PAST EXHIBITIONS 2017
Cross-Pollination: Lars J. Fischedick
“In these works I also explore liminal space, the space between perpetrator and victim, and my own shadow. There seems to be an invisible interconnectedness between opposites. Like a web that keeps them in a co-dependant, energetic relationship. Shadow is not the absence of light (Goethe), light needs shadow and shadow needs light. Between them you will find all the colours on the spectrum.”
– Lars J. Fischedick
Exhibition opens Thursday, 07 September 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Metaphysical Reflection: Aubrey Chali
Aubrey Chali (locally known as Chali) is a well-known artist on the Zambian art circuit. He has exhibited in many international scenes including South Africa, Europe and Asia. Chali’s uses a semi-abstraction to look at multiple layers of cultural identity within Zambia and throughout Africa. Chali uses the Chitenge fabric with paint to create interesting and unique artistic creations to explore cultural rituals and traditional spiritualism. Aubrey believes his art is a spiritual extension of himself. In order to advance his knowledge, he delves into his imagination, searches his memories and conducts research in order to make connections with others through the use of lines, dots, shapes, designs and tones. Chali considers himself a historian who uses signs and linguistic symbols to trace and document cultures. He often focuses on objects through the use of symmetrical patterns that investigate the past, present and future. Chali strongly believes in a shared universal cultural and spiritual connectedness and thus, aspires to move beyond his local environment discover how this universal kinship is expressed in cultures different from his.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 04 January 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Ubuntu / Uhuru / Awethu: Group Exhibition
” … Perhaps at the very bedrock for the possibility of freedom, peace and humanity is the simple acknowledgment across the spectrum of people, namely the recognition that one does not know the answers to the ultimate questions or even if the questions make sense at all. To ask these questions does not presuppose the opportunity for formal education, though that may help. Perhaps this self-awareness/knowing then is the beginning of freedom from oppression and the true lived reality of humanity.” – by Dr Danny Shorkend
Exhibition opens Thursday, 04 January 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Self Reflection: Benon Lutaaya
Artist Statement:
In this particular exhibition, I’m re-examining my practice as an artist, the medium, techniques and concept as a whole. Over the years, I have felt I needed to master what I have been doing and it has been growing.
In my world, quality is measured by “improvement” rather than “change” for the sake of fitting into the bandwagon of the elitist, post modern art burble.
I believe in order to achieve some crazy, wild, creative thing, you have to know enough to figure out how to push the limits of what the medium can do. This exhibit marks the end and a new beginning to become of my practise.
– Benon Lutaaya
Exhibition opens Thursday, 07 December 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
The Three Abstractions: Hussein Salim
“My artwork always needs to convey my passion. What I believe, is that artwork is supposed to reach beyond the boundary of the frame and break the laws of physics, society and the very way our minds work.
These paintings are my thoughts married with action. These are when I have “jumped out the frame”. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did creating them.”
– Hussein Salim
Exhibition opens Thursday, 07 September 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Karin Preller
Preller is well-known for how she engages photography and painting. With the use of personal archives such as family albums and home movies, she creates a momentary nostalgic recollection of the banal. By focusing on these memories she valorises these brief moments of everyday life that often get overlooked. The use of paint as a medium adds to this notion as it requires much delicacy and tenderness when rendering the real, thus it becomes a specific memory pulled out of the past, laboured on with care and brought into timelessness as an object unable to fade as memories do. The use of photography as origin of subject for these paintings creates a dialogue between the media, as it evokes ideas around representation when something becomes so translated. A photograph is often seen as captured truth, yet painting can often be seen as fictitious – like a memory. Thus, the translation of memory, to photograph and then to paint starts to convey the struggle of holding onto an experience as they become further fragmented; lingering only as fragile traces. Reminding the viewer of the preciousness of everyday lived moments.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 02 November 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
The Scent of Joss sticks: Vanessa Berlein
Embedded in a time of increasing technological and industrial change, society is in a state of rapid, constant redressing. We open ourselves to an array of costumes tailor-made to perform in unique or a vast range of contexts and circumstances. We fulfil certain roles in the play of society, changing between the political, social, cultural and environmental as one would do during scenes. And as a result of a constant and somewhat almost-automatic state of adaptation, we are presented with very little time to breath, look back and revel in what we have progressed from.
