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25
South African Artists
You Should Know
HL’s pick of names on the rise
text graham wood PHOTOGRAPHS supplied
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Rodan Kane Hart
has made a strong
debut on the sculpture
scene. His large
geometric sculptures
are inspired by urban
life and architecture,
and seek to evoke
some of the emotional
experience of moving
through the built
environment. He plays
with the language of
forms, and captures
something of the
spirit and history of
places, in his strippeddown abstract works.
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Sabelo Mlangeni’s
black-and-white photographs
(previous page) are seen by many as
continuing the legacy of the giants of
the documentary genre such as David
Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng. He won the
Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2009,
and his work has been shown widely on the
international circuit. He took up photography
almost by chance when he joined the
Market Photo Workshop after moving to
Joburg from rural Mpumalanga in 2001.
Mlangeni often documents impoverished
or marginalised lives, but his photos are
remarkable for the way he captures touches
of glamour, strength, beauty and grace
amid the grit. He’s known for long-term
projects, taking time to get to know his
subjects. For one such project, Country
Girls, he documented the lives of rural gay
communities, while his latest exhibition
explored local wedding ceremonies.
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Marna Hattingh
Liza Grobler,
works primarily as a book illustrator, but
her paintings have been snapped up by
collectors from Australia and Hong Kong.
The artist’s recent circular works depict
stylised figures against elaborate decorative
backgrounds. Their dance-like poses have
a fanciful quality, but also evoke archetypes
from the dark side of the imagination.
Likewise, the playfulness of her work
often belies more serious themes.
co-founder of Cape Town’s Blank Projects
gallery, is a prolific artist in her own right,
working in a wide range of media, including
site-specific work and using traditional
craft techniques such as beadwork, with
which she creates large, elaborate, brightly
coloured pieces. A veteran at international
residencies and participant in more than
100 local and international exhibitions, she
is working on her eighth solo exhibition.
Jaco Van Schalkwyk,
a Merit Award winner at last year’s Absa L’Atelier Awards,
first honed his skill as a realist painter and portraitist. He
rejects contemporary conceptual art and what he sees as its
glib intellectualisations, developing the complexity of his
vision within the medium of paint. With a strong religious
bent and drawing on the tradition of oil painting, the
artist’s images and narratives (seen at his recent Barnard
Gallery show in Cape Town) are now more fragmented,
grappling with contemporary consumer culture.
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Berco Wilsenach,
a part-time art lecturer at University of Pretoria, works at the
crossovers between art, science, mathematics and materiality.
A significant presence on the South African art landscape – he
won the PPC Young Sculptor of the Year in 1997 and the Absa
L’Atelier in 2005 – Wilsenach reasserted himself with his showstopping exhibition, The Blind Astronomer, last year. It explored
the idea of mapping the night skies with Braille and was the result
of four years of work under Spier’s Artist Patronage Programme
for ‘exceptional’ artists.
Asha Zero
Lehlogonolo Mashaba
is a pseudonym, and that’s just where
the complications and trickery begin.
His artworks look like collages made
of images torn from magazines, but on
closer examination they turn out to be
meticulously accurate acrylic paintings
of collages. The trompe l’oeil effect is quite
staggering, creating a paradox of the
warmth and authenticity of painting and
the superficial mixed-media images from
pop culture and the electronic age.
is a collaborative printer who qualified
and works at the Artist Proof Studio in
Newtown, Joburg. He’s attended residencies
and exhibited in group shows in South
Africa, France and the US. His first solo
exhibition, Noise, at Artspace last year
gained him critical attention. Mashaba uses
text from sources such as SMSes and the
Bible in layers to represent human figures
that appear to disintegrate, showing how we
are made and unmade by words.
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Haroon Gunn Salie’s
name hit the news last year when rapper
Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs bought one of his
works (below) from the Art Basel Miami
Beach exhibition. Back home, he’d made a
splash after becoming the Goodman Gallery’s
youngest new artist, having graduated
from Cape Town’s Michaelis in 2012.
Working primarily in installation, Gunn
Salie translates oral histories into artistic
interventions. His graduation exhibition was
held in a derelict house in District Six, and
challenged viewers to consider their role
in the area’s troubled past. He was
in the top 10 at the recent
Sasol New Signatures
competition.
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Mohau
Modikaseng
In 2011 Modikaseng became only the
second black artist to win the Sasol
New Signatures competition. The year
before, he was a finalist in the MTN New
Contemporaries Awards, and last year had
a solo show at New York’s art fair, VOLTA
NY. A graduate from Michaelis, his work
takes in sculpture, performance, video and
photography. His most recognisable work
includes remarkable large self portriats
in poses of symbolic challenge
or placed with weapons and
the trappings of violence.
Thematically he’s concerned
with the violence buried
in SA’s history and how,
although often suppressed,
it’s nevertheless central to
our lives and many of
its complexities.
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Hannelie Coetzee
is a photographer and land artist who,
apart from working with rocks as she did
during a Nirox residency in Gauteng, has
also become a sort of Banksy-like figure
in Joburg’s urban landscape. Rather than
working with paint and stencils, she works
with materials such as stone and mosaic
(as with her five-storey mosaic eye in the
Maboneng Precinct). Other images have
been carved into building plaster using an
angle grinder.
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Igshaan Adams
has exhibited at the
Rongwrong gallery in
Amsterdam and had a
residency in Basel. He
taps into his experience
of existing on the
borders of racial, sexual
religious identity
12 and
in his work, often
exploring homosexuality
Dean Hutton,
within Islamic tradition.
formerly Nadine, has been called ‘one of
the most consistently interesting artists
A multimedia artist,
currently working in Joburg’. Foremost a
photographer, her output includes video,
his works include
film-making, installation, intervention and
performance and
performance. With an ongoing concern
of social issues (including documentary
sculpture, using
projects of marginalised people) she has a
satirical side, too – for a group show, she
religious artefacts and
reprogrammed a vintage arcade game to
domestic objects.
depict the president shooting Zulu maidens.
