WHEN FIRST YOU cross the threshold of this gallery, this exhibition, you’re assailed by explosions of colour. There’s a hot pink that you can feel as agony in your intestines, an intense purple that makes you brace physically and there’s a sweeping of nuance in the shape of […]
The business of being neither here nor there comes under the painterly and philosophical focus of Diana Page in her first exhibition in South Africa in several years. It’s the flipside of being out of South Africa and living in Turkey for over a decade, and there are […]
FRANCE IN THE 18th century, boasted, among other things, a Rococo thinking that cast a light-hearted hue at almost everything. The artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of the painters of the era, popular for his saccharine images that teetered on the sexually taboo, with young girls mourning small […]
DON’T BE PUT off by Craig Smith’s characteristic light touch on his raw canvases in It’s Irrelevant, a solo exhibition of new works mounted at Galleri Kalashnikovv in Braamfontein. Similar to the thinking of American artist Cy Twombly, Smith negotiates space, gesture and chance in a way that […]
EVEN BEFORE YOU enter the space of Toni-Ann Ballenden’s show City of Gold: Cash for Scrap, in Gallery 2, you’re beset with a sense of playfulness that underpins an earnest idea of a plotted cityscape. There is an installation called Folly in the gallery’s window that speaks of […]
In 1943, a curious little book of stories about animals was published. Little Veld Folk was penned by one Cecil J. Shirley, it was aimed at a child readership, but its intense pen and ink drawings, particularly one about a bird who was vain, offers an edgy glance […]
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 […]
THERE’S NO SLEIGHT of hand or conceptual tricks in Corlie Schoeman’s considerable body of pottery exhibited in the Pretoria Arts Association ‘Potter of the Month’ slot for March. She refers to the technique she uses here as ‘cleilap’. And you can easily understand why. These objects, big and […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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