Her body of work appears to create a time lapse, as she combines jubilant subject matter with bare edges of canvas and paper with distressed surfaces, revealing the ageing presence of time and process. And like the split seconds between inhaling and exhaling, she places the viewer in a space where the progression of time and the passing of it briefly congregate. It’s as if she stages a dubious moment of farewell rather than goodbye. Although she presents the viewer with a realization pertaining to the decay of time and matter, she too offers an opportunity to preserve what is left and what one can take from the moment. – Kirsten Arendse
Exhibition opens Thursday, 02 November 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Asuka Nirasawa
Nirasawa’s travels have had a great influence on her practice stylistically. She has been influenced by the architecture of Amsterdam, the graffiti in Rome and largely by fabrics of various eastern countries. This aesthetic stimulus can easily be seen in her works on the cells. The meticulous detail articulates the biological complexities of the cells. The vibrancy of the colours conveys strong energy, and even beauty, as she conceptually engages with powerfully debilitating diseases. These include HIV, various cancerous cells, leukemia, sickle cells, liver fluke and osteoporosis growing and multiplying in their microscopic world. This subject is inspired by the memory of her father who passed away from lung cancer, thus a manifestation of the body that can live on as sacred and still beautiful.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 02 November 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Eclectica Contemporary is honoured to announce the opening of Not a Judge, Not a Saint, a solo exhibition featuring: Johannesburg based artist, Layziehound Coka.
Not a judge, not a saint, a “neither-nor” statement with a slightly deceiving sense of neutralism reveals the ease at which we dissociate ourselves from the judgements we make. Layziehound questions the power trajectories prevalent in society, be they religious and socio-political ideologies or those whom uphold them. His large, gestural body of work expresses a turbulent experience of conflict when tackling the so-called moral compass the artist and those of us alike are taught to live by.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 03 August 2017, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Eclectica Contemporary is honoured to announce the opening of Redemptive Beauty, a group exhibition featuring: Leila Fanner, Jess Holdengarde , Stephane Conradie, Sue Greeff and Janna Prinsloo
Exhibition opens Thursday, 01 June 2017, 18h00.
We look forward to seeing you there!
REDEMPTIVE BEAUTY:
Beauty is relative and changes as does fashion. Art, often thought of as the exemplary case of the aesthetic, does not implicate a definite notion of beauty and the so-called classical is no longer a tenable notion. This was made palpably obvious with Duchamp’s Ready-mades and later pop art and the resultant breakdown of a rigid distinction between art and life.
However, to complicate the issue when we speak of beauty it need not simply be a reference to formal, surface components, but to an extra-aesthetic dimension in which case one might speak of the beauty of an idea or the opposite, in which case the resultant aesthetic is not free of context in which it is born – beauty itself is thus more than simply the exterior garb. This one might term the postmodern acknowledgement that local histories rather than global, overarching truths and corresponding constructs of beauty mean that, at best, the aesthetic dimension ought not be considered the final word or rather the visual correlate of a or any system. There is thus no necessary ultimate form or conception of what is beautiful.
Beauty as redemption may be a lie, a veneer and surface that masks (or reveals) an ideological system bent on power and coercion. And beauty can be redemptive if it is defined in terms of a logical truth perhaps in the form of a mathematical equation or a more emotive one, like an honest smile to another. Art often sees the ugly truth. Beauty can be canonised and art its favourite emissary. But perhaps most significantly, art may offer new visions of beauty qua truth/s.
Dr. Danny Shorkend
The Rape
Eclectica Contemporary is proud to present a new solo exhibition by Sorrel Hofmann entitled “The Rape”. Following on from her highly successful debut exhibition at the UCT Irma Stern Museum earlier this year, this body of work examines the harm inherent in seemingly healing gestures and therapies, ranging from the environmental to the psychological.
Consisting of paintings, sculptures, photography and large-scale installation, Hofmann takes seemingly everyday objects and minimalist artistic marks and weaves a complex and highly charged network of connections between them. “The Rape” forms the first part of an ongoing project by the artist entitled “Freud and Friends” and begins a process of seeking to untangle, critique and reimagine a nexus of control, prejudice and domination that pervades human existence in an increasingly globalised and spiritually fractured western-centred world.
Hofmann’s works are lyrical, meditative but nonetheless deft and forceful. As critic Danny Shorkend noted with reference to her previous exhibition “Atlas”: “her ability to say something with an economy of means, that is the fact of simplification, a sense that the clutter of sensations and feelings have been reduced, for want of a better word, to a few basic shapes and lines” is noteworthy.
Sorrel Hofmann’s new exhibition will be an opportunity to see the latest work by an artist who is gaining increasing attention for her unique approach to material and pertinent subject matter.
Eclectica Contemporary is honoured to announce the opening of Redemptive Beauty, a group exhibition featuring: Leila Fanner, Jess Holdengarde , Stephane Conradie, Sue Greeff and Janna Prinsloo
Exhibition opens Thursday, 01 June 2017, 18h00.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Eclectica Contemporary is honoured to announce the opening of Paradise Regained, a group exhibition featuring: Thonton Kabeya, Michael Selekane, KyuSang Lee, Vincent Osemwegie and Leonard Shapiro.
These exceptional artists were invited to participate in a group exhibition the theme, of which is directly inspired by John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Regained. The artists who each, in some way, break the boundaries of their chosen media and practice, have been left to freely interpret the theme as they wish.
