Over time, our individual concerns evolve and shift, and as a result there are occasions when works, regardless of their importance and merit, no longer resonate in the curation of a collection. It is this sensitive moment, when a collector makes the often difficult decision to let go of a work, that is the premise for our Collectors’ Selection presentation. In this third iteration are works by artists we have worked with over the 19-year history of the gallery, almost all of which we have exhibited in solo shows and curated exhibitions. The works went to collections in the USA, Europe and South Africa. They are now available again and offer an opportunity for new and seasoned collectors to engage with pieces they might have missed in the past. And in a new collection, and in a new prism of personal interests, each work will now reflect new concerns in a different context for years to come.
Gerard Sekoto
Le Pont St. Michel, 1959
Oil on canvas
33 x 40.5cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town Inquiry
Gerard Sekoto left South Africa for Paris in 1947 and remained in exile, where he struggled to sustain his career as an artist, until his death forty-six years later. France inspired Sekoto in new ways allowed him to explore fresh subjects.The first years in Paris were difficult, he battled at first to adjust to the city and its art world, but, in his biography of Sekoto, N Chabani Manganyi writes that, ‘by the beginning of the 1960s, he was firmly settled and ready to move forward in his art and life.’
This shift is evident in this view of Paris which stands in contrast to the nostalgic scenes and portraits of township and rural life in South Africa that he mostly painted in these years. Only on rare occasions did he depict his Parisian surroundings such as this view of the Pont St. Michel, a bridge linking the Place Saint-Michel on the left bank of the river Seine to the Île de la Cité.
Gerard Sekoto, Paris, 1986
Photograph: George Hallett
Jane Alexander
Erbschein: An den Bergen, 1995
Mixed media and found objects
180 x 46 x 46cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Jane Alexander: African Adventure and other works
DaimlerChrysler Konzernzentrale, Stuttgart, 2002
DaimlerChrysler Contemporary, Berlin, 2002
Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, South Africa. 2003
Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein, South Africa, 2003
South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2003
Standard Bank Young Artist Award exhibition 1995-1996
Monument Gallery, Grahamstown (Makhanda)
King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha)
Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg
Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein
Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg
Durban Art Gallery
South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
Catalogue. Jane Alexander: Sculpture and Photomontage. Text: Ivor Powell
Africas: The Artist and the City
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2001
Jane Alexander
Erbschein: An den Bergen, 1995
Jane Alexander’s sculpture Erbschein: An den Bergen, as well as related photomontages produced concurrently in 1995, make biographical reference to the artist in relation to aspects of German history. In an essay of the same title, 2023, she elaborates on the background to these works, and their relevance to the artworks that followed.
‘The sculpture, Erbschein: An den Bergen, and a series of related photomontages all produced in 1995, form a set of works with biographical content. They refer, inter alia, to the home in Berlin from which my 15-year-old father and his parents moved for safety, and their new home in a small village near Berlin which they abandoned in 1936 in response to acts of both physical and symbolic persecution. These works refer through visual cues to the Berlin of my father’s youth, to the post-war Berlin of the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), and to the dismantling of the divided city and its communist presence after 1990 in the post-reunification Federal Republic of Germany. The impact of transgenerational, environmental and territorial factors through which political ideology is embedded, encoded and evoked symbolically, metaphorically and visually, underpins the creation of these works. … Erbschein: An den Bergen can be seen to be the precursor to the various tableaux, site-specific installations and photomontages that followed.’
- Jane Alexander, 2023
Jane Alexander
Erbschein: An den Bergen, 1995
‘ Erbschein is, in part, a monument of remembrance, a kind of shrine…. [T]he memories are layered; they are both personal and inherited. In the assemblage of the sculpture, the discrete fragments are placed one in relation to the other, telescoping time and place, in a virtual enactment of the self as the site of memory.’
- Ivor Powell, 1995
Jane Alexander: Photomontages 1981 - 1995
Stevenson Johannesburg, 2016
publication: Jane Alexander, DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture 2002 (2002, Hatje Cantz Ostfildern)
Gerard Sekoto Standing Nude, 1976
Gouache on paper
48.5 x 26.5cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
Standing Nude, 1976
The 1960s was a period where Gerard Sekoto often illustrated the female form - he painted a number of nudes in gouache during this time. The figure in this work stands in a frontal position and her whole body is pictured. She is looking directly at the viewer and is holding a cloth or piece of clothing. She is set against a background of fluid strokes of blue, yellow and green pigment. Barbara Lindop suggests that Sekoto’s studies of the human form in this period are of an idealised African woman rather than living subjects. Sekoto mentioned at the time that these ‘are more abstracted and iconic than the earlier portrait studies’.
