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 […]
DO YOU REMEMBER atlases and the unfathomability of the fold up road map? In the pre-GPS days of our world and our sense of geography, the atlas was a subtle and beautiful reminder of how small we are on this planet. Without all the loudness of internet-based hyperbole […]
VALENTINE’S DAY’S COME and gone with all its silly platitudes, earnest imperatives and underlying marketing ploys. But there’s a delightful little mad exhibition which is as much a foray on the love of another as it is about a maverick sense of what ifs. Love Letters by Diek Grobler […]
THE ROOM IS deeply silent, but robustly populated. All eyes are focused on the speaker, who is out of your line of sight. In this 1989 photograph of a trade union meeting at the University of Cape Town, photographer Omar Badsha (b. 1945) peers with a clean mix […]
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 […]
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