SOMETIMES MAGIC LURKS in an association between an established art gallery, the vagaries age and the possibilities that thinking out of the box can yield. For just a couple more days, the SA Association of Arts in Pretoria hosts a rather extraordinary little contemplation on what it means […]
A FRISSON OF sacredness mixed with a patent sense of physical uncertainty accompanies you as you enter the hallowed space which contains the result of three years of fine art research by Leora Farber. Her installation, Intimate Presences, Affective Absences (or, the snake within) is on show in […]
IN THIS AGE of social media, Wikipedia and any and every other kind of dumbing down and shallowing out of real thought, the presence of Ashraf Jamal’s anthology of art essays, published by Skira in 2017 raises a middle finger to lazy thinking, sloppy writing and weak academic […]
SACREDNESS IN AN object comes in many iterations, many of which can be completely unexpected. When you visit Charmaine Haines’s exhibition at the Kim Sacks Gallery, you will be accosted with a sense of the sacred that is joyful and full of levity, bold and clear, but unequivocally […]
IT’S EASY TO take a broom, a peg or an iron for granted in the daily conflagration of things that constitutes life itself. It’s about the daily grind of keeping dirt at bay as much as it is about presenting yourself in public, to say nothing of domesticity […]
THE ARCHITECTURAL DRAMA of the ramp and the entrance point to Circa gallery sets the tone for In/Dependence, a solo exhibition by Robert Slingsby, and the energy and force is carried through in a dramatic, intense installation, but there are elements of excess in the presentation and articulated […]
THE FACT OF death always belies what you may anticipate when you think of losing a loved one. One year after the untimely passing of David Brown, an extraordinary testament to the love of his family and his energy and focus, by way of an exhibition entitled Zoo […]
AS YOU ENTER the architecturally sacrosanct-seeming space of the upstairs level of the Standard Bank Gallery, Dumile Feni’s Guernica hits you in the solar plexus. It’s like a series of overwhelming chords in a familiar requiem. Hung in the back of the space, this magnificent drawing in ink […]
YOU MAY THINK ‘contemporary classical African art’ and immediately call to mind, bright colours, concatenating against one another in mostly geometric patterns. You’re about a third right. Challenging preconceptions about what African art looks like, Kim Sacks has curated another wonderful exhibition, focusing on the black and white […]
HE STANDS WITH assumed dignity on a plinth made of a wooden crate. His face is a morass of rough finger-worked texture, his body is constructed along the classic principles of the portrait bust. On his head, there is a stylised fish, or is it a loaf of […]
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