Barthélémy Toguo
The New World Climax (Inégalité), 2001-2012
Ink and carved wood, wooden table
22 x 49 x 29cm/75 x 66 x 66cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Barthélémy Toguo: Celebrations, Stevenson Cape Town, 2014
The New World Climax (Inégalité), 2001-2012
A Cameroonian who studied in Ivory Coast, Germany and France and lives between Paris and Bandjoun, Toguo’s many experiences with border control led him to interrogate ideas of inclusion and exclusion in his work. After being subjected to baggage checks a number of times, he devised the performance Transit, in which he checks in luggage made out of wood from Cameroon.
Similarly, for The New World Climax, first presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2001 and included on A Sculptural Premise at Stevenson in 2013, Toguo made large wooden stamps resembling those used to stamp his passport. He then used the wooden stamps to make prints on paper. The literal weight of the sculptures exemplifies the heavy burden for immigrants of being in a constant state of transition. The work highlights the difficulty of travelling for people forced into exile as well as those who long for change and the experience of something beyond their own borders.
Moshekwa Langa
Untitled (Native Woman), 2002
Mixed media on paper
140 x 99cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
Moshekwa Langa
Untitled (Native Woman), 2002
Untitled (Native Women) is one of Moshekwa Langa’s ‘word towers’ - drawings featuring lists of people and places that played a role in Langa’s life at any given time. Like playing a word association or memory game, the artist lists recognisable local and foreign areas such as Diepkloof, Rosebank, Rustenburg and Amsterdam alongside names of public figures - Jomo Sono, Brenda Fassie, J.R Tolkien, Bette Davis and Ben Okri. Institutions like The Citizen and Cinema Nouveau - appear next to lyrics, titles and phrases: ‘Suddenly it became very authentic’, ‘Crocodile smiles and tears’, ‘Banned and in exile’ and ‘He reached out to me’. Langa juxtaposes these words/texts with black and white photocopies from various sources - including a smoking Tallulah Bankhead - that float over brightly coloured waves of paint creating a turbulent sea that the viewer can explore and extract information in many ways.
‘My work is not entirely abstract. It is made up of questions and asides from which I have added and subtracted over the years. It only looks abstract because a small section is seen at a time. Like a series of disembodied passages from a book. It is made up of excerpts, recordings, facts, flowers and dreamscapes. It is a nonfactual, nonlinear account of what interests me.’
- Moshekwa Langa, 2016
Penny Siopis
Love, 2007
Oil and glue on canvas
89 x 74cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Penny Siopis: Lasso, Stevenson Cape Town, 2007
Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014
Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, WAM, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2015
Penny Siopis
Love, 2007
Penny Siopis has long been interested in what she terms ‘the poetics of vulnerability’ , where the materiality itself is as central to the image and concept as the depicted subject. The painting Love formed part of her second solo show with Stevenson in 2007, Lasso. In Love, a couple is pictured on a white bed; one figure is lying awake looking towards their partner, the other is turned completely away - lying on their side, eyes closed. Both figures’ bodies are visible through the bedding they sleep under - Siopis applies thin white paint to create a veiled sense of fragile intimacy.
The artist uses simple lines to establish background and foreground, and most of the canvas is treated with a soft miasma of white paint. The focus of the work is the exception - here, Siopis renders both characters’ faces in bright, bloody reds, with the female figure’s breasts and groin glowing allusively. Though depicting her figures side by side, Siopis creates an atmosphere of emotional distance through differences in posture and expression.
publication:
Penny Siopis: Lasso, Stevenson, 2007
Robin Rhode
A Day in May, 2013
Digital animation
Duration 3 min 15 sec
Edition of 5 + 2AP
Inquire location: Cape Town
Robin Rhode
A Day in May, 2013
A Day in May is a simple video animation first shown on Rhode’s solo exhibition Paries Pictus at Stevenson, Cape Town, and then at the 2013 Moscow Biennale. It loosely explores the politics of ‘Labour Day’ and ‘Worker’s Day’, invoking a global capitalist critique. The animation speaks of the tension between revolution and domesticity: marching with a black flag, the doppelganger keeps being held back by washing pegs.
installation:
collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
exhibited:
Post No Bills: Public Walls as Studio and Source, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, 2016
Projection of A Day in May on the Canal Saint-Martin in Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2013
Mawande Ka Zenzile
Untitled (Gothic), 2015
Cow dung, earth and oil on canvas
134 x 92cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Mawande Ka Zenzile: Statecraft, Stevenson Cape Town, 2015
Untitled (Gothic), 2015
Untitled (Gothic) was part of Mawande Ka Zenzile’s exhibition Statecraft in 2015, in which Ka Zenzile continued his interest in politics, with a particular focus on the construction and destruction of nation states. Employing familiar imagery sourced from the internet, art history and popular culture, Ka Zenzile’s work provides the viewer with an opportunity to see these images from a different perspective, by taking them out of their usual contexts and assembling them in conversation with each other.
