iArt Gallery

A curated group exhibition, Read between the lines / Lees tussen die lyne focuses on the incorporation and exploration of the written word as subject matter. Nuances of narrative and the influence of literature on visual art forms is the point from which a story of the viewer’s own is able to grow.

1 - 7 March 2010
US Gallery, cnr Dorp & Bird Street, Stellenbosch

Read between the lines / Lees tussen die lyne

A curated group exhibition, Read between the lines / Lees tussen die lyne focuses on the incorporation and exploration of the written word as subject matter. Nuances of narrative and the influence of literature on visual art forms is the point from which a story of the viewer’s own is able to grow.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Wilma Cruise, Liza Grobler, Theo Kleynhans, Colbert Mashile, Zwelethu Mthethwa & Louis Jansen van Vuuren, Alastair Whitton, Barbara Wildenboer

view work

Paul Emsley

“All that I can experience of the universe with any degree of certainty is matter – for me it is the visible and tangible end of space.” - Paul Emsley

For Paul Emsley, all forms are made up of different configurations and densities over which light and shade pass in the same way. Emphasis on a brooding or settled half-light and extraordinary mastery of the medium lends Emsley’s work a profound sense of mystery.

The Official Art Poster Edition 2010 FIFA World CupTM

iArt Gallery is delighted to be collaborating with David Krut Publishing in illuminating the point at which sport, art and culture intersect: The Official Art Poster Edition 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ is an Official Licensed Product of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™.

view gallery of posters

1 - 14 March 2010
iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street

It is always with pleasure that we welcome Louis Jansen van Vuuren back to South Africa, and as refreshing as his sparkling presence is, so is this new body of work an honour to present.

Sub Rosa, while containing elements that Jansen van Vuuren’s audience has come to know and love, marks a turn in expression in which the pictorial plane is emptied, simplified and darkened and the execution and application of paint is vigorously intensified.

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read “Onder die blou roos”, by Melvyn Minnaar

3 - 25 February 2010
iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street

Gina Heyer, a Master of Fine Art student at Stellenbosch University, will have her first solo exhibition at iArt Gallery between 3 and 18 February 2010.

Comprising her body of Masters work, the exhibition is concerned with subtle metaphysical and uncanny aspects of seemingly ordinary and unoccupied interiors. Playing with tensions between absence and presence, Heyer paints moments of stasis between human comings and goings. These spaces are both real and imagined, in which one is not sure what has or is about to happen. Heyer achieves this mysterious effect through discreetly negotiating the boundaries between the concepts of reality, unreality, the sublime and the contemplative working with oils and glazes on board and on a small and intimate scale to draw the viewer in. The spaces are beautiful and calm but somewhat unnerving, temporary and strange. As the rooms are vessels for our bodies to inhabit, the paintings become chambers for the mind to contemplate.

read discussion by Vivian van der Merwe

27 January - 24 February 2010
iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art

This exhibition consists of a collection of drawings by Colijn Strydom, inspired by the artist’s obsessive response to Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Poppies in October”.

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15 December 2009 - 15 January 2010

A salon style group show featuring work by both renowned and upcoming South African artists.
New work by:
Matthew Hindley
Clare Menck
Louis Jansen van Vuuren and Zwelethu Mthethwa
Sam Nhlengethwa
Johan Angus
Gerald Tabata
Warren Editions
The Artist’s Press

Also included:
The Official Art Poster Edition 2010 FIFA World CupTM

2 December 2009 - 13 January 2010

“In his understated way, he depicts a painful psychological reality that his forbearers tried so hard to hide.”
- Hazel Friedman, Ventilator

This season, iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art will show ten paintings by Walter Meyer that have never before been shown. Some work has been kept from public view for years, while other work has been recently created. A fascinating journey through a South Africa seen through the eyes of one of the greatest landscape painters of our time.

You may also be interested in:
Coast / Kus
other work by Walter Meyer
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1 - 12 December

Where sport, art and culture intersect: The Official Art Poster Edition 2010 FIFA World Cup South AfricaTM is an Official Licensed Product of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South AfricaTM.

iArt Gallery is delighted to be collaborating with David Krut Publishing in exhibiting these posters at 71 Loop St, Cape Town, to coincide with the FIFA World Cup 2010 draw at the Cape Town Convention Centre on 4 December. The show will run from 1–12 December.

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11 November - 9 December 2009

Tactility: denial and desire is an exhibition made up predominantly of bronze sculpture by Cobus Haupt, with painting by Thomasin Dewhurst.

Cobus Haupt works figuratively in bronze, his primary concern being ample tactility in his work, through which he maintains and amplifies the delicate balance between the real and the symbolic in a tradition of production that has stood the test of time.

Thomasin Dewhurst focuses on theatrical figures - imagined characters in a performance that is intimate, confidential, exposed, with the audience’s response being one of wanting to possess the unpossessible. Similarly to Haupt, Dewhurst also advocates the great importance of traditional media such as painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture as contemporary art forms.

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Wilma Cruise’s highly acclaimed body of work – Cocks, Asses, & – consists of a large number of sculptures, etchings, drawings, and writing, which draw from various sources of inspiration, including the relationship between humans and animals, human interpersonal relationships and the process of making art. Primarily, though, Cruise admits to being inspired by what she calls the ‘gap between’:

‘People’s bodies might be saying one thing, but what’s coming out of their mouths might be saying another thing, and it’s that “body language” that I’m interested in…the space between bodies becomes pregnant with meaning and a kind of language.’

read Dr Gerhard Schoeman’s opening speech

In this body of work, Theo Kleynhans explores the inter-relatedness of our shared experience on this planet by presenting fragments on the picture plane. These visual clues are placed using formalist techniques – line, colour, texture, shape – to ensure pictorial balance. Ambiguity and mapping underscore these fragments that stand as remainders of an otherwise lost or destroyed whole. Each artwork cross-references each other artwork, communicating via fragments of known existing art works – much the same way as we communicate with each other using bits and pieces of our experience of the world that has developed as we wander through it.

“Living in an environment in which we are constantly bombarded with data I find solace in the images that have always re-assured me – perhaps just because they are known, but also because they mark certain developmental stages in my fine art career. I use text throughout in the form of old handwritten letters of which only fragments remain visible. These fragments communicate the essence of loss and the creation of new memories” (Kleynhans, October 2009).

This year, the Laerskool Jan van Riebeeck had its year-end art exhibition at iArt Gallery. Work by children in Grades 1 - 7 hung next to the work of established South African masters, such as Gerard Sekoto, Frieda Locke and Christo Coetzee - work lent to the gallery from the extensive private collection of Frank Kilbourne.

On the opening night, 5 November 2009, certain collaborative pieces created by Paul du Toit and the Grade 7 children were auctioned off, while the other work was available for parents and friends to buy, towards raising funds for the school. As can be seen in the pictures, the gallery looked fantastic and much fun was had by all at the opening event. Much happy viewing also ensued over the week in which the artwork remained on show.

30 October – 6 November

Showing in a whistle-stop time frame at iArt Gallery Wembley, if you go down to the subway today is a collection of work that takes a brief, tongue-in-cheek look at the idea of the human animal. One wall of the space has been pasted with posters, creating a setting reminiscent a subway station or sheltering under a bridge. Within this fundamentally urban setting, strange creatures emerge. An inebriated hare leans unsteadily against a wall while another flies overhead. Leaves and feathers cast in bronze are scattered upward in a gust of wind, accompanied in their flight by fish out of water swimming along the airwaves.

