behemoth reflect the light, and contrast with the duller hues of bronze, brass and copper. It points in the direction of all four sculpture groups, generating lines of force that weld the separate parts into a single whole.

Tense, braced musculatures, screaming mouths, lolling tongues and distended eyes gazing heavenward in entreaty, reveal the men are in extremis. Nevertheless they doggedly continue to relay signals of the hand to each other, but this sign language is so riddled with ambiguity, it is meaningless. A frantic cranked-up vitality goes hand in hand with a mounting loss of control that makes rout inevitable.

Brown’s figures with their gross bull’s necks, protruding Adam’s apples and thick cauliflower ears, conform to the dumpy, thick-set anatomical canon whereby the Northern Gothic imagination portrayed an unidealized Rabelaisian humanity irremediably mired in its own carnality, unable to resist the baser summonses of the flesh and transcend its fallen condition. The febrile SA ART TIMES. September 2011

exuberance of his sculptural invention and the ghoulish relish with which it is executed, establish him as the heir of Brueghel and Bosch, and his Nationalist oppressors are the remote progeny of their Beelzebubs and succubi. His world comes cloaked in hoary medievalism, and his towers and ladders hazily remind one of the creaky poles, ladders, wheels, gallows, fishing rods and lances their Satanic figures use to harrow sinners into hell. Such overtones of doom and damnation provide an ideal framework for Brown’s vision of the insanity of apartheid and the inevitability of its collapse.

However the sculptor also evokes a recognizable, if increasingly rare, South African type, the big-bellied, beer-swilling, blue collar Afrikaners of the Reef – all small-town bigotry, ignorance and verkrampte prejudice. The quadvirate effortlessly bear their symbolical weight as embodiments of the volk, the entire Afrikaner collective. The tackle of knee-guards, braces, straps, belts, earphones, goggles and helmets, have become part of their physical being, endowing them with the mecanomorphic rigidity appropriate to those who unquestioningly obey directives, and act as cogs in the wheels of state machinery.

Brown handles them in a surreal amalgam of tragedy, slapstick and farce. Sinister, macabre and grotesque they may be, but what gives them substance and density is the way they both resist, and invite, their own destruction, as though some inextirpable Raskolnikovian urge to expiate their dim sense of guilt lay submerged deep within them. This faint glimmer of finer feeling prevents them from collapsing into mere caricatures, and reveals their creator’s essential humanity and faith in mankind.

Where to see David Brown’s sculpture ? : The sculpture is next to the New Administration building on Cross Campus Road reached either via the Woolsack Drive turn off on De Waal drive, or turn from Main Road into Burg, and then Stanley Road.

After 6p.m, the floodlit sculpture assumes a dramatic new guise.

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The

South African Wednesday 26 October New Bond Street, London

Sale

Irma Stern (1894-1966) ‘Watussi Woman’ 1942 oil on canvas Estimate £1,000,000 - 1,500,000 (ZAR 11,800,000 - 17,700,000) +44 (0) 20 7468 8213 sapictures@bonhams.com

International Auctioneers and Valuers - bonhams.com/sasale

BUSINESS ART

Amanda Bloch photographed by Jenny Altschuler on the eve of her 6th Red Cross Charity Auction, CT. The event has grown to be the largest of it’s kind, as well as most sought after by donor artists and buying patrons alike. The SA Art Times will bring you coverage of the event in the October issue.

See www.childrenshospitaltrust.org.za for more details

BUSINESS ART | ART LEADER / LINDA GIVON

Linda Givon Wilhelm van Rensburg I am writing a book: one you can pick off the shelf and open at any page and find something interesting to read. I am not interested in a conventional autobiography.” So says Linda Givon quintessential paragon of the South African art scene. the 3rd of September , is the day of the Red Cross children’sHospital auction in Cape Town that she has curated “There are no reserves on any of the lots: every cent goes to the hospital.