In this case the familiar reference of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic is direct - many understood the work to be a satirical comment on Midwesterners out of step with a modernizing world. Yet Wood intended it to convey a positive image of rural American values, offering a vision of reassurance at the beginning of the Great Depression.
installation: Mawande Ka Zenzile: Statecraft, Stevenson Cape Town, 2015
‘I’m fascinated by how the construction, or destruction [of nation states] is facilitated ideologically by the use of images as a form of propaganda, or by political rhetoric, in a world that is affected by geopolitics and capitalism.’
– Mawande Ka Zenzile, 2015
Penny Siopis Swarm, 2011
Glue and ink on canvas
Diptych, 200 x 180cm (1), 200 x 125cm (2)
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014
‘Swarm is a complex and dynamic work of art that communicates in an intense and personal way. It engages and captivates the onlooker with unexpected vitality, the emotive scope and cognitive depth underpinning the message.
‘While the overall impression of the work seems very abstract, the method, in direct relation to the theme, captivates and enchants the viewer to really experience “the swarm” in a somewhat disconcerting way that seems to both repel and attract at the same time.’
2015
installation:
Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014
Wangechi Mutu drip, drip, drip, 2017
Ink, acrylic and collage on mylar
246.5 x 99cm
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Both, and, Stevenson, Cape Town, 2018
Wangechi Mutu drip, drip, drip, 2017
‘One of Wangechi Mutu’s first proper jobs was working as an illustrator for the Kenyan office of American advertising agency, McCann Erickson. “This was the age of cut-andpaste graphic design,” the fifty-year-old Kenyan-born contemporary artist explains. “These were people who were doing ads for Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola. I learned a lot about these big companies and big products as a minion. I was that little person who did the drawings and figured out how to make them attractive to the public. But really, I played a very minor role in what the finished product was going to be. I think that working this way inspired a lot of my collages. My love of cut and pasting wasn’t born here, but it was reinforced.”
‘You probably won’t see a Mutu collage accompanying a Johnson & Johnson or Coke campaign any time soon. Mutu’s unnerving creations draw on pornography, anatomical texts, style magazines, as well as other sources, to create troubling figures that don’t spur on aspiration, but instead lead the viewer to reflect on some of the underlying assumptions of our world, such as race, gender, and old colonial certainties.’
- Kellie Jones, 2022
‘Mutu’s work is sensual, delighting in the materiality of its media (paper, paint, mica, wool, Mylar). Seen in a gallery, the organic forms, hybrid anatomies, wild hair, machine-like forearms, delirious patterns and compound eyes coalesce in a way that no digital reproduction can quite match. And what is true of the pictures is doubly true of the sculptures and installations, which also make use of smell and sound: dripping bottles, fermenting wine, rotting milk.’
– Teju Cole, 2014
installation:
Robin Rhode
Principle of Hope, 2017
C-prints
10 panels, 56 x 70cm each
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited:
Urban Impressions: Experiencing the Contemporary Global Metropolis Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas, 2022
Robin Rhode
Principle of Hope, 2017
‘Using the street corner as my studio, the photographic work titled Principle of Hope is photographed against a ruined wall in a township in Johannesburg. This dilapidated wall is situated in a disadvantaged community that remains as a footprint of the segregated Apartheid era.
‘In Principle of Hope, the glimmer of an answer resides in geometry - the necessary illusion of perfectibility. Here a spiral wall is rendered in painted grey tones to create the visual impression of heavy stacked concrete bricks. The painted concrete spiral evolves upwards towards a blue sky, a metaphor for an imaginary utopia.
‘Moving between abstract speculation and visceral record, the artwork takes as a point of reference the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s book published in 3 volumes in the 1950s titled The Principle of Hope in which the author explores utopian impulses present in art, literature, religion and other forms of cultural expression, and envisages a future state of absolute perfection.’
- Robin Rhode,
2019Rhode standing in front of Principle of Hope at Moody Centre for the Arts in 2022
Robin Rhode
Principle of Hope, 2017‘A part of something is for the foreseeable future going to be better than all of it. Fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over the settlements of held territory. To do as others do, but somehow stand apart. To tell a story in pieces, as it is.’
– Edward W. Said , 1986
‘Robin Rhode and his team of assistants create vibrant, temporary outdoor murals that serve as backdrops for photographed performances. Working in the neighborhood where he grew up, a mixed-race community plagued by drug and gang wars, Rhode leads a team of local young men in creating a new mural and shares his hopes for what participation in an art project can offer. Recounting a career that began on the street in newly post-apartheid South Africa and now extends into the international contemporary-art scene, Rhode engages his ‘born free’ collaborators in a performance at the Johannesburg Art Fair while considering intergenerational socio-political forces and the ways that play, humor, and youth culture inform his work.’