Though this collection of work has a generally light-hearted attitude, it raises significant imaginative issues around high-density living and an increasingly common desire to lean away from a high-speed metropolitan existence in order to live “closer to the earth” in the face of accelerating ecological concerns.

Participating artists:
Carla Crafford, Guy du Toit, Sarel Petrus, Wilma Cruise, Audrey Anderson, Igsaan Martin

22 October - 4 November

XI – Eleven Solo Exhibitions is exactly that: eleven bodies of work by eleven different artists, all shown in one gallery simultaneously.

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UPPER GALLERY:
Matthew Hindley: Blackout
Eris Silke: Icons
Louis Jansen van Vuuren: Oneiric Tones
Clare Menck: Woman painting women

LOWER GALLERY:
Colbert Mashile: Act IX: Scene I
Jan du Toit: The Interior as Self Portrait: The Self Portrait as Interior
Michele Davidson: Sugar Coated Reality
Audrey Anderson: Thinking inside the box
Gerald Tabata: Elusindisweni (Savlation)
Sandra Hanekom: Saintly Fools and Foolish Saints
Theo Kleynhans: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Hungarian by birth and Jewish by upbringing, Eris Silke’s character is difficult to overlook when viewing her captivating work. As a self-taught artist, Silke is not bound to or limited by any particular theoretical strain, but draws her inspiration from highly sensitive analyses of the world around her, including those aspects that are borne of the imagination.

Though her images are often shadowy, one is never drawn to question the integrity of her work. Silke describes her artistic motive in general terms: ‘Art has got to communicate real feeling. In dealing with the dark side of experience, art can be wild, but it should not be empty. In other words, you can show death, but you have to be on the side of life.’

Silke attributes her Victorian imagery to a childhood spent in books. Silke’s family fled a war-torn Europe when she was a young girl and settled in Israel. Being an only child and finding herself in a desert landscape which did not appeal to her creative sensibility, Silke found sanctuary for many years in the offerings of the public library. In her mind, Silke remained in Europe – the Europe of 1930s novels. The sentiments of humanism and of fine literature that she grew up on have remained with Silke throughout her life, guiding her in her art to be always on the side of the innocent. ‘The aim of my art is to communicate vulnerability according to the moral tradition of the world. I have little time for those who are not caring creatures – we can grow from, but never conceal, morality.’

For this exhibition Silke has produced a series of works that contain images and personalities that have contributed (both in her personal and imaginative existence and in the wider world) to her belief in maintaining love and sincerity in life and art.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

The title of the large work Woman contemplating her thirties / The yellow teapot (seen behind the artist in her portrait) summarises the contemplative exploration of mood and female psychology in this body of work consisting entirely of female nudes. ‘In this particular work, the warm glow of the startling red interior seen to the left in the doorway contrasts strikingly with the more sober greys and greens of the interior occupied by the nude. Significantly, she stands next to the old-fashioned painted kitchen dresser in the recess created by the corner of the room (and at the edge of the composition)
and covered largely by the shadow falling from the cupboard. Her entire attitude is one of wistfulness and pensiveness, perhaps regret, if that is not too strong an emotion, and she clearly occupies a different space, yet well aware of the warmth of the glowing interior next door and the erotic content hereby suggested’.

Menck’s series of swimmers originated from a visit by the artist to the Florisbad archeological precinct outside Bloemfontein. This is the place where the world-famous Florisbad Man (skull) was discovered in the 1930s, an important step in the worldwide race to figure out the evolutionary jigsawpuzzle of the origins of humankind. The actual site was subsequently turned into an interior swimming pool on account of the naturally warm spring well at its source and was last used as a holiday resort and spa in the 1970s.

The whole place has the uncanny derelict feel of a typical South African holiday resort (“Whites Only”) from that time. It has been abandoned and become obsolete – completely unchanged to date bar the activities of a few lone archeologists continuing important research – as if the clock was stopped. Swimming in the exact place where the famous head was found, with the warm mineral water bubbling up from the natural fountains in the bed of sand below, was a particularly poignant experience that moved Menck to encapsulate it in this series of self-portraits (one including the artist’s daughter). The personal tradition of the artist to continually paint selfportraits throughout her life, gives these works a special place in Menck’s output.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

In this series of seven paintings in oil on canvas, artist Jan Du Toit explores the theme of self portraiture in his own domestic setting. The mood in these works is pensive and self-reflective, his own human presence being surrounded by familiar objects which in turn reflect his autobiography to date. Many of these objects are in fact works by other artists with whom he has been in contact and who have in some cases served as his role-models.

Growing up in Tulbagh, Du Toit was inspired by the work and personality of Christo Coetzee (1929-2000), a number of whose works are seen in these paintings. Du Toit admired the facility with which Coetzee was able to make paintings. Another artist whose work is reflected here is that of Johannes Meintjes (1923-1980), a pioneering gay artist, whose works are filled with a
romantic nostalgia. Meintjes was also an authority on early Cape heritage, furniture and history. Du Toit has long admired the creative aspects of this early furniture and the aesthetic role it played in people’s lives in early, pre-industrial times.

Using himself as subject within the aesthetic structure of his own intimate spaces with paintings, furniture and ceramics, Du Toit creates a series of self portraits that are arrested moments in the life of an artist. What is seen in these paintings will be subjected to further creative change. Additions and subtractions will be made as the artist’s life is creatively lived and experienced.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

In this exhibition, Colbert Mashile looks back on his professional career as a dramatic endeavour. Titled Act IX: Scene I, referring to Mashile’s ninth year as a practising artist, the exhibition is made up exclusively of work created in 2009.

Mashile has become known for his particular style of local surrealism. Despite Mashile being pinpointed as the mouth-piece for issues around Sotho traditional circumcision rites, the label has become obsolete as an all-purpose interpretation as Mashile moves forward. Over the years, his imagery has developed into a sophisticated language developed via Mashile’s journey’s into deep imagination.

Writing of Colbert Mashile’s work in 2008, Virginia MacKenny referred to ‘elements one can recognise, but not always identify. Creatures with strangely featured heads and often amorphous bodies populate his landscapes and, while many of the images … have an almost graphic directness about their intent, others … remain difficult to interpret.’¹ Despite the bizarre nature of his subject matter, Mashile declines to offer any direct interpretation of his own work, preferring to leave the viewer to fly solo into his/her own imagination in order to locate potential meanings.

However, in this collection of unique and editioned work Mashile has taken a turn towards the figurative. Reminiscent of script dialogue, the work reads as a story pieced together using figures that are predominantly recognisable. Without abandoning surreal elements altogether, Mashile deftly employs anthropomorphism in order to achieve a remarkable mix of sharp satire and obscure personal references.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

In this body of work, Matthew Hindley expands his ongoing exploration of the subtle tendencies of individuals toward humane darkness. In these paintings, the studio becomes the platform from which a potential creative utopia can be developed. The studio is a Freudian id zone, so to speak, in which the term ‘blackout’ suggests an event of loss – of consciousness, light, power, sanity. In the dark the same rules may not necessarily apply as in the light and bonds between people can be created and strengthened through unhindered exploration of those things which the conscious mind chooses generally to ignore, forcing such desires into the realm of dreams.

