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Category: Visual Art

Cattle to believe in

SHE STANDS WITH the kind of poise that catches you in the throat, and once you’ve made contact with her eye, you cannot move on without feeling that something within you has changed. Is it in the sheer beauty of her coat, speckled by God himself? Or is […]

Present absences and men of war

DO YOU REMEMBER the cultural imperative in South Africa? The thing that you had to see, at all costs, whether it was an opera or an exhibition, a performance or an event? Kentridge’s The Head and the Load evokes this artistic urgency among South Africans, that is at […]

Mary Cassatt: Excellence on its own terms

SHE WAS A feminist before it was fashionable, a French Impressionist born in Pennsylvania, a woman painter in a man’s world. She took intaglio printmaking by the horns and created arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of images. This was Mary Cassatt. Her story Mary Cassatt: […]

Here’s looking at you, Cézanne

DO YOU REMEMBER a time when the world was a different place culturally, and the careful curation of an exhibition could be allowed the time and energy of nine whole years in its inception? The Cézanne exhibition central to this Exhibitions on Screen documentary ticks all those glorious […]

Something to hold on to

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 […]

Unbearable whiteness of being

NON-BINARY SOUTH AFRICAN performance artist Dean Hutton has stood on the outside looking in, for most of their life. While this may be a horribly lonely position for a child, it is one of supreme potency for an artist at the summit of their personal, political and artistic […]

The secret life of green tea

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 […]

RIP Queen Linda the Only

THE IDEA OF writing a conventional tribute to Linda Givon, the founder of the Goodman Gallery, who died suddenly on 5 October 2020, at 84, seems trite. This is because she was much more than the pedestrian sum of her parts. She was born, educated, married, divorced, widowed. […]