EXHIBITIONS 2018
KWAAI, this year’s summer exhibition at Eclectica Galleries, curated by Christina Fortune & featuring: Mikhailia Petersen, Kirsten Arendse, Joshua Williams, Scott Eric Williams, Rory Emmett, QUEEZY, Danielle Alexander, Matthew Wareley, Stephané Conradie, Gary Frier, Hasan Essop, Husein Essop and Dion Cupido, seeks to explore the question of “colouredness”. The purpose of the exhibition is not to provide any answers, but to open a conversation and celebration around ideas of the coloured identity and the lived experiences of those who carry it. It will attempt to shine a light on the continued hardships faced by coloured people as a consequence of Apartheid, and simultaneously contribute positively to the coloured community.
Exhibition Opens: 06/12/2018
Eclectica Contemporary is situated in the heart of Cape Town’s CBD. It hosts an impressive, carefully chosen, group of Artists. The Gallery, with it multiple levels set in an historical heritage building, attempts to question old traditions with new voices in Contemporary Art.
In our ‘Fusion’ exhibition, we have selected a group of esteemed South African Artists. Each Artist has been chosen for their preferred medium, allowing us to showcase the variety of skills, styles and concepts we have on offer.
Exhibition Opens: 06/12/2018
Everything I Felt and Heard | Kara Taylor
American-born artist, Kara Taylor received her Bachelors of Fine Art in 1997 from the Maine College of Art. After completing her studies, Kara lived in Maui for a few years, honing her skills as a painter and completing her first solo exhibition. Kara recognizes that many of her artistic influences and the themes which she draws on are due to being fortunate to travel to Asia and India. Kara has exhibited in various group shows throughout America’s North East and New York City. In 2000 she opened her own gallery, the Kara Taylor Gallery, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, which is a space that she has created to showcase her own work.
Throughout her practice, Kara has used mixed media to build up her two-dimensional artworks. Each piece she creates shows her meticulous focus in the layering process, demonstrating her understanding of the materials used. Across the series, narratives begin to unfold in which the artist attempts to address dual possibilities of division and unity existing within social binaries and the structures that uphold cultural standards.
Exhibition Opens: 01/11/2018
Ibrahim Khatab | Alive Memory
Eclectica Contemporary welcomes Egyptian artist Ibrahim Khatab’s exhibition “Alive Memory” to it’s gallery. The work showcases the artist’s deep love of calligraphy and lasting sentiment through a collection of paintings, which demonstrate his interest in colour, space and arabic script.
The painter Pablo Picasso once said “If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.”
Ibrahim Khatab’s shares Pablo’s sentiment towards the mastery that is the arabic script, which he fell in love when he was just 10 year’s old. As such calligraphy and language is very central to Ibrahim’s designs and life experience, he is able to use the script in varied ways to depict how objects can hold expression beyond the human experience.
Exhibition Opens: 01/11/2018
Claudia Treagus | My Capricorn Series
Passionate painter, Claudia Treagus, doesn’t have the everyday education axis into art. She took art in high school and only 15 years later rekindled her relationship with the medium, during an uncomfortable pregnancy. In the sleepless late nights to early hours of the morning she found comfort in painting the subtle beauties of daily life, highlighting that which we often take for granted.
This current body of oil paintings is a little different contextually to her previous works, as it’s based on her experience in Capricorn Park (a shipping container converted into a weekly art class in the oldest township in Cape Town). Claudia explains that the surrounding community exists within confined spaces and informal living – a different ‘daily life’ to her own. Through self-reflective and often introspective positioning within her paintings, Claudia navigates her own emotive responses and sensory experiences of this place. Bright oils convey the richness of how individuals and life within this social space affect her, bringing light to her own history and flawed presence. Often she finds herself pausing throughout these works, reflecting on the genuinely captivating feelings that occur (within the space) and attempting to recreate that sensory moment in her brushstrokes: visceral and dynamic, just like the community of Capricorn.
Exhibition Opens: 01/11/2018
AKAA | Art Fair
Also Known As Africa – Art and Design Fair
Eclectica Contemporary will be showcasing a variety of artworks at Also Known As Africa – Art and Design Fair from the 9 – 11 November 2018
Featuring Artworks by:
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Hussein Salim
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Kyu Sang Lee
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Asuka Nirasawa
BEING – Asuka Nirasawa
Asuka Nirasawa is a multifaceted multimedia artist who shares the results of the partnership between her artistic fluidity, curiosity and philosophical sensibilities at Eclectica Contemporary through this exhibition “BEING”.
Asuka’s work combines four series of works of which the common thread of the work consists of a circular pattern. Through these particular works – Asuka presents viewers with her exploration and experimentation of the circular motifs to be found in African fabrics that she has been studying for the past 2 years in great detail. The philosophical central theme here is based on experimental work she began whilst living in India in 2013. Asuka places these motifs within a philosophical discourse by challenging it’s aspects beyond just the decorative and ornamental – she questions the deeper meaning of the circular form. Although Asuka herself isn’t religious she has discovered that the elements of her Japanese-Buddhist heritage, subconsciously inform her own philosophy.