This year we are aiming to buy special equipment to help alleviate pain for the burns unit, . The evening of the auction is a completely enjoyable event, with Jay Pather choreagraphing and Phillip Millers music as part of the performance. It is in the garden of the Cape premier who promised to light up Table Mountain for us in red! ” Amanda Bloch the main event organizer and Linda focused on every detail and together aim to make it an exciting experience “All the artists were very gracious in donating works. When we started the biannual auction we had to accept everything we were offered, but nowadays artists get annoyed with me if they are not invited to donate works.”

“Steven Cohen is included as well” she adds, and her book falls open on another page. “I remember clearly his first exhibition at Goodman. Steven and Peet Pienaar did the first performance installation in the new gallery, standing naked in the window overlooking Jan Smuts Avenue.

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The sex workers across the road exposed themselves and called to the two artists, ‘Look, we also got them!’ Years later Steven told me ‘You gave me the courage to do what I am doing now’.”

We turn to another page: Linda’s new venture in the Juta Street development in Braamfontein. Together with Koulla Xinisteris she is opening a new gallery, designed by Jeremy Rose, on the hippest street in town. “One wall of the building we are converting is covered with Edoardo Villa plaques. He was the one who agitated most for the opening of my first gallery in the 1960s.

His presence in the new gallery augers well for the gallery.” Givon partnered with Xinisteris on a business venture many years ago. Together with MaryJane Darrell the three of them started a touring company, Art Safari Africa, taking Americans around the country.”To this day I still get enquiries about those tours.” Her aim is to start out with young artists. “‘I want to see if I still have the ability tom make successful careers for young artists, to help them develop and watch them gain confidence in their creativity . We want to be a starting point of some sort. I did that basically for Mikhael Subotzky: and many other young unknown artists. Who to day are in great demand both locally and internationally. We also want to accommodate artists who don’t have formal gallery representation and create a relaxed and friendly space for visitors with knowledgeable people in attendance. We want to help bring the inner city back to life” SA ART TIMES. September 2011

The book falls open on another chapter in Givon’s illustrious art career: all the international art fairs she accessed to promote South African art.

“When I first went to the Basel Art Fair in the late-1980s, the cultural boycott was firmly in place. I knew Wally Serote at the ANC cultural desk in London.

He knew that my gallery was violently and actively opposed to apartheid and encouraged me to go to the Basel Art Fair’ . The Fair coincided with June 16 and so my stand at the Fair was trashed.by professional demonstrators paid to do just that When I wanted to withdraw the other gallerists told me it would be foolish: nobody gets that type of publicity at a fair!” Back tracking a couple of years Givon reminisces about the 1985 New York show. “The day the cultural boycott was seriously imposed, by Bishop Tutu the works were already on the water. Our purported apartheid work earned us a NYPD escort to the venue, where they were exhibited to great acclaim. We – Edoardo Villa, Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Khumalo ,Ezrom Legae and myself were literally dancing in the street with excitement and one African-American journalist commented that if this was the behavior of apartheid artists, she wanted to join us and become South African !

One of the greatest experiences of her life she would capture on another page of her book: selecting works in Geneva for her 1985 Picasso show in Johannesburg. “It was bitterly cold and I was locked up in the freezing vaults of the free port in Geneva during lunch time when everybody went for their afternoon repose. But to go through all the work none of which had ever been seen was unforgettable: rooms and rooms of drawings painting ceramics and graphics was an extremely moving experience. My Picasso show was mounted decades before the Picasso and Africa one at Standard Bank Gallery in 2006.”

The most definitive page from Givon’s book is her decision to open her first own gallery in South Africa. “When I was working in a London gallery in 1966 I had to return to South Africa for my divorce to be finalized. The gallerist who specialized in Futurist Constructivism, Vorticism, Cubism and Dada art, asked me whether I would like to try and have an exhibition in Johannesburg. I trained with him in London and deeply value all that I learned from an SA ART TIMES. September 2011

extraordinary man. I started in the basement of the, gallery and when Anton Rupert visited the gallery on one occasion I was introduced to him as ‘ Zulu girl’! Rupert said come back to Africa dear girl, we’ll look after you.

And the rest is history.”

