Gavin Jantjes katalog by Oslo Kunstforening

T H E E XO G E N I C S E R I E S

THE EXOGENIC SERIES (AQUA)

Paintings by Gavin Jantjes 2017

(AQUA)

Dedicated to my special family. Angela, Linnemore, Paul, Euan, & Finn

EXOGENIC:

formed or occurring on the surface of the earth.

THANKS To Marianne Hultman Artistic Director of Oslo Kunstforening for her support :

PREFACE Marianne Hultman Artistic Director

Oslo Kunstforening

n 1998, Gavin Jantjes became the artistic director of the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo. From that time he has been a key opinion former and contributor to the contemporary art scene in Norway introducing

artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Shirin Neshat, Liza Lou and Marlene Dumas to the Norwegian public. In 2007, Marith Hope, the former director of the National Touring Exhibitions and Gavin Jantjes then curator at the National Museum, initiated a project entitled Africa in Oslo, a unique and ambitious collaboration aiming to create a knowledge exchange between curators based in Norway and the African continent. Africa in Oslo was the first collaborative research project ever between Norwegian and African curators. It provided the participating curators with the unique opportunity to build new networks and develop their knowledge and understanding of the different contemporary visual art scenes. The goal of the project’s five independent exhibitions was to present a new and emerging generation of African artists to a Norwegian public. Oslo Kunstforening (Marianne Hultman) and Oslo Museum; Intercultural Museum (Daniella van Dijk Wennberg) collaborated the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria (Bisi Silva). This culminated in the exhibition Maputo: A Tale of One City, that included the artists Berry Bickle (Moçambique/Zimbabwe), Angela Ferreira (Portugal/ Moçambique), Pompílio Hilário Gemuce (Moçambique), Rafael Mouzinho (Moçambique), Emeka Okereke (Nigeria), Lourenço Dinis Pinto (Moçambique), Mauro Pinto (Moçambique). The exhibition then travelled to 18 different locations in Norway and was seen by over 15,000 people over a two-year period. It also travelled to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare in December 2011 ending the tour at the Museo Nacional in Maputo, Mozambique in March 2012. Gavin Jantjes recently returned to the studio to produce a new body of work comprised of large, non-figurative paintings titled the «Exogenic Series (Aqua)» which mark a radical departure from his political and poetic paintings of the 1990s. Ten years after our first collaboration Oslo Kunstforening has invited Gavin Jantjes back, this time as an artist, to present his new canvases. This very first presentation of the series marks the only other time he has exhibited a new body of work in Oslo since he last showed at the Hennie Onstad Art Centre in Hovikkodden in 1976. These paintings underline his ambition to make us become visually inquisitive again, and to enjoy this fundamental act of looking, as our primary response towards art. At an international conference on contemporary painting held at Oslo’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012, Jantjes presented a paper entitled «To paint in the face of doubt». In it he determined that to be a contemporary painter is one of the most revolutionary things an artist could do in the current climate of visual art. His new series attempts to put the ideas he outlined in that paper into practice. And even if these canvases are not yet a complete answer to the doubt lingering over painting, one has to congratulate him for his effort to erect some sign posts that point to ways out of it. 5

THE EXOGENIC SERIES (AQUA)

Paintings by Gavin Jantjes 2017

opposite page. detail Untitled (2) from Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

THE EXOGENIC SERIES

(AQUA)

he Exogenic series of paintings 2016/17 marks Gavin Jantjes return to the studio after years away from it. These are the very first non-figurative works he has ever produced. The series is composed