Hindley does not, however, descend into circular motions of Freudian psychoanalysis. A brief investigation of the word “blackout” in popular culture reveals a ubiquity in music, fiction and film. In theatre, the term is
used to denote a killing of stage lights either at the end of a scene or for
particular dramatic effect.

Hence, Hindley’s compositions are reminiscent of actors frozen in the middle of a rehearsal, or still frames extracted from film footage. Hindley has not taken a purely authorial stance in the development of his creative utopia, appearing as subject and character in many of the works. In this sense, Hindley’s own act of painting serves not only as a recording of the scenes played out, but also as an extension of the performance itself. Remaining diligently figurative, Hindley explores the richness of the colour black, creating visual planes as darkly exhilarating as the fundamental schizophrenia of confronting issues of identity, sexuality and death.

Read Matthew Hindley’s biography

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

This body of work has grown from a seed of inspiration that presented itself to Kleynhans in the form of a bale of imported second-hand clothing during some time he spent recently in Zambia. On the streets of Zambia, it is not difficult to find such a bale, which can be bought without knowing what is inside and then re-sold on the very same streets. Owing to this accepted practice of buying blind, Kleynhans began to see these bales as a symbol of deceit – to be forced to pay for something without any kind of guarantee that what you are buying will be re-sellable at all. From the first image of the bale, and in his typical style, Kleynhans embarked on a journey of imaginative associations that ranged from the well-loved comic strip character, Tin Tin, to the story of Babel, to the activity of dropping bales of food or clothes from planes into areas fraught with famine or civil war, to the schoolboy’s punishment-avoidance tactic of crying out, “The Devil made me do it, Miss!” And so he arrived at the image of his devils, which he describes as ‘the devils of small irritations…designed to be a gentle tongue firmly in the collective cheek of devils.’

Expanding his humourous take on disaster, Kleynhans has drawn the conclusion that ‘as soon as something goes wrong anywhere there is a self-help guru ready to take charge and guide you through the seven steps to fabulosity’. Hence, the counterpart to the group of devils consists of 33 ceramic plates, inscribed with platitudes of which any self-respecting self-help manual could be proud. Kleynhans’ view is that most people, not least himself, feel quite beleaguered by the overwhelming ubiquity of ‘aspirational tweeness’ on the one hand and potential disaster on the other. And so, speaking on behalf of many, he finds himself quite literally stranded between the devil and the deep blue sea.

There are 33 plates and 11 devils on exhibition:

DEVILS (R4 000 each):
Masked Devil
Nudist Devil
Overinsured Devil
Bad Hair Devil
Diabetes Devil
Do-it-yourself Devil
Holey Devil
Tikoloshe Devil
Old Money Devil
Dangerous Love Devil
Horny Devil

PLATES (R1 900 each):
Only begin
Ex Africa semper alquid novi
Wherever you go, there you are
It’s your lucky day today
More is more
Time brings everything
As above so below
I was born under a lucky star
I feel good
Every man and every woman is a star
I am calm
I am wealthy
What we think, we become
Reality is an illusion
It’s just a point in time
You can do it
Good fortune
Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.
This, too, shall pass
Well done is better than well said
Strike it rich
Be a traveller not a tourist
I am never alone
Even when you experience particle, know that it is wave
You’ve got the money
Bigger is better
Keep breathing
Truth is within ourselves
All is good
Less is more
You can’t go to heaven until you invent it
All’s well that ends well
Caput mortuum

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

Gerald Tabata lives in the township of Kayelitsha, located in the Cape Flats – an area infamous for its violence and poverty. Tabata believes it is his duty (and the duty of all artists) to utilise his work as an instrument to call attention to social issues, of which the most pressing in Kayelitsha currently are high levels of unemployment, poverty, poor housing, crime and HIV/AIDS. In documenting his response to these issues, Tabata has made of himself a mouthpiece for the concerns of his community and a mentor to fellow artists.

However, Tabata’s work is not the visual agitprop that usually follows such a declaration. Rather, Tabata paints people who continue to live, work and, indeed, play in the face of social and economic adversity. For this body of work, entitled Elusindisweni – meaning both “church” and “salvation” – Tabata has chosen to document the religious component of Kayelitsha society. Tightly composed and crowded frames, these paintings feature characters documented over time, an item of clothing or compositional repetition hinting at the presence of the same figures in more than one painting. The story that develops is about a group of people in the township who have found comfort and hope in the concept of Christianity, but also (and not less so) in gregarious intimacy shared with fellow worshippers. Metaphoric elements emphasise Tabata’s point: ‘In some of the paintings there are candles in the far corner on top of the table. The candles are symbolic of a light at the end of a dark tunnel. There is also a person beating igubu (drums) – another ancient African way of celebrating and worshipping God.’

A sharp response to the formulaic iconage of 1950s “township” art, Tabata’s strong characterisation and capacity to create movement allows his work to speak, sincerely, for itself.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

Saintly Fools and Foolish Saints is built primarily around the frail boundaries that divide the genius from the idiot, the hero from the coward, the sane from the mad and the saint from the fool. It is a series of works that try to conceive of and reflect on the experimental derangement of living a life.

Of this work, and of her general artistic practice, Hanekom has stated:
‘I try to avoid the spectroscopic brutalities of habitual intellectualism in my artwork. Rather, I opt to create a type of visual lyricism that develops an artwork more dependent on imagery and suggestion than intellectual clarity and superciliousness. I do not enjoy the exaggerated intellectualism of some contemporary theories. To me, unconstrained servitude to the intellectual is the pathogen of contemporary art.’

Hanekom says that she ‘tends to err on the side of the subjective’ and prefers ‘to indulge in the destructive maladies of subjective humanity rather than create work that relies on mere theoretic exhibitionism.’ The artworks that still intrigue, charm, fascinate and enchant her display ‘the capriciousness of individual sentiment. I feel that complete comprehension of an artwork defeats the aim of the artist. I have the audacity and candour to expect an artwork to seduce me on an illogical and purely emotional level.’

Hanekom’s artworks are lived, the final product displaying the unique properties of the artist’s own hand and individual emotional tangibility.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

Audrey Anderson is a painter who is influenced by elements in the vast landscape of the arts that tend to blur the distinction between fine and graphic art – a breakdown with which the traditional perception of “fine art” is becoming increasingly comfortable.

Anderson is fascinated with the use of simple techniques of formalism in comic and graphic novel media. In her work, stylised figuration combined with a contemporary audience’s affinity to ubiquitous popular media images creates a potential for optimal emotional impact. For this exhibition, Anderson has created an installation that is, in effect, a walk-in graphic novel. Instead of creating a manuscript in the real she has chosen to approach the gallery space as a book. In other words, the gallery space, hung with work, can be read as a story that begins to develop once the viewer steps into it. Anderson’s particular story is set in urban Pretoria and visually “narrated” from two separate points of view: one of a young Indian male and the other a young white male. As these characters rove through their separate narratives, each creates his own data body. As the two figures’ separate stories unfold, their counter-opposite identities are revealed as fuel for the development of
each character.