Givon started the eponymous Goodman Gallery with R500 in her pocket, having to build and stock it with that money. Her first purchases were Legae and Skotnes drawings and small Villa sculptures. Michael Sutton helped her with designing the famous revolving black and white walls. “And on opening night they all fell down!” she laughed. The warren-like space expanded rapidly with a kitchen zinc half a flight up the stairs and a toilet two more flights above. “When Christo Coetzee on one occasion said he had to relieve himself and I told him how far he had to go, he told me ‘We’ll see about that’ and promptly did just that in the zinc sink within full earshot of all the visitors at his opening! As he descended the stairs he received a standing ovation, we had just witnessed the first performance art piece on South African soil!”

She appeared on the cover of Artlook, the only magazine of its kind in South Africa, placing her ubiquitous advertisements in each of the 104 issues.

“The one I liked the best had the slogan: ‘Look who shops at the Goodman Gallery’.” she quips.

“The elation aside” she says, “it was also very trying times. North Road, dividing Johannesburg from Sandton was often where I had to do my business because crossing the border would sometimes mean immediate arrest for Black artists in the 1970s, with policeman waiting on the other side.”

“My book is about events happening in my time that were formative in my life, like the fact that I was the first female hot air balloonist. I am inviting William Kentridge and Kendell Geers to have a conversation about art as part of the introduction to the book. One should just open the book and see what is inside.” Givon’s book is going to be one that no one would want to put down.

Photos: John Hodgkiss 57

BUSINESS ART | SA ART AUCTIONS / GOODMAN GALLERY AUCTION RESULTS x 2

Goodman Gallery Auction 2011 Goodman Gallery auction Matthew Partridge: The Goodman Gallery is not an auction house, rather as yields mixed results its name suggests it is a commercial gallery. Yet the nuance of trading at auction is that the sales apparently reflect more accurately the market trends of artists’ work than they do at a primary gallery level. This is the robust environment of supply and demand. Where the egalitarian principle dominates.

What was interesting about the Goodman auction on Sunday evening was the range of work that was on offer. The majority of works were selections of prints from large editions with a selection of smaller sculptural works and artists editioned books.

Many of the works on offer came out of the Goodman stock with a portion of the proceeds from 18 lots going to a charity, the Shout Foundation initiated by singer and pop star Danny K and rapper Kableo. Shout was foundered last year after the senseless killing of Reggae icon and master Bra Lucky Dube, with its funds going to initiatives that support criminal rehabilitation and assisting victims of trauma and abuse.

The total amount raised for the charity from the eighteen lots which included work by the Essop Twins, Deborah Bell, Mickhael Subotzky, Judith Mason Attwood, Penny Siopis, Senzeni Marasela, William Kentridge Brett Murray and David Goldblatt among others totalled R335 200.

What the auction revealed was that some big name artists who usually fetch and exceed their estimates on the auction circuit weren’t as robust in this environment. One Shout lot, a massive letterpress and photolithograph work on 110 sheets of paper titled Learning the Flute by Kentridge was estimated to sell at between R225 and R250 000 only fetched R150 000 with Danny K himself opening the bidding. “I’m really ecstatic” said K, “you know I’m a huge Kentridge fan so I was really putting my money where my mouth is”.

Speaking on the choice of lots chosen for the Shout Foundation, Lisa Essers of the Goodman said that she had deliberately chosen some difficult works in keeping with the nature of the charity so she was really pleased with the results.

What was also notable was the historical depth of the show with a water-colour by Alan Crump reaching its high estimate of R40 000. However what was also notable is that a usually good seller on auctions, Cecil Skotnes failing to meet many of the estimates set apart from the opening lot, a silkscreen of a seated figure coming in at just R300 over the high estimate of R8500.

Speaking of the research put into the range of estimates, Neil Dundas of the Goodman Gallery said that the prices were according market averages for each artist on auction taken from the past three years. With this being said the auction thus provides a relatively healthy indicator of a stable art buying economy in South Africa with a few exceptions.

As mentioned Kentridge generally failed to reach any of his estimates except for a rare linocut titled Splash in an edition of VII of X. The relatively small size and particular novelty of this work could possible explain its desirability. However the last lot of sale was Kentrdige drawing donated at the last minute, of dancer Dada Masilo who will be performing with him during the upcoming Refuse the Hour dance festival at the Market theatre in September. Estimated at between 1 250 000 and 1 400 000 the work fell under the hammer at just R800 000, virtually just over half its estimate.

