Hentie van der Merwe’s recent WAM exhibition ‘After De Jongh’ was replete with a selection of second-hand prints of Tinus De Jongh’s work, placed on patchworked fabric. This evokes the broekie lace doilies and crocheted antimacassars of a tradition of ‘tzatzkes’ used to enhance the home of many a granny.
It is here where the dead rise palpably and in beautiful costumes and choreography, to jiggle their bones and have discourse with those who mourn them. Frida takes the whole of the first act to be convinced to visit her Diego, who wasn’t all that gentle while she was alive.
Through seducing you into engaging with it, the exhibition places you in dialogue with its artworks. It constantly asks you, “What do you think?” There is an ever-present spirit of collaboration between curator and visitor, inside and outside, space and body, prompting new relationships of meaning to form, again, again.
From a giant toothbrush to a car tyre tutu, there’s a giraffe’s torso and a box from cremated ashes: the precious, the profane all in a beautiful conglomeration. There is respect both earnest and cynical paid to deceased mothers and representations of the horror of hate that leaves you queasy.
While LaFarge’s immersive book ‘Sting in the Tale’ (Doppelhouse Press 2021) doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive; it splits the fabric of what truth means when you are making art and allows this idea to stretch wide. Wider than you can believe. It challenges the values of education and truth. Scrumptiously.
IN HIS EXQUISITE 2008 tractate on death and dying, English writer Julian Barnes comments that just as every writer will have a last reader, so every grave will have a last visitor. South African artist Maria Pienaar takes this profound reflection a step further, contemplating the last viewer […]
IT IS NOT every day that an artist’s work can be contained by the conventional genres of still life, portraits and abstraction, but also by another almost invented genre: ‘Rembrandt’. The painter and arts writer, Marianne Meijer enjoyed a lifetime-long love affair with Rembrandt’s work, which brought darkness […]
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 […]
His was the story that changed the world’s understanding of the artist’s struggle. He yearned to, but failed to find love. He yearned to, but failed to make a conventional success of life. And at 37, died a pauper, alone. And then his work rocked the art world […]
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 […]
ansunecilliers
beckkglass
Chester Miggels
Gillian Rennie
elizhanduvenhage
erinventer02
Geoff Sifrin
godukazinobulali
henricopg
huibrechtdehart
isabeausophiajoubert
jessicajoubert
Kapisha Ramraj
kaylamullerr
lerato26mhlongo
matthewvanderwalt
meereieliefde
olgalouiselemmer
Palesa Moore
Peta Kaplan
Robyn Sassen
Saleemah Shaik
saleemahsketches
shanelschoombee
thembanhlapoart
Willem Pieter
zainabchoonara
Recent Comments