Further to this, and true to post-modern critical tendencies, Anderson offers two texts towards the deciphering of these identities: Dante’s Inferno, written in the fourteenth century, and Chuck Palahniuk’s contemporary cult classic, Fight Club. The three paintings featured here serve as a foreword to the story and introduction to the body of work, which in turn serves as an urban decoding of two identities.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

‘Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn’t, of what one doesn’t know. If one of the purposes of life is to know oneself, then a great deal of time is pent investigating things one already knows. So a great drawing is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace, or probing authoritatively the unknown.’
– Brett Whiteley. Tangiers notebook,1967

The series of works embody a visual exploration around a central evocative theme, culminating in a sequence of monochrome charcoal works and larger format colour pastel drawings.

Back to XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

2 - 17 October

A collection of original art posters created by Carla Crafford will be on show alongside work from the artist featured in the posters. A talented photographer, Carla began a journey of collaborative exploration over 20 years ago pursuing a fascination with the visual conversations made possible through photographing the work of other artists, particularly sculptors. An exhibition inspired by POSTER theft serves in part as a culmination of these years of work. In juxtaposing the artwork and the photograph of the artwork, the poster as an art object in its own right is highlighted. So too is the intimate and meandering
nature of creative collaboration made clear through the often touching, always powerful, images borne of this ongoing work.

Artists whose work will be on show include:
Diane Victor, Berco Wilsenach, Cobus Haupt, Pieter Swanepoel, Eric Duplan, Magdel Fourie, Guy du Toit, Wilma Cruise, Gordon Froud, Johann Moolman, Sarel Petrus, Egon Tania, Ladiné Joubert, Erna Bodenstein-Ferreira, Curt Fors and Jan van der Merwe.

Read Artist’s Statement

POSTERS by CARLA CRAFFORD:
A0 (laminated)
Digital print on Epson heavy-coated paper, Edition size: 3, R3 420 (incl. VAT)
A1 (unframed)
Digital print on PM230 paper, Edition size: 10, R1 710 (incl. VAT)
A2 (framed)
Digital print on Epson fine art paper, Artist’s proofs, R855 (incl. VAT)
A3 (framed)
Digital print on Epson fine art paper, Artist’s proof, R615 (incl. VAT)
A3 (unframed)
Digital print on archival matte paper, Edition size: 50, R400 (incl. VAT)

2 - 28 October

This exhibition provides a retrospective view of Colbert Mashile’s work on paper, between 2004 and 2009.

Colbert Mashile has been heralded as a contemporary African surrealist of sorts. His imagery has developed over the years into a sophisticated language of symbols and characters that are, although often almost recognisable, drawn completely from journeys into deep imagination. Mashile declines to offer any direct interpretation of his own work, and so viewers are left to cast around for visual affinities in order to decipher his artistic code.

When the stream of attention from writers and critics began around 2000, Mashile was almost completely pre-occupied with his own responses to the experience of the male circumcision ritual undergone by boys from the Mapulana clan of the Northern Sotho tribe before they reach their teens. Mashile attributes much of the imagery in his early work to his attempt to confront the horror and trauma of this event. The time Mashile spent living in Johannesburg had similar dark effects on his work. However, once re-located to Bushbuckridge, a rural setting in which he was able to experience his home landscape in a more direct way and live with a greater sense of peace, his work began to take on different and lighter forms.

Looking at work selected from over the years exposes interesting shifts in the artist’s modus operandi: from the ‘psychological images of phallic towers, cowrie shells, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms, huddled crowds, whispers and an ominous secrecy’ cited by Kate McCrickard in Mashile’s early work, to a shift toward figuration and subtle development in colour palette in more recent years.

9 - 23 September

A selection of new work on show.
Please email us for more information.

Read artist’s statement
Profile by Sean O’Toole
View earlier artwork by Richard Smith

In this body of work Hindley responds to the influence of his time spent in Berlin, taking on the monumental scale of the German master Adolf von Menzel. The scenes depicted take on a cinematographic reality.

True to his long-term fascination with cult-hero status and the power of pop celebrity, Hindley has titled the works with lyrics from pop princess Britney Spears’ latest album. Read together, the paintings form a lilting, uneasy dialogue – a multi-faceted narrative that is as lyrical as it is unsettling.

Hindley’s characters are recognisable from painting to painting, brought to life on his large-format worksurfaces to face different enigmas in each composition. Hindley’s paintings produce the strange sensation of being simultaneously watched and watched over. The viewer-turned-voyeur is caught witnessing private or intimate moments between larger-than-life characters whose story is underscored by a nuanced darkness. In the same disquieted moment, one is overcome with a sense of reassurance for the fact that this darkness is one that sits at the base of our humanity and a kind to which each of us can relate.

REVIEW Dramatic storyteller uses the medium of paint

Read Matthew Hindley’s biography
The Art of Making Artworks On An iPhone
Matthew Hindley - Blackout
Matthew Hindley

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15 - 29 July 2009

The Creative Block is an inspirational outlet for some of South Africa’s established contemporary artists, as well as a platform for fresh local talent.

Creative Block collectors are invited to become part of the creative process by grouping a number of artworks together. The collector’s choices become vital to the visual impact of each art piece.

The Creative Block is an initiative of the COEO art collaborative, headed by Jeanetta Blignaut, which leads original collaborative projects with South Africa’s emerging artists. Initiating projects that energize, immerse cultures, challenge stereotypes and break boundaries in thinking.

11 June - 1 July 2009

ARTISTS EXHIBITING
Deborah Bell, Wilma Cruise, Ricky Dyaloyi, Liza Grobler, Paul Emmanuel, Paul Emsley, Ruhan Janse van Vuuren, Louis Jansen van Vuuren, Anton Karstel, William Kentridge, Adam Letch, Johann Louw, Colbert Mashile, Judith Mason, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Sam Nhlengethwa, Claudette Schreuders, Eris Silke, Penny Siopis, Richard Smith, Kathryn Smith, Gerald Tabata.

Press Release

3 - 5 April 2009

ARTISTS:
Paul Emsley, John Walters, Jan van der Merwe, Colbert Mashile, Clare Menck, Wilma Cruise, Marlis Keith, Gerald Tabata.

27 February - 12 March 2009

The Sanlam Art Collection, established in 1965, is one of South Africa’s finest collections of South African Art. With holdings of more than 2000 items by some of South Africa’s most valued and emerging artists the collection provides a representative overview of South African art dating from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sanlam continues to acquire works by South African artists to broaden the representative character of the collection.

4 December 2008 - 30 January 2009

iArt Gallery’s exhibition of selected works featuring some of South Africa’s most prominent artists, as well as up and coming talent. Kate Gottgens, Gerald Tabata, Kelly Higgs, Hanneke Benade and Jan du Toit, amongst others, can be seen along side Johann Louw, Sam Nhlengethwa, Colbert Mashile, William Kentridge, Paul Emsely, Diane Victor, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Louis Jansen van Vuuren. This diverse range of artistic talent promises to produce a memorable show that should not be missed.

21 November - 4 December 2008

Generally known as a landscape painter, Walter Meyer produced a series of sea scapes over the previous two years. This exhibition showcased these unique works which will, no doubt, be of special significance in the future.