What was also surprising was the range of Norman Catherine works on display achieving values above their estimates. The works from the 80’s were photolithographs from the Tribute to King Ferd the III portfolio which he worked on with Walter Battiss and were of fantastical brightly coloured animals that are almost gaudy in appearance.

The typically solid seller on the night was Robert Hodgins, proving that his work still retains the desire of his collectors. His painting Totem done between 2007 and 2009 fetched R260 000 above the high estimate of R195 000. Another positive turn was the unusual Pieter Hugo from The Wild Honey Collectors which went high at R60 000 above its estimated R40 000, possibly attributed to its size at 82cm square and small edition number of 2/5.

What the auction proved was that editions in large sizes seem to have saturated the market for some artists whilst smaller editions are seen as collectable. All in all the sales reflected a generally stable and ambitious market with attention being paid to select items such as the original one off and the artist’s book.

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Michael Smith : Artthrob.The Goodman Gallery’s 2011 auction, in conjunction with the anti-crime organisation SHOUT For a Safer South Africa, a beneficiary of funds from 18 of the 134 lots, was held on Sunday 14 August.

Conducted by Ruarc Peffers, the auction yielded mixed results, with many lower- to mid-level lots closing well above the reserve prices, while some of the top-end lots netted prices below their high estimates. Nonetheless, the sale netted well in excess of R4.5m in total sales. Current Goodman Gallery owner Liza Essers and her staff were kept busy, with numerous lots eliciting telephonic bids, apparently from as far afield as France.

The event, largely a sell-off of stock purchased with the gallery group from previous owner Linda Givon in 2008, saw a broad range of works come under the hammer. Major works were largely absent, and punters mostly had to make do with smaller works and multiples, but the auction generated excitement by bringing together five decades’ of work by significant South African artists, and a couple of big-name internationals as well. Especially well-represented were Rorke’s Drift and Polly Street printmakers, and some of the more hotly-contested items were prints by Cyrian Shilakoe, John Muafangejo and Lucky Sibiya. Titans of South African modern art Cecil Skotnes, Walter Battiss and Sidney Kumalo formed the backbone of the auction, along with major resistance artists Durant Sihlali, Kagiso ‘Pat’ Matloua, Norman Catherine and David Koloane.

Contemporary South African art also put in a decent showing, with recent works by Tracey Rose, Lisa Brice, Mikhael Subotzky, Hasan and Husain Essop, Sabelo Mlangeni and Diane Victor generating interest. (Interestingly, a digital photomantage by Jane Alexander titled Harbinger in Correctional Uniform, Lost Marsh [edition of 60], originally sold by Editions for ArtThrob for R6000 in 2007, sold on the auction for R12 000.)

However, prime positions in the evening’s proceedings were held by works

by Robert Hodgins, Kendell Geers and, of course, the ubiquitous William Kentridge, the latter having a total of nine works up for auction (six works by Norman Catherine came up for sale, while there were four each by Penny Siopis and Deborah Bell). A smallish oil Totem by Hodgins from 2008 fetched R260 000, R100 000 up on its reserve, while a multiple-process print by the same jumped quickly from its opening bid of R9000 to R22 000.

A set of seven photogravures with drypoint by Kentridge, titled Zeno Writing, saw a more modest bid escalation, with the opening bid of R180 000 only being contested twice and the lot selling for R200 000, half of the high estimate of R400 000 published by the gallery before the event. A hand-coloured etching of an iris by the same fared somewhat better, moving swiftly from an opening bid of R240 000 to a sale at R280 000, the second-highest price achieved at the event. Yet this was still below the high estimate of R395 000.

A mixed media work by Geers from his ‘photocopy’ period in the early 90s also failed to scale the projected heights, selling for R140 000, again significantly below the gallery’s high estimate of R300 000.