However, we offer you this…
What can Milton’s work teach us within an African and South African context and can paradise be regained? The significance of basic education that is broad, deep and open as a right to all; the need for heroes and heroines to fight against social injustices; that the more negative side of the self is insidious; that we are the guardians of the earth and Eden can be made out of this earth – that should we open our eyes we may yet see that there are pockets of paradise right here in South Africa…
Exhibition opens Thursday, 06 April 2017, 18h00.
We look forward to seeing you there!
BLACK MAGIC, a solo exhibition by Loyiso Mkize
This collection is an exploration of the contemporary black experience, encapsulating the varied themes that inform the modern black landscape. This body of work intends to extract familiar key aspects to take apart, understand and reassemble what belonging to this group is and what belonging means. Specifically, how we are represented in conversation with how we choose to represent ourselves.
From the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age to this Age of multi-material, technological response following the industrial revolution 250 years ago. The ages of human technologies have been defined by our access to and ability to use different mined resources.
Mining provides us with all the ingredients to manufacture the technologies of our contemporary world. Behind mining are rich and contentious histories that have shaped social hierarchies.
The exhibition title encompasses bodies of work responding to different aspects of humans engagement and interaction and use of the wealth extracted from our planet, Earth.
Creative Destruction was termed in relation to economic principles that focused around the manifestations of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter, the man who phrased the concept in 1942 (a time of particularly creative destruction), hailed from Austria and was known as an ardent capitalist, who saw creative destruction as ‘the essential fact about capitalism’.
In the age of technology, with new devices and applications endlessly being created the possibility for communication is broadening and extending more than we had ever imagined. Social networks bombard us with images constantly; videos, pod casts, screens of news feeds and timelines replacing broadcasts, books, journals and newspapers crowd our everyday existence. Schumpeter, used the example of the railroad to demonstrate his ideal working of the principle: as a powerful transforming agent that opens up new opportunities while clearing away old areas of stagnated activity. In many ways, communication confronts this notion, with the visual becoming more central and accessible and as such, the contemporary dynamics have an affect on the visual medium that often is Fine Art. Where do we go from here and how can the practice of art making learn to negotiate and reposition itself today?
The change of season and the rehanging of a new show for Eclectica Contemporary aims to refresh and re-picture ideas of summer and the considerations of the end of 2016. Creative destruction offers a vehicle for response that can be used to encourage creation and open up new conversations.
Creative Destruction
A Group Exhibition Featuring:
Katlego Tlabela
Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi
Chris van Eeden
Daya Heller
Jeannette Unite
Ronald Muchatuta
Ley Mboramwe
(MANIATA) Lingala
24/10/2016 – 05/11/2016
Ley Mboramwe on Show with Asanda Kupa!
Ley Mboramwe hails from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He completed his degree in Fine Art at the ‘Academie des Beaux’ in Kinshasa (the centre of Africa). His life experience in the Congo, its suffering, beauty, politics, culture and economic circumstances is evident in his work.
The human body is used as a means of storytelling and a reflection of life. Where stories, such as looting, hunger, disease, nightmares, dreams and the joys of human existence are theoretically portrayed.
He uses the body as a mirror to the soul.
The exhibition opens Monday, 24 October 2016.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Un_Learn, my soul
06/10/2016 – 05/11/2016
Asanda Kupa: Solo Exhibition
Asanda Kupa is a rising talent amongst South African painters. He was born in Molteno, in the Eastern Cape and has always been drawn to the illustrative arts. His expressive mark making and abstraction of the human form creates a vivid and moving body of work that seems to explore change, progression and alteration through the language of narrative painting in a uniquely abstract manner. Kupa’s gestural works command a great presence in each space they can be found and his investment of time, energy and emotion as well as immense skill becomes apparent.
The opening of the exhibition will start on Thursday, 6 October 2016 at 18h00.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Restone Maambo: LEVITATION
Restone Maambo’s first solo show is held at Eclectica Contemporary from the 1st of September 2016. The works are painting and mixed media on canvas and work through the theme of Levitation.
01/09/2016 – 01/10/2016
A debut solo show
CHARTING
07/07/2016 – 27/08/2016
An inaugural exhibition curated by Andrew Lamprecht
Eight contemporary painters will explore new directions, techniques and ideas in their medium, responding to local and global issues that have emerged in the wake of decolonization, the end of institutionalized Apartheid and the challenges and opportunities of a globalized world. The title ‘Charting’ implies a journey and making one’s way in territories that are being explored as well as the idea of concepts, artists and themes that are on the rise and coming to the fore. This, the first exhibition in a new gallery and exhibition space, has been guest curated by Andrew Lamprecht, Cape Town-based lecturer and writer.
2016 Silent Auction
Bid Or Buy
From Michaelis Students, Emerging & Established Local Artists & Collectors
03/08/2016 – 04/08/2016