July - 31 October 2008

Thirteen life size works made over time with the earliest dating from 1999 and the most recent 2008 by Tshwane University of Technology lecturer Jan van der Merwe reveal his ongoing preoccupation with universally relevant issues such as power, responsibility and violence.
- Veronica Wilkonson

Read Veronica Wilkinson’s review

9 - 23 April 2008

‘Muse-08 creates a unique opportunity in social documentation by celebrating the lives of individuals who have shaped South African culture through the visual arts, performing arts and new media. Poets and patrons, visionaries and villains, actors and activists, all who play prominent roles in South African Arts and Culture have been captured on paper and canvas by our country’s leading artists.’
- Elana Brundyn, Founding owner, iArt Gallery

Read Brian Berkman’s review

30 November 2007 - 15 January 2008

Longtime friends and renowned South African artists, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Louis Jansen van Vuuren, joined forces in 2007 for a collaborative exhibition.

While the collaboration attempts to enhance an inherent concept through points of confluence and visual dialogue, it simultaneously addresses contrasting points between the styles of Mthethwa, a Zulu, and Jansen van Vuuren, an Afrikaaner now living in France, in a manner that celebrates their differing backgrounds, their common heritage as South Africans and, above all else, their unique friendship.

Below is a selection of the artworks exhibited.

Press release

Anton Karstel, born 1968 in Pretoria, holds BA Fine Art (1990) and M A Fine Art (1995) degrees from the University of Pretoria. He began exhibiting on group shows in 1993 in an exhibition entitled REAL ART at the ICA in Johannesburg. Since then, he has exhibited on many group and solo shows, including Too Close for Comfort at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in Johannesburg in 1997, Wonderful South Africa at the Millennium Gallery in Pretoria and Pol-Aesthetic at the Civic Gallery in Johannesburg in 1998, and Extract at Joao Ferreira Fine Art in Cape Town in 2001. Karstel currently lives and works in Cape Town.

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William Kentridge is undoubtedly the best known South African artist, currently in demand by major institutions all over the world. He is perhaps best known for his films, theatre, and opera, but he is also a prolific producer of limited edition fine art prints which are as varied and complex as his films. A prolific and highly energetic creator, Kentridge has deployed work in a number of media into an oeuvre of astounding depth.
Of his work, Kentridge has said: “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.”

William Kentridge is a South African artist. He was born in Johannesburg in 1955. He took a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and then a diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. At the beginning of the 1980s, he studied mime and theatre at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. William Kentridge received the Carnegie Medal for the Carnegie International 1999/2000; the Goslar Kaisserring in 2003; and the Oskar Kokoschka Award (2008). He has received honorary doctorates from a number of universities internationally. He lives and works in Johannesburg.

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Louis Jansen van Vuuren is a South African artist who is primarily concerned with the tradition of Still Life painting.

Louis Jansen van Vuuren was born and educated in South Africa. He graduated with a degree in Creative Arts and and an Honours Degree (Cum Laude) in History of Art from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He has been an art educator and a practicing artist for forty years. Van Vuuren has had more than eighty exhibitions in South Africa, Europe and America and has works in Museums, Corporate and Private Collections throughout the world. In 1998, he retired from his academic post at the University of Cape Town’s Art School and now lives in the Limousin Region of France.

In 2007, Louis Jansen van Vuuren and Zwelethu Mthethwa produced a series of works in collaboration. The body of work was shown at iArt Gallery and was very well-recieved.

Between Us / Entre Nous / Phakathi Kwethu
XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

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Ruhan Janse van Vuuren works with the Human figure as a vestigial sign. His voice is fresh within the South African art scene as he strips away the parameters that define the young Afrikaner. Working within the parameter of Afrikaner stereotypes the individual becomes representative of the whole and Janse van Vuuren manages a transition from stereotype to archetype with aesthetic grace. He builds an Afrikaner mythology of mundanity that echoes a realism of social profundity. He makes use of models showing the human condition of the imperfect. Leaving the material unpolished, broken and with rough surfaces he tries to give true meaning to the material used.

Ruhan Janse van Vuuren has participated in various group exhibitions in Gauteng and the Western Cape, and in 2004 was the winner of the Technical Excellence in Concrete Sculpture category of the PPC Young Concrete Sculptor Awards.

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Louw’s paintings, oils executed with economy of colour and tone, are mostly untitled and explore anonymous, non-specific male figures in shades of grey, red and pale yellow. They become increasingly more abstract as he grapples with the threatening domain of psychological and political menace and intrigue, all the more frightening in its absence of specified time and place. Louw’s more recent work broadens his metaphoric use of images to include scenes derived from the austere landscape of the central Karoo.

Louw holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Stellenbosch. He has lectured in painting at Stellenbosch University and later taught at the Foundation School of Art in Observatory. His works hang in significant private and public collections in South Africa and abroad.

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“A self-proclaimed “optimistic old sod”, Robert Hodgins once described painting to be a “a bit like surfing” in that a good deal of time is spent bobbing about, waiting for the right wave to come along…Another Hodgins maxim is that “subject matter is not content”. Art is an “auto-intoxication that allows one to live through marriages, divorces, deaths and unhappy love affairs, and come up smiling all the time”. Brenda Atkinson has noted Hodgins’ distinctive “British post-war vision”. His familiar icons of malevolent businessmen in pinstriped suits, prison cells, historical references and political tyrants still reappear, both tempered and aggravated by his mastery of colour and texture which sensitively negotiate the terrain between seriousness and sombreness.”
Kathryn Smith, 2000.

Robert Hodgins was born in Dulwich, London, in 1920, and immigrated to South Africa in 1938. In 1944 he returned to England, and studied art and education at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, where he received an arts and crafts certificate in 1951 and a National Diploma of Design in painting in 1953. He returned to South Africa, where he taught at the Pretoria Technical College School of Art from 1954. From 1962 he was a journalist and critic for Newscheck magazine. He lectured in painting at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1966 to 1983.

In 1983, he retired to paint full-time. He has partaken in many solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad. His work can be seen in many galleries, corporate and public collections, including Anglo American, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Sandton Art Gallery, the Pretoria Art Museum, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, University of South Africa (UNISA), the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, and the William Humphries Art Gallery in Kimberley.

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Diane McLean is a South African artist who works mainly in oils, gouaches and pastels, and her subject matter ranges from portraits and nudes to landscapes, architectural studies, and still life. Her work is primarily figurative but with a strong atmospheric quality achieved by the use of muted colour.

Diane McLean was born in 1963 at Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rhodes University in 1984, with distinction in Painting, followed in 1987 by her Master of Fine Arts from the same institution. She has participated in approximately 60 group exhibitions since 1984, including selection for major national exhibitions. Her work is to be found in private, public and corporate collections in South Africa. She also has work in private collections in France, Portugal, UK, Australia, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Greece, Spain and USA.

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“[Walter Meyer] is widely celebrated as possibly the finest painter of distinctly South African landscapes that this country has yet produced.”
- Ivor Powell, The Sunday Times

“In his understated way, he depicts a painful psychological reality that his forbearers tried so hard to hide.”
- Hazel Friedman, Ventilator

Walter Meyer was born on 31 January 1965 in Aliwal North, South Africa, and lives in the town of Upington in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the University of Pretoria and spent some years studying at the “Staatliche Kunstakademie’ in Dusseldorf. He has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad, and has recieved a number of awards, including the ‘New Signatures’ award for Painting and Drawing in 1984 and 1987 respectively.