Lot 134 was, of course, the most eagerlyanticipated sale, Kentridge’s original charcoal and poster paint Drawing for the Refusal of Time (2011). Yet again, though its high estimate proved elusive, the work sold to a telephone bidder at R850 000, well below the projected R1.4m. Though Peffers dutifully talked up the work as a ‘major Kentridge’ and a ‘key work’ in the artist’s latest project, the general feeling was that it is not of a level with Kentridge’s career-de fining one-offs; one onlooker stage-whispered to me, ‘Sure, it’s a Kentridge, but do you like the image?

Come on!’

Kentridge proved the most lucrative artist represented at the auction, with sales of his work totalling R1.582m. Hodgins came in second at R289 000, while Sam Nhlengethwa tipped the R200 000 mark.

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

RED CROSS HOSPITAL ART BENEFIT | BUSINESS ART

The 2011 Art Benefit in aid of the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital. 3 September 2011 See more here: www.childrenshospitaltrust.org.za Artists give generously for paediatric burns unit Top South African artists have donated original artworks to be auctioned at the 2011 Art Benefit in aid of the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, hosted by BoE Private Clients.

This biennial event will take place on Saturday, 3 September 2011 at Leeuwenhof, the official residence of the Premier of the Western Cape, with all proceeds to be donated to the Children’s Hospital Trust. The Trust raises funds for the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town and for paediatric healthcare in the Western Cape.

The impressive line-up of artists includes Deborah Bell, Willie Bester, Steven Cohen, Hasan and Husain Essop, Kendell Geers, David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, William Kentridge, Moshekwa Langa, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, Mikhael Subotzky and Sue Williamson, amongst many others.

The sixth of its kind The 2011 Art Benefit will be the sixth of its kind organised by Amanda Bloch, Patron of the Children’s Hospital Trust, in collaboration with Linda Givon, founder of the Goodman Gallery for Contemporary Art. This duo has teamed up with the Michael Stevenson Gallery and the Goodman Gallery, now under the directorship of Liza Essers, to bring together the valuable artworks for auction.All proceeds from the event will go towards the purchasing of specialist equipment needed for the Hospital’s new Burns Unit, currently under construction. Part of the funds raised at 2009’s Benefit, kick-started the fundraising drive for the Burns Unit’s upgrade, which commenced in September 2010. The Hospital’s existing Burns Ward was built in 1956 and treats approximately 3500 children with burns every year. It is the only specialised burns centre in the Western Cape treating children under the age of 13 with burn injuries, and, because of a lack of similar facilities elsewhere in South Africa,is also a referral centre for children with severe burns from areas outside the Western Cape.

A first for the event For the first time, the event is to be hosted by leading wealth management company BoE Private Clients, as part of its commitment to the cause of philanthropy in South Africa. Managing director Paul Finlayson explains that philanthropy underpins the company’s vision ‘to create prosperity through people and partnerships.’ Participation in the Art Benefit event is an initiative on the part of the BoE Private Clients Philanthropy Office, which was specifically established to facilitate the involvement of High Net Worth individuals and families in benevolent causes, and to assist Non Profit Organisations to achieve longer term financial sustainability.

Since the inception of the Art Benefit in 2003, the event has raised more than R14million for the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, thereby touching the lives of thousands of patients who have been treated at the Hospital over this period.

Amanda Bloch’s passion and philanthropic role stems from 2001 when her son became very ill and was saved by the medical intervention of paediatric specialists at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital. Linda Givon is a loyal donor of the Children’s Hospital Trust and has been a pioneer for South African art for many years.

The 2011 Art Benefit hosted by BoE Private Clients will provide a spectacular night out with superb art, elite company, lavish cuisine and mesmerising entertainment choreographed by world-renowned performance artist and choreographer Jay Pather in collaboration with acclaimed composer Phillip Miller. Guests will also be eligible to win extravagant prizes, generously donated for this benefit evening. Tickets to the 2011 Art Benefit hosted by BoE Private Clients are available at a cost of R1000 per person or R10 000 per table of 10. For more information or to purchase tickets contact Amanda Bloch on bloch@wol.co.za or Tara van Schalkwyk at tara.vanschalkwyk@chtrust.org.za or on 021 686 7860.

SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Linda Givon and Amanda Bloch from last Red Cross Childrens Fundraiser

Linda Givon, Maguerite Stephens and William Kentridge

Sanell Aggenbach, Linda Givon and Brett Murray

Artist Sue Williamson 57

BUSINESS ART | SA ART AUCTIONS / STRAUSS & CO. CAPE TOWN AUCTION

Lot 270: Dorothy Kay: Self Portrait with Red and White Scarf oil on canvas, 60 by 44,5cm R 350 000 – 450 000

Lot 294: Irma Stern: Two Arabs signed and dated 1939. oil on canvas, 58,5 by 83,5 cm, in the original Zanzibar frame R20 000 000 – 25 000 000

Lot 312: Jane Alexander: something’s going down, 1993-94. synthetic clay, oil paint, wood, aluminium, leather and prints. 135 by 132 by 38,5cm R 400 000 – 600 000

Lot 255:Hugo Naudé, The Artist’s Garden, oil on board, 26 by 28cm, R 100 000 – 150 000

Strauss & Co’s September Cape Town auction

Irma Stern’s Two Arabs (R20 000 000 – 25 000 000) is certainly the most important painting to be offered at auction in South Africa over the past decade and will no doubt create a great deal of excitement amongst collectors at Strauss & Co’s upcoming auction to be held at the Vineyard Hotel, Newlands, on 26 September 2011.

Of great interest are a number of impressive paintings by J H Pierneef, including the early Trees by a Dam (R2 000 000 – 3 000 000), displaying clear Impressionist influences and Karoo, a gift from the Women’s Committee of Pretoria to HRH Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone in 1930.

Several appealing paintings are also of historical interest such as Pieter Wenning’s From Grove Road, Claremont with Devil’s Peak and The Bridge, Rondebosch (both at R800 000 – 1 200 000), Hugo Naudé’s The Artist’s Garden (R100 000 – 150 000) and Dorothy Kay’s superb Self Portrait with Red and White Scarf (R350 000 – 450 000), in which the artist depicts herself in front of her famous family portrait now in the permanent collection of Iziko South African National Gallery.

Jane Alexander’s something’s going down, 1993-94 (R400 000 – 600 000) is a powerful evocation of South Africa on the cusp of democracy. Strong works by Cecil Skotnes, Lucky Sibiya, Robert Hodgins, David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Deborah Bell, Brett Murray and Andrew Putter will appeal to collectors of contemporary art.

Buyers also expect to see some good quality pieces of silver and furniture and, as usual, this sale does not disappoint. Amongst the excellent examples of English, Continental and Cape silver is a particularly noteworthy 58

set of four decanter stands, Benjamin Smith II and James Smith III, 1811, attractively pierced and chased with vines (R120 000 – 150 000).

Some of the more desirable pieces of furniture are expected to perform well, including a dainty late 19th century Vernis Martin cabinet-on-stand, by Sormani & Son, regarded at the time as being one of the most important cabinet makers in Paris (R70 000 – 90 000), an early Cape yellowwood and stinkwood gateleg table (R100 000 – 150 000) and a jonkmanskas (R100 000 – 120 000).

AUCTION Monday 26 September 2011 Day Sale at 3 pm, Evening Sale at 8 pm The Vineyard Hotel, Conference Centre, Newlands PREVIEW From Friday 23 to Sunday 25 September from 10am to 5pm WALKABOUTS Stephan Welz and Emma Bedford Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 September at 11am CONTACT NUMBERS 021 683 6560 / mobile 078 044 8185 Catalogues are available and can be purchased online or from our offices. www.straussart.co.za SA ART TIMES. September 2011

Jacob Hendrik PIERNEEF, Karoo R 500 000 – 700 000 Provenance: HRH Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone

Important South African Art, Furniture, Silver and Ceramics Auction in Cape Town Monday 26 September 2011 3pm and 8pm

WALKABOUTS

PREVIEW

ENQUIRIES & CATALOGUES: 021 683 6560 / 078 044 8185

Stephan Welz and Emma Bedford Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 September at 11am

Friday 23 to Sunday 25 September 10am to 5pm

www.strausssart.co.za South Africa’s premier fine art auction house

Nushin Elahi’s London Letter On the face of it, Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin have nothing in common.