of small paintings on sheets of hand-made paper and a group of large, equally sized canvases. They mark a radical break with the poetic/metaphoric images he produced in the 1990’s. It’s a brave and bold step, for a once politically engaged artist, to make paintings void of any clear social subject. These canvases are an adventures into paintings’ convention of making meaning without the use of a figure or referent. Jantjes investigation considers what remains possible in the field of painting after conceptualism, post-modernism and post-conceptualism. And instead of looking for solutions in painting’s extended field, as so much recent painting has, his search began in the domain of abstraction, its African, European and American manifestations and the histories of non-figuration in other cultures. Finding a different way to paint began with reduction. Paint material has lost its body. He paints in thin, mostly transparent layers and avoids the heavy, gestural painting, that art history too often regards as a trademark of abstraction and the canon of America’s New York School of the 1950’s. His choice of soft transparent hues, rather than full bodied and saturated colour is another moderation. Reduction and transparency he says “invites a different form of viewer engagement”. It allows one to look through and into the marks and the colours stacked in pictorial space. Resemblances to nature and the human figure have been stripped away. Shapes have been unlocked from their role as stand-ins for the real. Painting is once again an open structure, in which everything appears to twist and float within the boundaries of the painting’s frame. There are no hard edges here. Nothing feels man-made even though everything is. At a deeper level his journey into non-figuration is connected to things remembered. Skeins of paint tease out sensations from the vault of memory. There is a hum of history to the oldest method of visual image making. Without narrative nor analogy to establish a subject, these paintings occupy the contradictory gap between emotion and logic. Instinctively one reads them emotionally as a bridge between the rational and the imagined. And to facilitate this imaginative leap from instinct to knowing, his canvases are grouped under a generic title “The Exogenic Series.” It suggests the natural environment; the earth’s layered surface; the forces that determine our planet’s patina and shape its geological appearance; weather, erosion, sedimentation, vegetation et cetera. Subtitled (AQUA), the canvases and the smaller paper works are preoccupied with the most abundant element on the earth’s surface - water. But no seascapes or rivers are depicted. Lines, dots and smears of paint evoke the natural fecundity of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. They construct a fluid, translucent world that slips between logic and meaning. Images dissipate and reappear from a convoluted camouflage of layers. A sense of the fluid is evoked. Like water in the hand of the thirsty, his images can

be thought of as vital but difficult to grasp. At one moment the surface evolves into something concrete then melts into nothing at the next. Decisions are being made and unmade as ideas flow on and off the canvas, each leaving a small trace of itself, like a tidal mark that lets you know what once was and what could become. He claims never to throw away anything, just to continue reworking it until the painting decides it is done. The untitled, large canvases, each have the size of a doorway and function like openings into another reality. One is constantly at a threshold, invited to look into and beyond the surface; to step into and beyond the frame and excavate a different space; to enjoy whatever the imagination constructs. Hung as an unbroken series they function like pages of a musical score whose sense of movement, visual timbre and tonal harmonies connect each to the other. An incomplete first opus, rich in visual ideas and craftsmanship. Jantjes says, in an interview included in this catalogue, that he wants viewers to think of his paintings in the same way they do mountains. The immovable natural objects that shape environments. But I think of them more as boulders in the road. Obstructions to art’s current and relentless rush toward somewhere else. A sudden break to the art market’s ‘chatter’ that leaves so many breathless and confused about what contemporary art wants to become. As we search for a way to by-pass his boulders, we are surprised, even shocked at how they hold our attention, while saying nothing about anything we or the institutionalised art world want to talk about. His search for what remains possible in the field of painting, has given Jantjes the opportunity to conjure delightful visual obstructions that are a respite from art‘s prevailing discourses. Words fail us. We are seduced into looking again. The eye and the mind are preoccupied with the visual. The human spirit is uplifted. © Paul Regrette

To surprise and not repeat myself

„Painting is self discovery. Every good artist paints what he is“.

Jackson Pollock

„ We must take a painting as a kind of traditional stage: the curtain rises,

we look, we wait, we receive, we understand; and once the scene is finished

and the painting removed, we remember: we are no longer what we were;

we have been initiated“.

Roland Barthes

„In the annals of history no other movement has been more hated than

abstract painting“.

