GERHARD MARX

One and three spaces forms part of a series of sculptural and propositional cartographies that engages physical depictions of space - ‘spatial imaginaries’ – with an interest in how these descriptions affect and shape that which it describes.

The conventional ‘globe’ offers a simplified world view in which the world is presented as a singular, cohesive, and contained entity, one in which all parts are contained by the whole. In contrast with this simpification, the sculptural cartographies of this series uses the logic of collage with the aim of comprehending more complicated spacial experiences of overlap, intersection, simultaneity, relationality and overlay.

The act of laminating paper cartographies onto three dimensional form mimics the construction method of conventional globes. Curiously this act reverses one of the central concerns of cartography - the logic of projection - which transposes the continuously curved surface of the obloid earth-body onto a flat, two dimensional plane in order to make complex, dimensional information flat, manageable, portable, and inscribable. The act of transposing flat cartographies into dimensional space inverses that process: it is a moment of bringing the theoretical into the real; into dimensionality. It marks the opposite of ‘projection’ – arguably an act of ‘reflection’. The result is an object that is both drawing and sculpture, both object and conjecture.

The cartographies used to coat the work are collated from standard, educational world atlasses. The fragmentation and reconstruction of these cartographic shards pays no heed to histories, boundaries, geographies nationalities and points of origin. The logic of collage allows these dissonant fragments to be combined into a new subjective logic, suggesting a spatial imaginary which aspires to hold multiple positionalities, doubled presences, failed containments, lapsed distances, histories folded into one another, interwoven geographies, worlds that exist across, in between and amongst.

SUE WILLIAMSON

Williamson’s new series of drawings, Postcards from Africa, continues the artist’s interest in the power of a small printed image to carry news of a specific moment in time to a far off audience, sometimes current, sometimes separated from the event by a century. Her early series of etchings The Modderdam Postcards (1978) was based on sketches made over seven days while witnessing the destruction by the apartheid state of an informal settlement near the airport in Cape Town.

Postcards made from A Few South Africans (1983-86), mixed media portraits of heroic women active in the struggle for liberation, were distributed not only across the country but the world. Most recently, the artist has turned her attention to vintage postcards of photographs taken by European colonisers in Africa in the first decades of the 20th century, who used the postcards as examples of the success of their missions, supposedly demonstrating the civilising effect of colonisation on the colonised, or presenting views of exotic Africa. Sourcing these postcards from museum archives or from the internet, Williamson reverts to classic drawing techniques. She dips her pen into a bottle of ink, building up images with layers of intricate cross-hatching, adding colour from a limited palette to reproduce the rural landscapes on the postcards, or capture the scenes of daily community life: harvesting, swimming, gathering wood.

NICHOLAS HLOBO

Working with various found objects and materials — leather, rubber, bronze, ribbons, copper and brass —Nicholas Hlobo considers his artistic practice to be a kind of autobiography through which he articulates a sense of self. Through an obscured grammar within a language of abstraction, Hlobo explores his psychological, emotional and spiritual journey. “My work is about my journey, how I relate to myself and to the outside world. I’m very curious about the invisible, intangible and incomprehensible aspects of that journey and there is always a slipperiness to the process of figuring it out”, says Hlobo.

Hlobo uses materials that have resonance to his personal memories, he explains; “Materials are found and used as a way to add more layers to the narrative. And how they are intervened with forms part of becoming a language that tells the story. Found objects have their own stories with various patinas depending on where they come from.” In “Unomalanga”, loosely translated as the sun goddess, Hlobo uses ribbons and leather on cotton canvas. As a coproduct from cattle, leather has personal significance to the artist. Within the isiXhosa culture, cattle are considered sacred and the Kraal, where they are kept, is revered as a spiritual site. The work references the sanctity of the animal and reflects on the sun through its feminine qualities.