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BACK TO Zwelethu Mthethwa

Mary-Rose Hendrikse’s work reflects an ongoing preoccupation with the human face, its corporeal and psychological expressions. Hendrikse embraces the inherently volatile language of oil paint and rebels against the urge to subdue it as is often seen in traditional portraiture.

Mary-Rose Hendrikse (b 1963) completed her Batchelor of fine arts at the university of South Africa in 1998 and has gone on to exhibit nationally and internationally.

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“Cobus Haupt’s beautiful figure studies of ordinary people cast in bronze and cement, is a perfect example of the ambivalent relationship that exists in art between reality and representation. His subjects are culled from everyday acquaintances and, in the classic tradition of western figurative sculpture, are first made into scale-accurate clay renditions of the model – flaws and all. For Haupt, the casting process (and its various stages such as moulding, drawing waxes and even the welding on the final bronze) is not just a form of replication but an intrinsic part of the final artwork. And so each new process leaves its mark on the sculpture.”
- Johan Thom

Cobus Haupt (b. 1976) graduated with a B.Tech Fine Arts from the Technikon Pretoria in 1999 and is a full-time sculptor based in Pretoria.

Tactility: denial and desire

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Bead artworks were the outcome of two workshops lead by Mandla Vanyaza and Liza Grobler at the Qalo Beadwork Studio.

The workshop that Liza guided was an introduction to the relationship that exist between IMAGE and TEXT, to illustrate how words can translate into visuals and to explore how one can use pictures to tell stories. Three frames drawn by the bead artists communicated an incident from each their personal experiences. These frames were then combined into a single artwork.

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South African artist Liza Grobler’s visual research is a conversation between image, language and daily life that incorporates bright colours and diverse materials. She often collaborates with other artists and/or groups, such as the Qalo Beadwork Studio. Grobler’s idiosyncratic and diaristic pictorial vocabulary is capable of evoking a sense of a real individual life at the same time that it invokes matters of iconic status and general human interest - self-image and exploration, sexuality, confidence and vulnerability, professional ambitions and creative aspirations, idealism and cynicism, love and marriage.

Since receiving her Masters Degree in Fine Art with distinction from Stellenbosch University (1999), Grobler has had six solo shows and partaken in numerous group shows locally as well as in internationally.She is a part-time lecturer in Drawing at the UCT School of Architecture and an art critic for Die Burger. She lives and works in Cape Town with her husband Norman O’Flynn and son, Storm.

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” [Sam] Nhlengethwa is an artist curious about the intimacies of home, an artist drawn to the immediacy of his surroundings, and - importantly - an artist whose work has sometimes reflected upon the epochal moments defining recent South African history … Renowned for his collage cut-ups, Sam Nhlengethwa’s use of photomontage is noteworthy for its restraint.”
- Sean O’Toole, 2003

Sam Nhlengethwa was born in 1955, in Payneville, Springs, a mining community situated a short distance east of Johannesburg. Between 1977 and 1978 he completed a two year Fine Art Diploma at the Rorkes Drift Art Centre, after which he has exhibited extensively across the globe. He stands today as one of South Africa’s finest pioneer black artists.

Summer in the City

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Claudette Schreuders creates carved and painted wooden figures that reflect the ambiguities of the search for an ‘African’ identity in the post-apartheid 21st century … Her figures demonstrate a hybrid canon influenced by the blolo and colon figures of West Africa, as well as other stylistic input from medieval church sculpture, Spanish portraiture and Egyptian woodcarving … Schreuders’ figures are essentially modern deities for modern problems, taking with them the blolo figures’ potential to ‘cure’, as well as engaging with issues around foreignness and hostility and the means we use to create a space for ourselves in a perceived ‘alien’ environment.”
- Sue Williamson, 2000

Schreuders was born in 1973 in Pretoria and lives in Cape Town. She graduated with a BA(FA) from the University of Stellenbosch in 1994 and obtained her M.F.A. degree from the University of Cape Town in 1997. She has had a number of group and solo exhibitions in South Africa. Her work has appeared in prominent international art museums around the globe.

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“The work I have been engaged with over the past five years consists of large portraits and multi-panel drawings in charcoal and mixed media on paper. The portraits are of people who are real and people imagined. Because of their size I invariably arrive at an image that has enormous power … The next step in the process is to “rob” them of their power. I interfere with them by placing objects, symbols, cartoon images or icons on a grid in front of them. This brings an added dimension to the work and sets up a tension between the subject and the icons placed in front of it.”
Richard Smith, 2009

Richard Smith was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947. He has had a varied career as a cartoonist, social commentator, illustrator and fine artist. Smith has exhibited widely both in South Africa and abroad.

Richard Smith: NEW WORK

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Artworks available by Jan du Toit.

XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

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Martie Strydom is a painter who employs primarily the medium of oil on canvas. Her main concern is representation of the body, which she does with a particular sensitivity to corporeality and the influence of changing light on a subject. Recently, she has moved into the tradition of landscape painting, which she executes with equal sensitivity, though the body remains a subject to which she returns consistently.

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“I paint figurative work in a representative and somewhat expressive style. I am interested in (after Bacon and Freud) how painting that gives an illusion of external reality can often induce powerful tactile sensations in the viewer. Through a particular painting process, during which the artist responds in a bodily way to viewed objects, a certain textural paint mark can be produced. This is true of my own painting process, and, when achieved, makes the difference between a merely clever work and a truly passionate one.”
- Thomasin Dewhurst

Thomasin Dewhurst is a South African artist currently based in the United State of America. She graduated with a Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Witwatersrand in 1999, after which she has focussed full-time in her painting with the result of being exhibited extensively both internationally and abroad.

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Atmosphere is central to Jaco Van Schalkwyk’s paintings. The theoretical play of light and shadows is more important to him than the subject matter. He finds inspiration in his South African surroundings and especially in wild and domesticated animals. By creating a sense of movement he endeavours to portray the character and mood of the subject matter.

Van Schalkwyk has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad and he is represented in several collections. At present, the artist is working with fellow artist Marié Vermeulen-Breedt, while studying towards his Bachelor’s degree in Art History at the University of South Africa.

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“Adriaan will best be remembered for his analytical approach to painting and his melancholic interpretation of South African landscapes, often barren but always devoid of human presence. His last body of work featured a series of paintings depicting stills from the interior of Tygerberg Hospital, the sterile institution often juxtaposed with foreboding imagery of the ocean.”
- Sanell Aggenbach

Adrian van Zyl was a prolific South African artist and educator, who passed away in 2006, one week after his 49th birthday.

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Of her work, Grace da Costa has said: ‘The exploration of the plastic qualities of the medium, be it oil or wax, is important. Contradiction, the play between realism and abstract, impasto and glazes, light and dark, brutal and sensitive, textures, sensuality, mood and emotions. Some works are easy, others a struggle - one thing leading to the next, until the whole appears.

Da Costa qualified and worked as a Graphic Designer for 18 years. She started painting and sculpting in protest against the restrictions imposed by computer technology. Her works form part of collections locally and abroad and have been exhibited in various galleries.

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Gerald Tabata is a fresh artist who draws inspiration from his immediate environment. Working in a sophisticated, painterly technique and thoughtful in his use of colour, Tabata is concerned primarily with evoking the mood and atmosphere of the scenes that he depicts, which are inextricably bound to South African township culture.

XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions
Summer in the City

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Cyril Coetzee is a largely figurative artist with roots in both European and African traditions. In his multi-layered, emblematic and chromatically rich oil paintings he explores a deep interest in the meeting and cross-pollination of cultures, beliefs, mythologies and histories. Both intensely personal, yet often reflecting contemporary social events and concerns, his works make striking use of the human figure as a vehicle of expression and, sometimes, parodic comment - aspects related to his ongoing interest in portraiture.

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Hardy Botha’s time spent working in a circus as a scenery designer and later as a clown has been a lasting influence on his painting. His work is colourful and fantastically playful, posessing all the dreamlike qaulities of Surrealism but minus the often disturbing underbelly.

Botha recieved a Diploma in Fine Art in 1967. Since then he has been exhibited both locally and internationally.

‘Conrad Botes considers himself to be a comic artist, and even though he may digress into making paintings on glass, or handsome and brilliant objects of furniture and lights, it is the jagged graphic line, the searingly acid, iconoclastic storyline which cuts to the heart of the sacred cows of Afrikaner culture which turn him on artistically.’ - Sue Williamson

Conrad Botes was born in Ladysmith in the Western Cape in 1969. Botes read for both his Bachelor and Master of Fine Art degrees, as well as a diploma in Illustration, at the University of Stellenbosch. Botes has been shown both locally and internationally and is a founding member of Bitterkomix, a collaboration with fellow artist Anton Kannemeyer.

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Deborah Bell, a leading Johannesburg artist, is concerned fundamentally with a personal search for the ‘Self’ and she often draws on spiritual imagery from a wide range of sources. This continuity of form and content within Bell’s opus allows the possible meanings within her work to reach beyond the personal search of the artist herself. Bell works in a number of mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking, animation and ceramic sculpture.

She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1957. Bell received her B.A., B.A.(Hons) and M.F.A. degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand and has since lectured at various tertiary institutions, including the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa. She has travelled extensively in North America and Europe, but is now based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Aldo Balding is a talented painter who focuses mainly on portraiture in the traditional sense. His paintings also often depict scenes of European influence that are romantic in their tone and painterly style. Of Aldo’s work, Brian Swell has said: “Aldo Balding gives us an informal image with the weight of a formal portrait, neatly emphatic where it matters.”

Aldo Balding lives and works in Europe.

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Through his paintings Phillip Badenhorst attempts to delve into the subconscious workings of the mind, with regards especially to emotional and intuitive processes. In theory, Badenhorst falls into the area of Romantic Expressionism and often employs a solitary figure in an open landscape to explore the themes of loneliness and estrangement.

Philip Badenhorst was born in 1957 on a farm in the Western Transvaal. Badenhorst’s career as painter includes 33 solo exhibitions and he participated in more than 100 group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad since 1981.

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Michele is a Capetonian by birth but her artistic roots are European. Having traveled all over Europe including Spain, France, UK and the Netherlands, she credits her experiences there as the inspiration for her latest Bathroom paintings, which started with a bathroom in Sloane Square, London; a seed from which an entire series of ‘atmospheres’ have grown. The space, light and mood in these scenes resonate Dutch still lives and the chiaroscuro of the European Renaissance.

XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

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‘As an artist, Jan van der Merwe matured on the South African scrap heap of Apartheid and has become the archaeologist and anthropologist of its varying states of decay. If there is a shred of evidence on a forsaken rubbish dump, he will find it.’
- Willem Boshoff

In speaking of his own work, Van der Merwe describes his process as ‘incorporat[ing] found objects and junk materials that have been discarded…I work with artefacts of our time and try to transform them into archaeological relics, revealing human pathos and weakness.’

Jan van der Merwe was born in the Orange Free State in 1958. After spending many years in the employ of the South African Government - first for the Railways and then the Defence Force - before turning to academia as a lecturer at Technikon Pretoria (Tshwane University of Technology). Van der Merwe has been the recipient of many prestigious art awards and his work can be found in numerous private and public collections both locally and abroad.

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The objects Clare chooses to paint have a characteristic quirkiness to them and speak of a world of personal associations. Clare invites the viewer to explore her inner world in terms of these domestic ‘fetishes’ that she fondles with her paintbrush.

Clare Menck studied Fine Arts at the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch and at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Dresden. South African-born, of German/Dutch (Afrikaans) descent, she lives on the West Coast with her painter husband and two children.

Clare Menck - Woman painting women
Summer in the City

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Eris Silke is a self-taught artist who works predominantly in black and white and in a style reminiscent of a Gothic fantasy. ‘From early on her psychological insight manifested in her work, particularly the influence of Jung and Freud. Dreams and fantasies are lifted from the depths of her subconsious and transferred to the canvas.’
- Suzanne Belling, June 2009.

Eris Silke was born in the Eastern European province of Transylvania. Of Hungarian extraction and Israeli upbrining, Eris is currently based in Cape Town. She has about 30 solo exhibitions to her credit and her work can be found in numerous collections locally and abroad, including that of the SA National Gallery.

XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

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‘If one turns to Western practice Mashile’s graphic rendering of a simplified visual language marked by artificially contructed spaces, disproportion of form and flattened solid earthy colours bears some affiliation to the earlier work of Italian painter Georgio do Chirico…a precursor to the Surrealists.
He rediscovers and celebrates an ancient past, but remains thoroughly contemporary.’
- Virginia MacKenny

Colbert Mashile was born in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. After his schooling, his intention was to build a career in Public Administration. Fortunately, during his studies in Pretoria, he developed a healthy fascination with art. This led him to abandon a dreary future in administration and find refuge at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. His creations have attracted attention ever since - and will continue to do so.

Colbert Mashile: Experience and the Scar
XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

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Longtime friends and renowned South African artists, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Louis Jansen van Vuuren, have been involved since 2007 in collaborative activities that attempt to enhance an inherent concept through points of confluence and visual dialogue. The works address contrasting points between the styles of Mthethwa, a Zulu, and Jansen van Vuuren, an Afrikaaner now living in France, in a manner that celebrates their differing backgrounds, their common heritage as South Africans and, above all else, their unique friendship.

2007 exhibition:
Entre Nous / Between Ourselves / Phakathi Kwethu

Summer in the City

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Matthew Hindley is an artist that has refused to be pinned down to any one mode of production. After graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2002, where his final exhibition won him the Michaelis Prize, Hindley has let his artistic strategy spread out in many different directions – from traditional media such as painting and sculpture beyond the new media of video to technologically advanced methods of physical computing. In his current work he has returned to painting in oils on canvas.

Read Matthew Hindley’s complete biography
Matthew Hindley: Like, like, like, like a circus
REVIEW Dramatic storyteller uses the medium of paint
Matthew Hindley - Blackout
The Art of Making Artworks On An iPhone
Summer in the City

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Kelly Higgs translates a fascination with flowers, combined with historical references to the tradition of botanical illustration, into beautiful and sensitive watercolour paintings.

Kelly, who began painting at an early age, grew up on a farm in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. Having spent many years as a graphic designer working in the advertising and design industries in London and South Africa, Kelly returned to painting full-time and held her first exhibition in 2003. She currently lives and works in the U.K.