Three hundred years and a host of –isms in art separate them, but at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 25 September you can see them hanging side by side. One can understand the premise behind the exhibition: both men arrived in Rome aged thirty and were fascinated by the Eternal City for the rest of their lives. Their inspiration they took from myths and legends, classical literature, and then, at the age of 64, they both painted a series called Four Seasons.

Twombly and Poussin : Arcadian Painters tries to find the visual links to tie these facts together. Sadly, neither painter is served by the comparison and what may have been a good idea on paper goes horribly wrong on the walls. The clean classical lines of Poussin’s depiction of mythological scenes simply jar with the wild outpourings of Twombly. Neatly hung, there are scenes of Apollo on Parnassus, or Pan with his followers by Poussin, against Twombly’s list of Apollo’s attributes or a scrawl with Pan on it. Cerebrally they may be, as the curator says, “timeless themes in strikingly divergent modes,” but they don’t enhance each other at all.

Instead one wonders exactly why Twombly made the name he did from the early scrawls across the page that make one think of kindergarten, even when they are politely labelled “jittery pencil markings.” Twombly died last month, and when one sees his work alone, such as the series of Four Seasons from the Tate, you are able to admire the rich painterly textures he produces, lavish and romantic, or the sharp contrasts between light and dark in the untitled work at the beginning.

Alongside Poussin, however, there is no dialogue at all.

The gallery is also currently hanging Poussin’s entire series of the Seven Sacraments, two of them from the permanent collection and five on loan from Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire.

as various gold altarpieces from Italy. The section on two British saints and the cults associated with them at Durham (St Cuthbert) and Canterbury (St Thomas Becket) are particularly interesting.

Altarpieces are the subject of another exhibition, Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500 (until 2 October) at the National Gallery. The exhibition examines the reasons why altarpieces came to be dismembered and the methods that art historians now use to reassemble them. It showcases altarpieces by well-known artists such as Piero della Francesca, but includes many which are less familiar.

The exhibition Treasures of Heaven at the British Museum (until 9 October) features some of the finest sacred treasures of the medieval age, exploring the spiritual and artistic significance of Christian relics and reliquaries in Europe.

These may seem far removed from our secular world, but in fact our obsession with celebrities is simply continuing a tradition from the middle ages.In those days it was contact with a saint or their relic that held prestige and protection, while now there are those prepared to pay anything for a vial of the remains of a beloved pop singer, or a shirt worn by a sporting star - our modern form of worship.

Another photography exhibition, this time at the National Portrait Gallery until 23 October, trains its lens across the pond, to reveal the glamour of Hollywood’s golden age, a period lasting from the Twenties to the Sixties. Glamour of the Gods explores how actors and actresses had a profound effect on how beauty and celebrity was seen then, and now. All the big names of glamour are here, from Rita Hayworth, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to Elizabeth Taylor, draped on couches or on the arms of their on-screen partners. Many shots have not been shown in Britain before and all were selected from the astonishing archive of the John Kobal Foundation in London.

Goldsmiths were among the first artists to sign their work and there is plenty of it on display here. Starting with early simple artefacts, treasures were often placed in progressively more extravagant and ornate settings. Gold, silver and precious jewels abound in these ecclesiastical treasures, and one doesn’t have to believe that you are seeing the umbilical cord of Christ to admire the lavish sculpture that surrounds it.

The work includes objects from more than 40 different collections, among them the Vatican. Some of those on display are the British Museum’s bejewelled Holy Thorn reliquary with its enamelled representation of the Last Judgement; the 12th century bust of St Baudime, a gold figure studded with precious stones as well

Eyewitness: Hungarian photography in the 20th century at the Royal Academy until 2 October traces the impact a handful of Hungarian photographers had on our image of the world. The black and white collection starts with idyllic pictures of a pre-war Hungary: peasant faces, lovers under an umbrella, a large man floating in the baths. Then war intrudes, the tone changes and the lenses are trained in other countries. Among the five photographers featured is Robert Capa whose blurry D-day landing images are iconic, but there are also less familiar names, most of whom ended up in America before they returned to see the destruction of their own country.