William Rubin

An interview with Gavin Jantjes

I want begin by asking you why your new paintings have no titles. What are they about? That‘s a question many viewers who know my earlier work ask. They want to know the meaning to these canvases; their purpose or function. It’s the wrong question. I can forgive you for asking it, as it is one I used to ask myself. Its our natural desire to name things, to connect what we see, to what we already know. To make comparisons and analogies. Titles help to construct the analogy and that in turn, makes the naming easier. I no longer give individual paintings a title. Maybe I will do that again one day. I have always made paintings in series and I group them under a generic title. It points viewers in the general direction of what interests me. “Untitled” fires the viewers’ imagination. The group title for these paintings is “Exogenic“ and refers to the natural world. In this case our planet‘s living crust. The subtitle ‘Aqua’ references the element covering almost three quarters of our earth‘s surface. But these are not paintings about water. They are about the effect of water on all things on the surface of the earth. My next group of exogenic paintings may include the subtitle ‘Terra’ and they will investigate the solid material that makes up the layers in the earth’s crust. I want my paintings to be what they are. Objects in the environment. Things you encounter that can engage vision, like a beam of light through the clouds or a mirage on a hot horizon.. But more importantly the genesis of these paintings is the meditative act of discovery with the eyes. It’s the pleasure of looking, the surprise of discovery, and if there is a purpose to my work, it is about re-connecting our enjoyment of contemporary art to the visual again, after decades of grappling with art through its subjective discourses. So much of my time in the studio is spent looking, making visual judgements. What remains? What needs alteration? My earlier figurative work was about context and discourses and I enjoyed that discursive approach. But context and narrative have been celebrated for a very long time, and to such an extent that I feel contemporary visual art is regarded more as a piece of literature, or document or a text. I want to get pleasure from not looking for analogy, or narrative or satire, or comic relief. The initial concern of my return to painting is to discover my limitations with this medium. Can I move beyond the doubt cast over it by post-modern theory and research once more those aspects of its history that once made it special. Its materiality for example... To understand again that a lump or a smear of paint does not have to describe something we can already name, something we know. Can the paint deposits on a surface become a repository or a transmitter? Can a paintings’ marks and 11

colours convey the sense of things and alter our knowledge of the world? And can it, in that transmission, allow a sense of beauty to unfold? Can it evoke a sense of place or time or an emotion? And my intention is not to make beautiful paintings. Presuming to know what a beautiful painting looks like, precludes the discovery of beauty in contemporary time. By providing the eye with an image that does not rely on analogy nor a referent and yet evokes beauty, is a challenge to the way I used to paint and to the vast majority of viewer‘s ways of seeing. The subject, if one can call it that, is painting itself. This very old medium I feel needs to be re-discovered, examined and enjoyed again in an almost primordial way. If my current work seeks to appropriate anything, it is the essence of something, not a likeness of it. For me painting is a process of creating something that does not already exist. Why beauty? Aesthetic beauty is not popular today. Discussing why something is beautiful is like mentioning someone‘s handwriting when everyone now communicates using digital fonts and emojis. A work that evokes beauty asks the viewer to retrieve and/or add something to what they cherish. If there is nothing in one’s memory bank that aligns to what one is looking at, to what one already knows and the image remains attractive, we are startled. The novelty of this experience is memorable. We file it away, along with the emotional responses it triggered. Newness and discovery through looking are a part of painting’s history. I want to revisit that. I want to be in awe of something. I want viewers to once again have a wanderlust for the visual. To be carried along by what a painting makes you feel. Music does this all the time. I‘m not speaking about song, where words are an important element of the experience. We never question pure music in the way post-modernism interrogated painting, asking it to justify itself through its context or meaning. Thelonius Monk, Branford Marsalis, Steve Reich or Harrison Birtwistle don’t get interrogated about an absence of subject, text or context. We just allow their music to affect us, or not. And when it does, when it’s not mediated by language, it is beautiful. It may irritate or please. You can dance to it, be moved by its rhythm, or emotionally overwhelmed by its tonal harmonies. Viewers who enjoy non-figurative, or non-representational paintings invest time in looking and its the same for listeners who enjoy music without words and fixed structures. They enjoy other aspects of the medium’s character, the unfamiliar, the strange novelty of it. Maybe it’s time to question again wether a painting’s colour harmonies can function like tonal harmonies. Can the marks in a painting create enough movement to rub our senses the right or wrong way, shift and uplift our emotions? In the post-modern and conceptual periods of Western/ European art, this sort of visual enjoyment was regarded as a sacrilege as our engagement with art rapidly shifted from the visual to the literal. The gallery became a library, a research centre, an archive. Texts and contexts have made viewers forget how to enjoy looking or better said, how to