SAM NHLENGETHWA

Nhlengethwa was born into a family of jazz lovers; his two brothers both collected jazz music and his eldest brother was a jazz musician. ‘Painting jazz pieces is an avenue or outlet for expressing my love for the music’, he once said in an interview. ‘As I paint, I listen to jazz and visualize the performance. Jazz performers improvise within the conventions of their chosen styles’ (Nhlengethwa, S., Art Throb, 2003). In an ensemble, for example, there are vocal styles that include vocal range, call-and-response patterns and rhythmic complexities played by different members. Painting jazz allows the artist to put colour onto the music. He believes jazz emphasizes interpretation rather than composition. There are deliberate tonal distortions that contribute to its uniqueness, this enables Nhlengethwa, as a collagist and painter, to use these distortions and exaggerated patterns as a technique in exploring his artistic freedom.

YTO BARRADA

Salient to Barrada’s practice are concepts of pleasure, discovery and analysis, which are formulated through key works that experiment with materials (rust, cotton, natural dyes) and traditional processes. Her methodology is influenced by her background in history and political science. By using visual, textual and sculptural relics, the exhibition finds points of anchorage in historical narrative and aesthetic imagination and simultaneously condenses and stretches the frame of time.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

William Kentridge’s botanical drawings of trees are rendered in Indian ink on the pages of old encyclopedias and attempt to capture the forms of trees indigenous to the area around Johannesburg. Using photographic references and drawing loosely in ink, the trees are grown page by page – each page holding only a fragment of the whole. The complete botanical forms emerge more by recognition than by a pre-existing clarity as to what the plant must look like, as the pages are shifted, layered, torn, pieces added, marks added – until the tree reveals itself as complete.

In an interview with Artnet, published in October 2021 Kentridge reflects on the images of trees as follows; “It is about allowing things to take their shape—I’m not quite sure why all these trees are being drawn. In one sense, they’re long-term self-portraits. I read somewhere a description of death that said we all grow our tree of death inside us. It starts growing when we’re born, and we have to hope that we’ll live long enough for this tree to be a great, beautiful, strong tree before it comes through us.”

MISHECK MASAMVU

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, give a sense of multiple temporalities existing within a singular picture plane. Beneath the surface of one painted image, lies an infinite number of images. Masamvu’s abstracted figures transform and transmute depending on the vantage point, embodying both political and social turmoil captured through the history of his homeland, Zimbabwe.

“I use figuration and abstraction in my work because I am looking for an alternative space – one that is against the forced ideology of government and the breakdown of the pursuit of humanity. For this, the symbolism of the landscape and the figure in constant states of entangled
metamorphosis are important. I am aware of the communion of the body, the soil and spirit and am interested in how transfiguration and memoirs of body and soul can evoke a real sense of vulnerability”

— Misheck Masamvu, 2021

CLIVE VAN DEN BERG

On the nature of this theme in his work, Van den Berg notes: “A swelling of earth, a hollow or dispersed pile of stones that once marked a grave or embattlement, are the grammar of my landscape vocabulary. These vestigial mutterings of geography are the prompts that I respond to in making my work, a kind of interstitial speech, connecting the remnant to its repressed or forgotten source… I grew up in Luanshya, a small mining town in Zambia and now live in Johannesburg, one of the largest of all mining towns. Perhaps it is the occasional shaking of the land, its stuttering as a shaft collapses or a plate realigns, or indeed the sudden appearance of sinkholes, those most compelling of negative spaces that first made me curious about that other landscape, the underscape.”

For Van den Berg, land serves as a powerful marker for the anxieties contained in both the personal and the political. The artist seeks to unpack this by separating the idea of land into the spheres of ‘above’ and ‘below’ ground. Using this dichotomy the artist is able to differentiate between what we idealise on the surface, and what exists unresolved below. Historical depictions of land, which were primarily filtered through Western perception, sought to possess the territory by recording its surface image. In turn, Van den Berg confronts the tradition of South African landscape painting, by peeling “the surface off the land and mak[ing] the landscapes porous”.