IF YOU ARE of a certain era, you hear the name ‘Clementina van der Walt’, and think immediately of a very specific type of ceramic object which became classically the work of this South African potter in the 1990s. They were bold and kind of clunky, they featured […]
THERE ARE ONLY a few days left in the season of arguably one of this city’s most important and best curated exhibitions. On Common Ground, put together by seasoned photographer Paul Weinberg, aligns and contrasts selected works of two of South Africa’s photographic giants – David Goldblatt and […]
SHE WAS NOBODY. That is, until she met and married mining magnate Sir Lionel Phillips, and gave life to the possibility of the Johannesburg Art Gallery – amongst other things – which became central to much of her life’s ambition. Lady Florence Phillips is an icon in historical […]
WHY IS IT an instructive exercise to look at the work of artists related to one another? Does it have to do with heredity and perceptions of where the so-called art gene lies? Or maybe you’re looking for where the works cleave together, and see that they come […]
THE STILL LIFE genre is so well used as a safe teaching device, you may consider it to have a long beard and scant relevance. Truth is, it’s not just a didactic exercise about decent perceptual skills. There’s a whole rich history behind it about contemplations of mortality […]
AS YOU REACH the top of Circa Gallery’s oval spiral ramp that has become so iconic on Jan Smuts Avenue in Rosebank, and enter this exhibition of works on canvas by Bambo Sibiya, you realise something overwhelming. This is not a simple art show. It is an event. […]
SAY THE NAME ‘Roger Ballen’ to certain people and you will get a rather judgemental and furious response, even before they know the context or the work being shown. Ballen on Film is a very important exhibition that should disengage all the Ballen nay-sayers, but it may well […]
THERE’S SOMETHING INTRINSICALLY engaging and satisfying about saturated colours painted with a flat sense of accuracy, but there’s also something deadening about this approach to art-making. The more you look at the paintings in acrylic on canvas by Neill Wright in his show at the Everard Read Gallery, […]
THE FORMAL, POLITE space of the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg has not lost its sense of prestige. It’s polished and honed in a particular way. There’s certain atmosphere of traditional sacredness in this space. And as a gallery, it’s a complicated sacredness, that is as much about […]
THE AFRICAN NARRATIVE that takes traditional material culture and rethinks it, is not a new one. Think of the work of Man Ray, or the late bronze cast assemblages of Joan Miro, or the tinkering of Picasso in an Africa-wards direction. Some of these forays led the artists […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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