think through visual images that have no premeditated subject, or apparent referent. Perhaps this is why we find beautiful things awkward and out of sync with the tough, rational art that attaches the prefix „post-“ to its name. Is this why you have decided to make abstract paintings and avoid figuration? The politically motivated work against slavery, apartheid and cultural discrimination that I made many years ago, provided viewers with information for a discourse on those subjects. Seldom was their quality as works of art, wether prints or paintings, a point of discussion. I did not mind this slippage of interpretation then, as the goal was to open debate about the things that affected the lives of the oppressed. In some small way I made a contribution to those debates. Subject or narrative was the artworks‘ raison d’être then. You call my new paintings “abstract”. I don’t call them that. Abstraction implies a referent, a form, an existing entity that has been remodelled, or ‘abstracted’ into a new image. Picasso’s series of etchings of a bull comes to mind. The first plate is a depiction of the animal, full bodied with hair and horns. The final plate is an abstraction of six or seven lines that you continue to recognise as a bull. A non-figurative image of a bull on the other hand would evoke its power, its size, its mythology. The Exogenic paintings are non-figurative. They are about provoking the imagination with colour, line, texture, spatial illusion and a different sense of time. I’m working with other forms of visual perception that have lines of force which I hope can still alter consciousness. The moment one recognises something in a painting the looking stops. Without recognisable images or references the viewer continues to look. The experience is not driven or constructed by a subject, it is a self critical assessment of the viewers ability to see, that keeps the viewer connected to the painting. It also means that every new face to face meeting with the work could be different. My approach is nothing new. This is how we once looked at art before ethics, and art history pushed a cerebral discourse ahead of a retinal one. The lyrical abstraction of Arshile Gorky left a school of ideas that questioned how we see. I want to investigate this further. All creative acts are driven by the question ”What if”? What if we took away the political / social subject? What if line no longer served to described an image? What if colour regained its emotional potential? What if visual communication did not include text? We seem to have forgotten that the mind can operate in a different mode, in another rationality. I am doing what composers of jazz and classical music do - making something out of nothing. I want a form of practice that can sit alongside the popular, and the rational art of recent decades. One that lifts the shadow of doubt from painting and makes a case for the retinal as confidently as other media fore13