Exhibition Opens: 04/10/2018
Lost Souls – Anthony Lane
Anthony Lane and Eclectica Contemporary present a discourse on the Syrian Humanitarian crisis to Cape Town.
As Anthony say’s “It is human nature to forget. As we are bombarded with so much new information on a daily basis, it is my wish for The Lost Souls Project to keep the dialogue alive. The plight of refugees the world over is ongoing. They are faced with the daunting challenge of building new lives in unfamiliar environments, carrying their memories of lost homes, families and countries with them. The possibility of returning to the lives they once had, a dream that may never be realized”.
Exhibition Opens: 04/10/2018
Leila Fanner | Ceremony for the Soul
Presenting a series of paintings imbued with vivid colors abstract motions and delicate details, Leila Fanner is featured as September’s invited artist for Eclectica Collection. For Leila, painting becomes a meditation in an external sense, and a way of incorporating vistas of this world and others.
Central to her body of work and seen in others that have come before, is the depiction of a single feminine form. The figurative presence in her work elaborates on notions of sentience, with each creation existing as a guide or an explorer-companion. The figures presented seem to be a mythical and metaphorical imagining of being immersed in the natural world while experiencing ties to the ephemeral.
Throughout the works, symbols and narratives circulate through each piece creating an elaborate tale with exuberant tones and illuminating imagery that converse on the traversing of our realms of consciousness and existence. The works are evocative and intricate, calling for self reflection and a moment of quiet absorption.
Exhibition Opens: 06/08/2018
Nina Holmes – Un|safe
The exhibition is an exploration of the tensions and anxieties, often taken for granted or ignored as the ‘norm’, through painting and mixed media works on varying scales. Nina has contemplated, through these works, notions of risk, safety, measures for protection and how we view the people and institutions that surround us. In some ways harking back to the stylistic and technical approach of impressionist painters as a kind of visual respite from the complexities and busyness of today’s world, she has juxtaposed contemporary clues and cues into each work that make them startlingly current. Un|safe forms a nuanced articulation of the blurry assumptions that shroud us in a kind of safety while maintaining the equal potential to trap us. Navigating these themes through traces, off cuts, stretched and un-stretched materials, Nina has formulated a series of paintings that are as challenging as they are aesthetic. The work pushes the viewer to see beyond comfort and pleasantries, richly available in her plush and sumptuous palette, and to think further about what surrounds us in our daily lives, to recognize what is presented right before our eyes.
Exhibition Opens: 06/08/2018
Eclectica Contemporary | FNB Johannesburg Art Fair
Each of the artists we have chosen utilize their own individual techniques to convey commentary on the world as they experience it.
Exhibition Opens: 06/08/2018 – 09/08/2018 @ Sandton Convention Centre
Working mostly on large canvases, sometimes coupling or grouping panels together, Georgia Lane presents In this Time, a solo exhibition that explores the juxtaposition of time and place, questioning the boundaries of memories and actions by creating intricate paintings that reminisce and record places past.
Exhibition opens – 1 August 2018
The exhibition is set up in order to confront these terms and imagine their different possibilities, less bound by the assumption of being lesser than but rather reaching towards an understanding of being multiple and expansive.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 05 July 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Natasha Barnes
Natasha’s paintings take inspiration found in her travels and her love for the rich African images surrounding her life. Her experience is transferred onto canvas in a myriad of expressive brush stroke and harmony of colour. Natasha’s paintings are abstract in that her creative process is to absorb the sensation of her physical experience then transfer to the canvas without looking at the subject.
Samson Mnisi
Samson Mnisi also whose late name translates to “Rain maker”. Born in 1971 in Lesotho, Samson is a Soweto Based Artists, who studied Fine Art and photography at FUBA Academy. He has had numerous groups and solo exhibitions, locally and internationally.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 05 July 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
The pull the edge of a thread. To unravel the cloth. To grab hold of something and walk with the eventuality it leads towards. Or away from. The Edge of a Thread exhibition is a group show that wraps itself around and through any and all mediums, with artists weaving and winding through their own practice, stitched together with cement, pixels, fragments, leaves and pigments within the Eclectica Contemporary gallery space.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 07 June 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
For Turbine Art Fair 2018, the gallery features a selection of artists from South Africa, whose art practices demonstrate innovative and exciting approaches to dealing with notions of new African narratives within the contemporary discourse.
Aimee Lindeque
Zolani Siphungela
With Vincent Osemwegie, Anthony Lane and Duduza Mchunu
Variation / Distinction
An exhibition exploring the distinction of line in varying mediums and topics. Each artist elaborates around notions of interaction and variation through, around, within and across lines of people, worlds and beings.
