Sandra Hanekom: Sondeval

4 – 28 August 2010

iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art

Sondeval, Sandra Hanekom’s most recent body of work, is at its core a conflation of two things. On the one hand, it can be regarded as a significantly emotional reaction against old-school “fire and brimstone” Christianity of the kind preached during her childhood. However, it is simultaneously a homage to Christian art of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

Sondeval (literally meaning “falling into sin”) is the Afrikaans term for what is known within the Judeo-Christian religions as “The Fall from Grace”, which refers to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise after they had offended God by consuming the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. While the English term, “fall from grace”, has a more elegant ring to it, the Afrikaans translation expresses the unmitigated nature of their downfall more unequivocally. The unsympathetic Christianity to which Hanekom was exposed during her childhood presented God as an entity to be feared and avoided.

This issue is by no means unique to Hanekom’s childhood, but what is surprising is that, along with her skepticism of the church, she possesses a deep passion for Biblical art of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Almost as a macrocosmic extension of her own oxymoronic feelings, Hanekom is fascinated by the tumultuous relationship between God and art. She believes that all art concerns God in some manner or another. She explains: “Sometimes even an absence of God can be seen as some strange affirmation.”

Her recent works, including large oil paintings on board panels, contain images of a disjointed human existence.They can be regarded as modern-day Bruegels – “filled to the brim with symbols, questions, mysteries, life and sometimes death.” Hanekom elaborates: “We are connected by blindness and folly. We are like a Bruegel painting.”