ground the cerebral. An art that seeks a connection between itself and viewers without the mediation of the author’s words or those of a cultural critic. I have no problem shifting from one to the other. Gerhard Richter accepted both forms of painting. So did Phillip Guston and so do I. What is it that you love about painting, figurative or non-figurative? I enjoy paintings that are not reliant upon rational analogy - that apprehend the literal and make space for the visual. I enjoy a painting‘s physical presence and the latent sense of time that is visible in the archeology of its production. The layering of each painted deposit harbours a history - its the time spent building up those layers. Thats why I feel a natural title for these new paintings is “Exogenic”. There is a sense of how long it took for the surface to come into being. And it’s not that the final work describes any known surface, but as one looks into the compacted layers of paint on a canvas, a different sense of both time and space emerges. I love painting for its slowness. That it takes time and you can‘t force it to happen faster than it wants to. And that‘s got nothing to do with the time it takes for paint to dry but the time needed for a painting to find its way into the world. A painting is crafted. You make it and it makes you make it. A painting doesn‘t happen until the painting tells you what to do, rather than you trying to make it do what you want. Inherent in all painting are notions of time. Brief momentary glimpses that last a few seconds or unbroken lines of time that began with rock and cave painting and continue on to contemporary work. Each painting is a free element in time, touching or dipping into particular moments in the flow of time. It can present all those moments, all of this complexity, mixed up in an instance. This is why a rock painting from early history still functions in the present as a painting. The same with Monet’s “Water Lilies”. It‘s the result of the same human action in which paint material is laid down onto a surface. It’s not an ethnographic relic but a thing that floats free from its time into the future, to touch our imagination in the present. Likewise a non-figurative painting invites the imaginative leap into the future, extending time from now, to tomorrow and beyond. A photograph by contrast isolates a moment in the stream of time, apprehends it and extracts it from the flow. It does not move. Cannot move. Maybe this is why so many artists use video, to remain in a time stream for a longer period than the photographic moment. I also love painting‘s complex histories. There are so many ways to paint both figuratively and non-figuratively. Learning to love them all, that’s a challenge. I enjoy the the act of making a painting. The immediacy of its production. You just go into the studio and work on it, without having to start up a motor or a hard drive, set up a tripod or mix plaster. When you lay paint down, things happen. It‘s one coloured mark next to or on top of another coloured mark and they either work together or not. I also love the discipline of work inherent in making

good paintings. The joy of doing it each day. To mess with painting material and make something that evokes a sense of peace or place or achievement or beauty. Theaster Gates talks about the nobility of work, of bringing manual labour into a creative process. Uplifting the everyday skills you have, to the level of gallery art. It‘s a feature of Jasper Johns and the sculptors Richard Serra and Ulrich Rückriem, who respectively brought sign painting, ship building and stonemasonry skills to formal painting and sculpture. It‘s an act or better said, a way of knowing one‘s self in the world. The large canvases in the series are the same size and in portrait mode instead of landscape. The paintings on paper echo this. Is this a strategy? If you make paintings of different size and proportions, each painting exists on its own. They could talk to each other through a style. But serialising paintings through size, sets up a democratic dialogue between them and that makes a community. Having the same idea space to work in reveals variation within a continuity. There is a recognition not to repeat, not to make twins. It’s a bit like getting to grips with every movement in a concerto. Each individual part is able to stand alone, yet together they unfold a mood, a place and a time. Each anticipates what comes next. When hung sequentially, time begins to flow differently in the same spatial arena. As I’m not depicting landscapes, the direction of the canvas need not echo an expectation of a panorama. Your use of line is interesting. It’s varied and uneven. Its autonomous not descriptive. In nature there are few lines or better said, outlines. What drawing does is to trace the contours of objects or shapes bumping up against each other. Organic nature has linear elements but these are convoluted, and suggest an organic connectedness. The meeting of the earth’s tectonic plates or the filigree of tree roots in soil are examples of this. We know the ‘straight’ horizon is actually curved and heaven and earth do not meet there. Lines are usually man made. The purpose of painting in Europe’s Renaissance art was to illustrate, annotate and document. Line became the descriptive tool with which one built images of the world. Linear perspective gave us one form of illusory space. From then on, and throughout the training of artists in art academies today, line drawing has been taught as a cornerstone to visual art practice - abstract art attempted to change that. The old discipline of line drawing is difficult to unlearn. Remove the black outlines in Picasso’s paintings and things fall apart. His lines hold things together beautifully. But this does not apply to all of art. There are alternatives. Early Japanese brush painting depicts with marks not line. In Australia dots were used and in South African rock painting, images are not outlined. In the late work of Rothko, Pollock or de Kooning line is given this sort of autonomy. It becomes another mark. 15