In a world where lines are often blurred and circumstances are more frequently confronted by knee-jerk reactions, Variation/ Distinction considers the personal narrative within this – from abstracted figurative sculptures to portrait paintings and deeply intimate video installations. Exploring the personal means that artists are able to tap into the resources most easily available to them, while also catalyzing an interaction of tense self-reflection. Both easy and harshly challenging, confronting and exploring the personal results in a complexly relatable set of ideas and notions. All people uncover and explore their own identity in different ways but the singular connector of self-study is a key thread that wraps around us all.
the presence of absence | Christa Myburgh
The strength held by mothers was once described by Maya Angelou as “a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow”. The process of building this body of work and maintaining life as a single mother resulted in Christa Myburgh’s solo exhibition being something like the climbing and falling rainbow that Angelou describes. In this exhibition, intensely personal and intimate events contribute to an undercurrent theme of fragility, illusion and absurdity. For her solo exhibition at Eclectica Collection, Myburgh undertakes size, perspective and chiascurro to illuminate a lived reality that she associates with her life as a mother of two young children.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 05 April 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Limb | Ben Coutouvidis
The title of this new exhibition alludes to the physicality of the work – in forms and shapes and in making, from the intertwined roots and branches of trees reaching out across the canvas like fingers and legs and toes, to the spliced and re-articulated sculptural figures. ‘Limb’ gestures through language and imagination. The works in this exhibition explore and illustrate the notion of speaking through movement, using different mediums to articulate different thoughts that come together around the central connection of gesture, different notions of body and the worlds that we find ourselves in.
Exhibition opens Thursday, 05 April 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Loyiso Mkize: Signal 2 Soul
“This body of work is a deconstructive journey inward. Here I model light and dark expressively and deliberately as a way to observe the seen and the unseen of the human form. Who we are as well as who we appear to be. Taking on the shadow plane, I explore the “darkness” using colour. The shadow plane is drenched in a colour field, an entire colour landscape where I search for my connection with whom Im depicting. What stories hide behind our everyday facade (the side of us caught in the light)? And how do we establish identity with these two fields of existence? Behind the lit plane description of who we appear to be, is a universe of memories, emotions, ideas, experiences, loves, hates, prejudices, interests , opinions, beliefs etc. This devise itself is positively charged with intensity and vibrancy which I believe in a way illuminates our inner truths and possibly serves as an agent encouraging us to relate to one another more effectively. To be inquisitive enough not to perceive one another at face value, but to brave the mysteries of the unseen and in so doing acquire signal to the soul.” – Loyiso Mkize
Exhibition opens Thursday, 01 February 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Stop stop click: group exhibition
“A key question hitting the art world and specifically contemporary photographers is the question of the future of the image. To stop, to pause, to click manifests in everyday life across so many platforms and interactions. To take seriously the art of photography, does this mean a forfeiting of chance? Of the momentary and immediate? Or does it simply mean a reconsidering of interaction and a reframing of approach to image-making?”
– Clare Patrick
Exhibition opens Thursday, 01 March 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Danielle Zelna Alexander: Beholder
This body of work is an investigation into the notion of construction and the veneer of ‘finishing’ an artwork. Drapery and cloth are used as a metaphor for ambiguity, passivity and tension to confuse the distinction of content, subject and peripheries. The traditional medium of oil paint is juxtaposed with the industrial medium of wall crack filler to highlight the faults or cracks in these physical and conceptual confinements.
An exercise in looking and then looking again. These works bring periphery and framing into question through the seductive lighting of abstract or mundane, blurring what gets to be depicted or represented in the historic medium of oil on canvas. Each work explores an unsettling quietness presented as passivity. Using cloth and physical frames to stand in for narratives of perception and representation, the work attempts to grapple with the issues of ambiguity and tensions in relation to the artist’s perception and understanding of identity. It also looks at what that means or is represented as within the art institutional context which, in its authoritarian nature creates a “framework” (context) for the content that it houses to exist in and be presented through. By using certain elements and traditions seen in the canon of art history these paintings set up a conversation around what can be accessed and who gets to engage with art and the institutions associated.
Philipp Pieroth
Berlin artist, Philipp Pieroth investigates spatial relations between individuals and human interactivity as a means to interrogate the alienating context of a capitalist and technologically-based society. As a result of frequent traveling between South Africa and Europe, his work is informed by immersing himself in spaces that provide interaction and conversation with others in efforts to redefine and re-establish a consciousness around human connection.
Body, Soul and Spirit: Ley Mboramwe
The work in this exhibition throbs and pulsates through the room, vividly pushing their imagery through the space. The viewer is confronted with Morambwe’s vibrant mark making and use of colour – colours that mimic the heat and fraught environment the paintings draw on. Following on from motifs in his earlier work, Mboramwe’s figures continue to float in space, transfiguring body and flesh, spirit and soul; the abstraction of life that we are eternally caught up in.” – by Clare Pattrick
Exhibition opens Thursday, 01 February 2018, 18h00, at 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