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“I have always wanted to be an artist. This sense of self and destiny has shaped my being so conclusively, it has effectively ruined the prospect of being anything else. It has also left me singularly obsessed. I would describe my work as ironically romantic, with a definite sense of narrative and the personal.”

Sandra Hanekom was born in 1971 and graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from Stellenbosch University. She has worked full-time as an artist from 1994 and has been included in numerous group exhibitions and had solo shows in Gauteng and the Western Cape. She has also had curatorial experience and has served on the boards of the Durbanville Cultural Society, the East London Art Society and the Bellville Arts Board.

XI - Eleven Solo Exhibitions

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“All that I can experience of the universe with any degree of certainty is matter - for me it is the visible and tangible end of space. This is probably why I gain such satisfaction from the experience of drawing or painting the human figure, flowers in a vase or an animal. All forms are made up of different configurations and densities. Light and shade pass over each in the same way. By emphasizing a brooding or settled half-light I try to give a sense of mystery to my images.” - Paul Emsley

Paul Emsley was born in Glasgow in 1947. Having grown up in South Africa, he moved to the U.K. in 1996 where he currently resides. His work can be found in most public collections in South African and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the BP Portrait Award in 2007.

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Alex Emsley’s work can generally be described as naturalistic, with close attention paid to fine detail. His preferred subject matter varies from portraiture to still life. Still lives are predominantly produced in oil on canvas, while portraits are executed in charcoal on paper.

Alex Emsley (born in 1973) obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Fine Art from the University of Stellenbosch in 1995.

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Wilma Cruise is a South African artist specialising in sculpture. She has also produced a number of works on paper, which often arise through a process of her translation of drawings toward work in the sculptural medium. In her work, Cruise is preoccupied with the body and the way that the body is represented in space and forms a link between the inner realities and the social environment. Language often also plays a central role in Cruise’s work, as the means of articulating and understanding one’s own position (body) in relation to others on both conscious and sub-conscious levels. In this way she explores a gap in communication - in what she calls “the space between”.

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Hanneke Benade works in pastel with a profound sense of fine detail. These faithfully rendered figurative scenes are as absorbing for the viewer as the (predominantly female) subjects in them seem to absorbed in their own tranquil meditations. On closer examination of these quiet scenes, however, there is a subtle sense that the subjects are not as serene as they first appear to be. In their pensive quietness, a subtle tension is revealed which is at once feminine and subversive.

Hanneke Benade was born in 1972 in Tshwane and graduated from the University of Pretoria with a Fine Arts degree in 1993. Hanneke has been included in a number of international group exhibitions, but has also held numerous solo shows in South Africa. She has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including a Volksas Atelier merit. Her work can be found in many private and publis collections in South Africa and abroad.

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“The mystery of the human face and figure has fascinated people for centuries. The fact that the viewer sometimes observes something of themselves in the art work, occurs in many ways unnoticed. And in some ways this makes the attraction between the art work and the viewer all the more stronger. The fact that so much can not be explained or rationalized will always intrigue people who view it.”
-Johan Angus

Johan Angus was born in Johannesburg in 1968 and graduated in 1990 with a degree in Information Design from the University of Pretoria. Johan worked as a graphic designer for many years before deciding to dedicate himself full-time to his artmaking in 1996. He has held numerous exhibitions in South Africa and his work can be found in private collections both locally and abroad.

Summer in the City

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Audrey Anderson is a painter who is influenced by elements in the vast landscape of the arts that tend to blur the distinction between fine and graphic art – a breakdown with which the traditional perception of “fine art” is becoming increasingly comfortable.

Within her practise, Anderson’s main concern is the everyday. By creating a visual narrative around banal, often automated, activities of our everyday lives, Anderson highlights how much time is taken up by such moments, but also how much of our identities can be analysed through the ways in which we go about these tasks. By forcing the viewer to focus in on tiny details of our everyday lives that would otherwise go unnoticed, Anderson also brings more macrocosmic aspects of interpersonal and emotional relationships into view.

Audrey Anderson is a young South African artist who completed her degree in Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria in 2006.

Audrey Anderson - Thinking inside the box

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“Art is absurdity. Oil paint and charcoal is only base matter, and yet, with long hours alone in the studio the banal somehow becomes extraordinary. Although the conceptual framework of my work is always shifting, I endeavour to make the end result of a work the same: to fashion something beautiful with what crude implements I have at my disposal and what measure of expertise I may possess.”

Born in 1983 John Walters is at present reading for a Master of Fine Art degree at Rhodes University. Supervised by critically-acclaimed South African artist Christine Dixie, the basis of the Masters work is a series of paintings and drawings which attempt to deal with ‘whiteness’ in a specifically Eastern Cape context.

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French born artist, Eric Duplan spent his childhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. As a teenager he moved to South Africa, joining the School of Performing Arts, in Johannesburg. He followed this, by studying interior design and stained glass making.

In the early 1980’s Eric joined the Lintas Group Advertising Agency as an illustrator. The then became a freelance illustrator and over the next eight years worked for most of the major advertising houses in Johannesburg. It was during this time that Eric illustrated a number of front covers for the Financial Mail and was commissioned by Gencor to sculpt a series of bronzes trophies.

He moved to the Western Cape and became a muralist specializing in trompe l’oeil. His many murals have included a major commission for a hotel in Ostend, Belgium. In 1989 Eric transitioned to full time painting and based himself on an isolated farm on South Africa’s rugged western coast. The magnificent surroundings inspired his many large land and seascape paintings.

Eric paints in oil and his paintings are many faceted, mixing fine details with abstract architectural renderings in a technique that produces pieces reminiscent of a Zen Garden, where a certain meditative quality is induced. A reflection of both Eric’s thoughts and mediations as he paints and those created in the patron. In his latest solo exhibition Eric’s works are perhaps most easily described as topographical landscapes and yet that is too simplistic. They are almost archeological with a bird’s eye view of the landscape in which the ruins take on figurative and symbolic form. The passage of time echoed in the many layers of paint.

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Guy du Toit was born in 1958 in Rustenburg in the North West Province. He graduated from the University of Pretoria in 1982 with a BA(FA) Degree (distinction in sculpture). His work has been exhibited extensively, both locally and internationally and has been consistently supported by private and public collectors, institutions, academics and fellow artists. He has been honoured with many awards and has in turn been invited to curate and adjudicate exhibitions.

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Zwelethu Mthethwa is known primarily for his work in the photographic and video media. Though the pastels and paintings he completed early in his career were well recognised, Mthethwa’s major citical attention commenced in the 1980s when he began to photograph the start of informal squatter camps around Cape Town. Though the media of photography and video are still viewed as “new”, Mthethwa’s work is traditional in the formal sense – his compositions are immaculate, his sense of line strong and his use of colour always significant. The integrity and honesty with which Mthethwa tells visual stories and provides his viewers with vividly evocative vignettes of his immediate word has earned him acclaim, both critical and popular, the world over.

Zwelethu Mthethwa was born in Durban in 1960. He holds diplomas from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and, the deserving recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, Mthethwa holds a Masters in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mthethwa’s work has been shown in over 100 exhibitions and can be found in a vast number of public and private collections worldwide.

Zwelethu Mthethwa PHOTOGRAPHY
Zwelethu Mthethwa PASTELS

ZWELETHU MTHETHWA - monograph from Aperture