The challenge here is to compose a work with linear marks, smears and blobs of different coloured paint material. Simple marks, layered onto a surface over time. I want to produce something exciting with this limitation. If a line can behold a sensation as John Berger claims, then it can allude to time and space. Together with the visceral smears in painting’s vocabulary they can temper the mood of a work. Line used in this way can be as thin as a hair or as broad as a six inch brush. You are painting with acrylics and you use them very thin, like watercolour almost. Paint has many material qualities, from very thick to very thin and everything in between. It‘s just how one wants to and needs to apply the material. The 50‘s New York school made gestural marks, with thick, heavy paint deposits, a mannerism of abstraction. The act of painting became a performance, a masculine display of virility. Man over nature rather than in harmony with it. I don‘t want to repeat that. My current ideas about the exogenic are about qualities of fluidity and transparency; of fading or reflected light; of floating, or weightlessness. Can you say a bit more about these qualities. What do they offer you and reveal to viewers ? They are qualities I see in water and on the surface of the earth. The colour of spring plants for instance. Soft, gentle, not fully formed, yet full of promise. The fecundity of life that springs from water is another. The generative yet evasive qualities of hope, which like water in your hand, is difficult to grasp. It runs away, evaporates. But you have felt it, seen it. The perceptual difference of water to that of dry land is another. One is gritty, solid and static. The other is transient and moves with a palpable force. Conventional landscape painting uses linear perspective or fading colour to make a spatial illusion. Water‘s transparency makes one recognise spacial volume more succinctly. Immersed in water, we recognise that the quality of light and the passing of time seem different, more intense. Transparent colour suggests this spacial volume found in water. Under water there is a sense of weightlessness and a different sense of space. Gravity does not disappear but water distorts one’s sense of it, by making noticeable that something resists gravity and floats. Light passing through water will refract in all directions and seems to come from everywhere. Deep, open water has no shadows and everything in it moves slower. So at the river bank and the shoreline, there is an exogenic reality where solid, opaque and static forms meet with translucent and transparent ones. My paintings are about these qualities and they help me to create a sense of space and time that is different to our virtual world. Different to instant, hi-res pictures. Different to rapid text messages. Each painting has a sense of space that one cannot measure in metres, or clearly define what is front, back, top, bottom or sides. Because the marks and colours do not describe, they unravel notions of space. It’s like looking into the facets of a diamond. Light is refracted. Front can fold into side. Top can flip and become bottom. Space becomes almost infinite, yet one knows it is contained in the small diamond one is looking into.

Your long absence from the studio while curating, did that influence what you did on your return to it? Yes it did. Curating was an engagement with a greater variety of artistic practices than just my personal taste. It made me more conscious of art‘s diverse histories. I recognised change as the prominent feature of practice. And on my return to painting I could not simply pick up where I had left off so may years ago. A re-think was necessary. The motivation was to surprise and not to repeat myself. The creative “what if” question stood on the horizon in big bold letters. So out went narrative depiction, realism, analogy and thick paint. In came subdued colour harmonies and fluid, transparent paint. Everything I once used and thought I knew about painting has changed. Having worked with and very close to great art in museums moved my ideas along. My final curatorial project was about contemporary painting and it set up my return to the studio. Curating gave me the time to re-think how I read painting and why I have always liked Helen Frankenthaler, the later de Kooning paintings, and more recently Amy Sillman, Dorothy Napangardi and Tomory Dodge.

What do you want viewers of your paintings to get from them? This is a big “what if ?” for the viewer. What if people think of all painting, and not just my painting, as they think of a mountain? Mountains are attractive for reasons other than their size. They are not like anything else. They do not represent anything. No mountain is a stand-in for another mountain. They are what they are, large compositions of rock earth, vegetation and snow. Seen from a distance or close up, they hold your attention. They are astonishing or beautiful, even memorable - a mountain will tell you something about its history through its geology and its surface. It has an effect on the surrounding environment and on human emotions. Mountains can hold mysteries that some regard as sacred. It’s seldom that a mountain is boring. What we call visual perception describes something we do naturally and have done throughout our lives. We see first and think next.. What keeps the eye interested and the mind occupied, are the rough, unarticulated or partly articulated images in our field of vision. I think that my paintings echo this human behaviour. I want painting to keep the imagination busy - to behave as catalysts for emotion and thought. To stand as sign posts that point to possibilities - Good painting keeps visual boredom at bay and ideas open-ended. I want those who have truly looked into these paintings and not just at them, to have enjoyed that experience. To feel that the time a painting asks them to set aside, was worthwhile. That this exercise of looking into a painting strengthens their belief that this medium offers something particular and different from other media. I hope they find beauty in that experience and where possible that they celebrate it, with friends and loved ones. 17