Fashion photography, portraits of artists such as Picasso, Chagall and Matisse and the boulevards of Paris, a lost cloud against a Manhattan tower block all contrast sharply with images of the destruction of war, the chain bridge over the Danube being rebuilt, the ruins of a Warsaw ghetto. The exhibition forms a fascinating account of life in the 20th century, capturing events from the mundane to the tragic, and all with a uniquely Magyar style, until these national voices were lost in what became a global medium.

South African artist Michael MacGarry is one of four contemporary artists working in Africa who features in Contested Terrains at the Tate Modern in their space for international and emerging artists (until 16 October). Exploring connections with history, there are portraits of Nigerian diviners by Adolphus Opara, Sammy Baloji’s montages of Congolese mining and Kader Attia’s juxtaposition of African artefacts with scarred soldiers. The tensions between tradition and modernity are made explicit in MacGarry’s sculptural objects, from ivory carvings of a container ship and an oil derrick to a nail-studded replica assault rifle, referencing Nkondi sculpture and the devastating effects of war.

NUSHIN ELAHI’S LONDON LETTER | BUSINESS ART Captions: (left) Eyewitness: Hungarian photography in the 20th century at the Royal Academy

Laszlo Fejes: Wedding, Budapest, 1965

Treasures of Heaven at the British Museum

(Right) Unknown female saint: Reliquary bust of an unknown female saint, Right second level) St Baudime: Reliquary bust of St Baudime.

Copper gilt over walnut core, ivory and horn. Auvergne, France, c.

1146-1178. Altarpiece reliquary: Altarpiece reliquary painted by Lippo Vanni. Siena, Italy, c. 1350-1359.

Holy Thorn Reliquary. Paris, France, c. 1390-1397.

Devotion by design: National Gallery Attributed to Fra Angelico Saint Romulus: Frame Panel from Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece, about 1423-4 Contested Terrains Tate Modern, Level 2 Michael MacGarry The Ossuary 2009-2010 Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits. National Portrait Gallery Elizabeth Taylor, 1948 by Clarence Sinclair Bull Marlene Dietrich on the set of Manpower, 1941 by Laszlo Willinger Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters: Dulwich Picture Gallery Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni: Autunno, 1993-5, Acrylic, oil, crayon and pencil on canvas, Tate: Cy Twombly, Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, 1961, wax crayon, lead pencil, oil paint, colored pencil on canvas, Institute of Chicago.

Nicolas Poussin, The Nurture of Jupiter (mid 1630s) C By permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

FNB Joburg Art Fair 2011

It’s been a long wait for the fourth FNB Joburg Art Fair since it has been moved from April to September. Artlogic director Ross Douglas says: “The team is very excited about this year’s event. By moving the Fair to September we hope to contribrute to what is becoming an art season in the city”.

This year’s FNB Joburg Art Fair takes place on the entrance level of the Sandton Convention Centre from 23 to 25 September 2011.

With so much time to plan, Artlogic has curated a host of new Special Projects that promise to offer new and regular visitors an art extravaganza.

Twenty three galleries will be showcasing the work by their artists, some old favorites and some newcomers. The galleries are selected by a panel of judges to present contemporary African art as it exists locally, on the continent and in the rest of the world.

Some of South Africa’s top wine estates are being introduced to the Fair and local Italian restaurant Mastrantonio will be delighting the audience with their culinary expertise. The intention is to make sure the experience of viewing all 4000 square metres of art is comfortable and enriching.

This year Alfa Romeo is once again a sponsor of the increasingly popular Alfa Romeo Art Talks program which takes place inside the Fair and is free to ticket holders.

The Goethe Institut is adding richly to our international guest list by facilitating the visit of Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon to this year’s Fair.

Look out for Dercon’s keynote address as part of the Alfa Romeo Art Talks on Saturday 24 September. Dercon’s talk is entitled Audiences: How much do we really care, in which he will consider the way art institutions engage their publics.

To find out more about our Special Projects and to view the Alfa Romeo Art Talks schedule, please visit www.fnbjoburgartfair.co.za

Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon

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