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Michael Taylor
is primarily a
figurative painter
with a distinctive
expressive style.
His work has a
narative aspect with
an ironic, satirical
flavour. Much of
the humour of his
work stems from
the tension between
their outlandish
titles and what
they depict.
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Michele Mathison
Zimbabwean-born Mathison,
a Michaelis graduate, explores
the way in which implements,
from pickaxes to saws and fuel
cans, have gained symbolic
power and have come to
represent political turmoil.
His sculptures often form
geometric patterns from
these objects, creating
a kind of beauty, an
emotional response,
and political
and social
commentary.
Mathison
participated
in last year’s
installation for
the Zimbabwe
Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale.
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Benon Lutaaya
Dikgwale Paul Molete
Kyle Morland’s
moved to Joburg from Uganda when he won
an international artist residency award at
the Bag Factory in Newtown in 2011. His
work consists mainly of evocative portraits
of homeless and vulnerable children, and
combines collage with acrylics, blending
realism with abstraction. His first solo show,
Transgression, at Artscape last year gained
much critical attention.
is a printmaker best known for his work
with linocuts. In 2003, he won the Brett
Kebble Art Award for printmaking and was
also artist-in-residence at the Belfast Studio
and the Black Church Studio in Dublin,
Ireland. His works, although beautiful, are
often concerned with social ills, taking in
topics such as xenophobia, and examining
the role of the artist in relation to society.
abstract mild-steel sculptures explore the
nature of space and its paradoxes, often
involving complex visual tricks that play with
negative space and perception. Morland’s
second solo exhibtion took place at Blank
Projects last year, and he was included in a
number of group exhibitions including the
Performa 13 Biennial in New York. He also
works in photography and video.
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Sandile Zulu
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Gerald Machona
first burst onto the scene at the 2011
Johannesburg Art Fair when Business Day
listed him among the top 10 young artists
practising in SA. In the wake of the xenophobic
attacks in the country, Zimbabwean-born
Machona began exploring the concept of
alienness in his art (he was a Michaelis student
at the time) using decommissioned Zim dollars
to create items such as tribal masks and even
a space suit. His first solo show will be at
Joburg’s Goodman Gallery in June.
may be a well-established presence
on the local art scene, but his
exhibition earlier this year, ARTOMS:
Histopathology, Regeneration and Other
Cases, at the UJ Art Gallery in Joburg
in collaboration with the Stellenbosch
Modern and Contemporary (SMAC)
Art Gallery reminded the art world
of his place. It followed a showing in
Stellenbosch in 2012, which was his
first exhibition in South Africa in over
five years. Zulu is best known for his
work with fire, using burnt marks
and beautiful patterns to capture the
elemental nature of fire on canvas
and in his sculptures. His works are
noted for their repetitive patterns and
visual harmony. Zulu has exhibited
extensively in South Africa, as well as
in the US, Germany, France, Sweden,
Scotland and the Seychelles. David Krut
Publishing released a book in the TAXI
Art series dedicated to Zulu in 2005.
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Jake Aikman’s
haunting seascapes seem to communicate not just awe in the
presence of nature, but also the solitary contemplation of nature
as a way to self-knowledge. This London-born Michaelis graduate
is a good old-fashioned Romantic yet the way his paintings evoke
both human and nature’s vulnerability brings their contemporary
concerns about the environment right up to date. His third solo
exhibition at SMAC Art Gallery last year, entitled At the Quiet
Limit, added forests and landscapes to his seascapes.
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Portia Zvavahera
was the winner of last year’s Tollman
Award for the Visual Arts. Her brightly
coloured almost expressionist artworks
take in painting and printmaking,
sometimes combining the two. Her subject
matter is deeply personal – images
drawn from dreams and diary-like
recollections, showing her concerns
with birth, marriage and love as well as
social justice and contemporary African
religious practices. Last year she
represented Zimbabwe at the Venice
Biennale and this year held her first
show at Stevenson Cape Town, entitled
Mavambo Erwendo (Beginning of
a Profound Journey).
Rowan Smith
explores the
aesthetics of
Jared Ginsburg’s
technology and its
work is known for being witty, provocative and experimental. Winning the Michaelis
Prize as top of his class in 2010, in some of his earlier work he created strange ephemeral
place in the public
machines from cane and other materials, and suspended familiar objects from gallery
imagination, often
ceilings to encourage a renewed look at them out of context. His latest exhibition at Blank
Projects, entitled Body Parts, involved monoprints and drawings that inspired a series
re-purposing
of canvas sculptures of body parts – in a cycle of creativity, inspiring further drawings.
defunct tech to
make retro-futurist
sculptures that
explore imagined
futures, nostalgia
and our relationship
with technology.
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Gabrielle Goliath’s
Faces of War was the Goodman
Gallery in Joburg’s opening
exhibition this year. It was an
examination of domestic violence
and the silence that surrounds
the topic and, while sensitive
new territory for Goliath, she
has explored issues including
femicide, violent crime and
identity in previous work and the
problems inherent in representing
the pain of others. Her oeuvre includes
everything from photography to dance.
Goliath’s work has featured at the Dak’Art
Biennial and Photoville, the Tierney
Fellowship exhibition in New York in 2012.
Examples of her work are included in the
Iziko South African National Gallery and
the Johannesburg Art Gallery.