Untitled (1) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (2) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (3) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (4) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (5) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (6) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (7) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (8) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (9) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (10) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on tarpaulin canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (11) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on tarpaulin canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (12) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (13) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Untitled (14) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm

Paintings on Khadi papers 2017

Untitled (9, 10) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on hand made Khadi paper 100 x 70 cm

Untitled (11, 6, 8, 7,) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on hand made Khadi paper 100 x 70 cm

Untitled (5, 1, 4, 3) from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on hand made Khadi paper 100 x 70 cm

GAVIN JANTJES

raduated from the Michaelis School of Art University of Cape Town and the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste Hamburg. His work has been exhibited internationally including the ICA the Hayward & Whitechapel Galleries and The British Museum

London, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Gothenburg Art Museum, Sweden; the Henie Onstad Art Centre Oslo; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin; the Bronx Museum in New York, the National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Washington US and the Museuo Picasso Barcelona Spain. His paintings and graphic work have been collected internationally including Tate Gallery the V&A, UK; the National Museum of African Art Smithsonian the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, The Hermitage Museum Saint Petersburg Russia, and numerous private and corporate collections around the world. He was the artistic director of Hennie Onstad Art Center (1999-2004) and senior curator at the National Museum Oslo Norway (2004-2014). He is the initiator of the “Visual Century Project” and author of “Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907 2007” volumes I - IV, published by Wits University Press S.A. in 2011. He lives and works in Oslo and Cape Town.

Selected group exhibtions 1998 “Transforming the Crown“ The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York 2001 “The Short Century” Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich travelling to;

Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art Chicago; PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, MoMA, New York

2002 “Beyond the Material‘ South African National Gallery, Cape Town “States of Emergence” Warren Siebrits Gallery Johannesburg 2003 “M_ARS” Kunst und Krieg, Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria “Ideologia II” Biennale for Contemporary Art in Nordic Countries, Gothenburg, Sweden 2004 “Back to Black” Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary, Whitechapel Gallery London travelling to The New Art Gallery,

Walsall, UK; curated by Powell, Bailey & Straw.

2006 “Second to None” Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town curated by Gabi Ngcobo, and Virginia MacKenny 2007

“Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art”, National Museum of African Art Smithsonian,

Washington DC, USA; curated by Christine Kreamer

2009 “Strengths and Convictions : the life and times of the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu,

F W De Klerk and Nelson Mandela” Iziko South African National Gallery travelling to Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, Norway

2012 “Economia:Picasso” curated by Pedro G. Romero, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Spain “African Cosmos: Stellar Art” National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Washington DC, USA; curated by Christine

Kreamer travelling to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California

2013 “Rise and Fall of Apartheid” curated by Okwui Enwesor and Rory Bester Centre for Photography New York USA

travelling to Haus Der Kunst, Munich

“Post Picasso: Contemporary Reactions ” curated by Michael FitzGerald, the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Spain 2014 “artevida” Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2016 “The 1980’s: Todays Beginning” Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven The Netherlands “South Africa: the art of a nation” The British Museum London UK 2017 “The Place is Here” Nottingham Contemporary travelling to South London Gallery UK. “Images of War” Bonniers Konsthall Stockholm

Selected Bibliography 1998 “A fruitful Incoherence“ dialogues on internationalism edit Gavin Jantjes, published by inIVA London. 1999 “Views of Difference: Different Views of Art” edit. Catherine King. pub. Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2002

“States of Emergence” South Africa 1960 -1990. Pub. Warren Siebits Modern Art Johannesburg S.A.