Click to watch:
Robin Rhode in "Johannesburg", Art 21, Season 9, September 21, 2018
Zander Blom
Modern Painting (Museum Posters), 2017-18
Mixed media on found museum posters
43 individual pieces, dimensions variable
Inquire
location: Cape Town
exhibited: Zander Blom: Paintings and Posters, Stevenson Cape Town, 2018
Modern Painting (Museum Posters), 2017-18
Over the past decade Blom’s fascination with the development of abstraction in modern art has given rise to a range of strictly non-figurative experiments in painting. Traversing diverse techniques, textures and modes of composition, Blom’s imagery has been characterised by perpetual change in the process of formal inquiry within the realm of abstraction.
Presented in Blom’s seventh solo exhibition alongside paintings, Modern Painting (Museum Posters) are posters in which museum gift-shop reproductions of celebrated works from the history of modern art are playfully collaged with photographs of African wildlife and irreverently defaced with scribblings of childish and rebellious icons.
exhibited:
Zander Blom: Paintings and Posters, Stevenson Cape Town, 2018
Simphiwe Ndzube Msobomvu, 2020
Mixed media on paper
89 x 76cm
Inquire
location: New Jersey
Simphiwe Ndzube’s Msobomvu was made during the COVID 19 pandemic lockdown. Stuck in his Los Angeles apartment and with limited access to his usual studio, Ndzube turned to making smaller-scale drawings with only the materials he had access to. This global moment in time is referenced in this drawing as the main subject has their mouth and nose covered by a red scarf (the title of the work - ‘msobomvu’ - meaning ‘red’ in isiXhosa).
‘For the first time, it feels like people really see each other. When COVID-19 began I was stuck in a tiny studio apartment that I had been wanting to move out of, and I lost access to my art studio downtown. I have upcoming shows and family to feed in Africa, so I needed to find a place to make art. First, I found an alternative space to work; it was a small studio down the street where I started making drawings for a children’s coloring book (with artists such as Virgil Abloh and Nina Chanel Abney) published by Library Street Collective. Then, two months after the start of quarantine, the building where my studio is opened back up. I realized that I had an interest in continuing to make drawings; I had always made these, but quarantine encouraged me to focus and take them more seriously.’
- Simphiwe Nzube, 2020
References
Pg 4 - Gerard Sekoto (1913 - 1993), Stevenson LINK
Pg 6 - Barbara Lindop, ‘Gerard Sekoto’ (Randburg, SA, 1988) page 55
Pg 7-11 - Text extracts and images from Erbschein: An den Bergen, Jane Alexander, published by Stevenson (2023)
Pg 9 - Ivor Powell, ‘Jane Alexander: Sculpture and Photomontage’ (Standard Bank National Arts Festival, 1995)
Pg 14 - ‘Barthélémy Toguo: Celebrations’, Stevenson (2014) LINK
Pg 18 - ‘Moshekwa Langa in Conversation’, Kobena Mercer in Looking Both Ways, pg 108 LINK
Pg 21 - ‘Penny Siopis: Lasso’, Stevenson (2007) LINK
Pg 25 - ‘Robin Rhode: Paries Pictus’, Stevenson (2013) LINK
Pg 28-30 - ‘Mawande Ka Zenzile: Statecraft’, Stevenson (2015) LINK
Pg 28 - ‘American Gothic’, Art Institute of Chicago (2019) LINK
Pg 33 - ‘Penny Siopis wins Helgaard Steyn Award for Painting’, Arthrob (2015) LINK
Pg 36 - Kellie Jones, ‘Wangechi Mutu’, (Phaidon, 2022) LINK
Pg 37 - Teju Cole, ‘Wangechi Mutu: under the skin of Africa’, The Guardian (2014) LINK
Pg 41 - Robin Rhode, ‘Artist Statement’, Prix Pictet (2019) LINK
Pg 42 - Robin Rhode in ‘Johannesburg’, Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 9 (2021) LINK
Pg 44 - ‘Zander Blom: Paintings and Posters’, Stevenson (2018) LINK
Pg 47 - ‘Art In Uncertain Times: Simphiwe Ndzube Makes a New Connection with the Body in Los Angeles’, Juxtapoz (2020) LINK
Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road 7925 Cape Town +27 21 462 1500 46 7th Avenue Parktown North 2193 Johannesburg +27 11 403 1055
Prinsengracht 371B 1016 HK Amsterdam +31 62 532 1380
info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info
@stevenson_za