Spinning Pig Tales

This body of work represents a satirical view of the incestuous relationship between government, business and our free market system. It comments on how this relationship promotes a system of power versus powerlessness. The focus of this series of bronzes is on the co-dependency of governments and their multi-national corporations, and how foreign policies are used to benefit both. It highlights how the powerful countries dismiss international law at the expense of global security, and how we have come to accept it.

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Untitled (Figure running)

Dumile Feni’s stylistic development brought about by the dramatic emotional events he experienced in 1968, including his displacement to London, resulted in a body of work which is unique, not only in terms of the stylistic approach to volume and mass, but also because of its specific emotional content.

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Johans Borman, Michael Stevenson and Michael Graham-Stewart presented the exhibition, ‘Take your road and travel along’: The advent of the modern black painter in Africa, at the first Joburg Art Fair in March 2008.

This exhibition for the first time paired well-known South African artists including Gerard Sekoto, George Pemba and Ernest Mancoba, among others, with their contemporaries from other parts of Africa, such as Ben Enwonwu from Nigeria and Sam Ntiro from Tanzania. The title of the exhibition, ‘Take your road and travel along’, is a quote from a letter written by Sekoto, and it aptly describes the difficult and lonely journey that the pioneers experienced both in trying to study art in their home countries and in leaving Africa to study in Europe.

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‘Walter Meyer 2007’, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by the artist, was hosted from 29 November to 15 December 2007.

In this collection of paintings, selected over a two year period, Meyer portrays some still lifes and explores the changing landscape from Camps Bay, via the Kalahari and the Namib up to Luderitz. In his masterly style, Meyer manages to capture the mood and soul of these uniquely African scenes, evoking all the different emotions one experiences when visiting them.

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‘Encounters’, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Ben Coutouvidis was hosted from 24 May to 9 June 2007.

Coutouvidis continues his kaleidoscopic exploration of the South African landscape, focussing on transmutations of water as visual metaphor for various emotional states.

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We subconsciously register, and react to, the energy captured in objects during their creation. Given the tremendous amount of concentration, planning and hours of painstaking execution that forms part of the creative process, it comes as no surprise that we very often stand in awe when engaging a special painting or sculpture. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the work of truly great artists has always been the ability to harness the ordinary and mundane in everyday scenes and objects to communicate a particular emotion, mood, atmosphere or even spiritual experience.
During the selection of works for this second solo exhibition of Ben Coutouvidis, we became very conscious of the underlying sense of truthful craftsmanship displayed in the accomplished technique of this dedicated painter. At the same time, we were struck by the different moods and spiritual elements evident in his repertoire of landscapes, street scenes, interiors and still life paintings.

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Erik Laubscher

Experiencing the landscape is a spiritual experience for Erik Laubscher. His paintings become the poetic language of his emotions – the experience of his reaction to the vastness and varying contrasts of the South African landscape. He unifies lines, forms, colours and textures into ordered compositions - capturing the emotional impact of the landscape. The result is a celebration of the magnitude and expansiveness of the land.

Jacobus Kloppers

For some time now, Jacobus Kloppers’ work focuses on the concept of travel, the realisation and discovery of landmarks and indicators along the way, and, especially, how it impacts on the psyche. He has walked a long way – initially through depictions of objects (dams, drinking troughs, gates, etc.) along roads leading through the Karoo landscape, later the road itself as a (non) place, and, more recently, by focusing on road signs as indicators of place, distance and direction. Now he enters what he calls a “second world” - to extend his investigation into the “continuous interaction between the experience of place as a physical phenomenon and of place as a moment in the world of thought”.

Walter Meyer

The landscape - being continuously transformed by nature or human activity - has many faces, and many stories to tell. As the arena of life, it is a collection of innumerable tracks, a document of past and present occurrences from which we can often read what the future may hold. As we inhabit and transform the landscape, the terrain and its elements also impact on us – physically and emotionally. This interplay of forces has a major influence on the identity and condition of both the landscape and the people who inhabit it. Although this is quite obvious, it does hold the key to why Walter Meyer’s paintings of the Southern African landscape so often leave a haunting and memorable impression on us.

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A terrain can only be owned in as far as it is occupied, and this is attained by naming and mark-making. This mark-making is our cultural intercourse with the landscape.
The renaming of places in contemporary South Africa and the accompanying polemics confront one with questions such as: By what do we know a place? What is our relationship with a specific place? And, above all: What does it mean to yearn for a place?

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