2004 “Back to Black ” Art Cinema and the Racial Imaginary Pub Whitechapel Art Gallery London UK. p 135/36 2005 “Cosmopolitan Modernisms” annotating Art’s histories, edit Kobena Mercer, pub. MIT CAmbridge Mass 2007 “Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures” annotating Art’s histories, edit Kobena Mercer, pub. MIT CAmbridge Mass 2008 “Exiles Diasporas & Strangers” annotating Art’s histories, edit Kobena Mercer, pub. MIT CAmbridge Mass “Art South Africa Magazine” vol. 06 issue 03’ Filling in the Blanks’ p21. 2009 “Contemporary African Art Since 1980” Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agulu. pub. DAMIANI “Strengths and Convictions : the life and times of the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu,

F W De Klerk and Nelson Mandela” edit. Gavin Jantjes. pub. Forlaget Pres with Nobel Peace Center Norway.

“South African Art Now” by Sue Williamson pub. Collins NY, USA 2010 “Nicholas Hlobo” exhibition catalogue edit. by Gavin Jantjes pub. National Museum of Art Architecture and Design Oslo. 2011 “Visual Century : South African Art in Context 1907 - 2007” volumes 1 - 4 by Gavin Jantjes pub. Wits University

Press. contributing editors Jillian Carmen, Lize van Robbroek, Mario Pissarra, Thebinkosi Goniwe, Mandisi Majavu

2012 “Prism : Drawing from 1990 - 2012” edit. Gavin Jantjes, pub. National Museum Oslo. “African Cosmos: Stellar Art” edit. by Ann Hofstra Grogg and Migs Grove pub. The Monacelli Press NY. USA “Economia:Picasso” edit. by Pedro G. Romero, Ajuntament de Barcelona / Museu Picasso 2013 “Everything Was Moving” photography from the 60s and 70s edit. Kate Bush pub. Barbican Art Centre UK “The Rize and Fall of Apartheid” edit. by Okwui Enwesor and Rory Bester pub. Prestel “Song for Sekoto: 1913 - 2013” edit. Barbara Lindop pub. Gerard Sekoto Foundation Johannesburg, SA 2014 “Post-Picasso - contemporary reactions” curated by Michael FitzGerald, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Spain “An Appetite for Painting” Reader & catalogue by Gavin Jantjes pub. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo. 2015 “Picasso in Contemporary Art” edit. Dirk Luckow essay by Michael FitzGerald pub. Deichtorhallen Hamburg. “Biko’s Ghost” The Iconography of Black Conciousness by Shannen L Hill pub. University of Minnesota Press. “Picasso Mania” Éditions de la Réunion , des musées nationaux - Grand Palais, edit. Alban de Nervaux, Le Centre Pompidou,

Paris France

2016 “South Africa: the art of a nation” Pub. Thames and Hudson edit John Giblin & Chris Spring 2017

“Art Africa Magazine issue 07 March 2017 “A Luta Continua” edit. Kedell Geers. The complexities of exil p.098

“Free Thinking” BBC Radio 3 with Phillip Dodd Programmmes /b0801rnj. (podcast)

The Exogenic Series of painting was first exhibited at Oslo Kunstforeinig Norway in October 2017 ISBN 978-82-690981-0-5 ISBN 978-82-690981-1-2 (PDF download) Catalogue is printed by RierĂł on Munken White v1.5 90 grams Set in Soho Gothiic and Soho Pro All photographs by Gavin Jantjes ÂŠ The materials published in this catalogue are protected by copyright law. Without explicit authorisation, reproduction is only allowed in so far as it is permitted by law or by agreement with the the author Gavin Jantjes. (BONO)

Cover image. detail Untitled (2) by Gavin Jantjes from the Exogenic series (Aqua) 2017 acrylic on canvas 200 x 145 cm