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 Vol 2.’ 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

We are reaching the end of another year.  It is a time of celebration and also reflection. We are going on a journey with our artists, taking the opportunity to look back over this year and unpack various social issues we have faced.

Ibrahim Khatab

Ibrahim Khatab, a Cairo born artist, currently lectures at the National University of Cairo and has exhibited both locally and internationally. His art showcases his knowledge and technical skills of paintings, installations and video art. Ibrahim’s artworks visually expresses the artist’s deep love of calligraphy, as well as colour, space, movement and arabic script which all factor heavily in his practice.

Ibrahim Khatab feels that Islamic Calligraphy played a poignant role in the education of art and writing. Then and now, the medium is seen to be an important element of the Arabic cultural legacy, an eternal heritage that Khatab fell in love with when he was 10 year’s old. Years of honing the technical skill allowed him to use this talent as a source of income (by designing banners for commercial spaces and beautifying the pilgrims’ houses who had arrived from Mecca)and it has become central to his designs as a practicing artist today.

Sterling Trimby is a multi-disciplinary artist from Cape Town, South Africa. With a creative background and an obsession for illustration, he spent his youth drawing and painting. Through underwater photography, the door to the digital frontier was opened, providing a new platform of expressive freedom. Further obtaining a degree in graphic design and along with the quest for spirituality, fantasy, and adventure, the definition of his art began to take shape.

Portraying esoteric concepts and symbolism combined with science fiction, he takes viewers on a journey challenging prescribed systems and provoking the understanding of reality. Let your mind play!

After conceptualizing, Sterling’s work process all starts by hand. Sketching with pencil and technical pens, most of the elements begin organically and are then transformed digitally. Once inside design software, the process can vary, but mixing pixels and vector and adding a lot of colour and atmosphere is typically standard. Sometimes a piece is completely autonomous and randomly created freely and sometimes the art can be fully conceptualized and then executed in a planned manner from start to finish.

Peter Mammes

Peter was born in 1986 in Krugersdorp, South Africa, and currently resides in London. He has worked on drawings and artwork from a very young age. For the most part an autodidact, his training has also included an apprenticeship in a puppet theatre and with a set designer working on theatre productions. Peter is a fourth-generation South African of Dutch descent, who grew up as part of an isolated, Afrikaans-speaking community during the collapse of the apartheid regime and the transition to a democratic, multi-cultural government. As a child experiencing the regime change, he observed the rapid transformation of the country’s collective social and economic norms and the conflicted and often clumsy responses to those changes. His observation of the amorphous historical narratives told by the successive governments ruling South Africa has been a major factor in his development as an artist. He uses his artwork to pose questions about the construction of the narratives of power and authority, the intersection of individual and national identity and the suppression and celebration of the ugly and unacceptable.

“I am interested in patterns. Thoughts occur as patterns; our lives are made up of events that occur as repetitions; history is repeated in patterned compositions. I am fascinated by the way nature forms patterns, even those that are grotesque. When people and animals are born deformed, the deformity is symmetrical, harmonious. There are patterns in deformities, which imbue them with grace and beauty.

I try and draw attention to the beauty of the things society tries to hide, the beauty in the uncommon and unusual. I grapple with the way in which what we consider benign and banal to- day might be in the future, or have been in the past, considered pathological and bizarre. My work draws attention to the unusual in order to question our current sense of normality, which is temporal and malleable.”

institutional culpability
2018
Acrylic on Board
183 x 175 cm

Post modern delights
2018
Acrylic on Board
183 x 100 cm

Cobus Haupt

Haupt is well established as a bronze sculpture that draws on history, popular culture and tradition to produce artworks that are visually interesting, tactile and playful. The process and method of bronze casting informs Haupt’s work both formally and conceptually. The tendency to include cracks, flaws and unresolved imperfections that bears witness to the casting process catalogues the tactile history and the bronze technique itself, and also comments on Haupt’s rendering of the human figure. Human beings are understood as unique, fragile and remarkable due to his or her so-called imperfections, flaws and scars. These human ‘defects’ and ‘deformities’ bear, as in the case of the bronze casting process, witness to their engagement with life. Due to the importance of the process, Haupt undertakes all the aspects of the sculpting process himself from the mould making to the casting.

Themba Khumalo

Themba Benedict Khumalo was born on the 16 February 1987 in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa. Khumalo graduated from Artist Proof Studio in printmaking, where he obtained a Design Foundation Certificate. He went on to do a professional printmaking development course under the sponsorship of Pinpoint One, at Artist Proof Studio in 2009 where he was an intern in the silkscreen unit and special project team. Khumalo is interested in exploring different mediums, such as charcoal drawings and painting.

“My concept is based on my relationships with people. In my work, I explore feelings of connectivity and isolation. I am most comfortable in a designated private space. My biggest fear is rejection and loss. My attempt is to build trust and closer associations with others through my artwork.

There are never human figures in the images. However, electric poles, plugs, and cables are the subjects of all the works. These are metaphors for life, energy and movement. The subjects are seen in different contexts, all outside, in a city or landscape. This provides the context. The atmosphere is created by the sky.”

Gulwa Lindisipho

Gulwa Lindisipho was born (1995) and raised in South Africa.

“I am an abstract painter, poet, documentary photographer and last but not least a social rights activist. One of the first elements that one would notice in my craft is my use of colours. Bright and challenging to the naked eye, I apply rich colours in thick paint on brown paper or canvas. My sense of scale shouts at the viewers no matter where they standing in the room, and they just can’t ignore me. Another element is my use of shapes and forms, the business that I create in my background pushes the figures to stand out in the foreground, I use this aproach to provoke thoughts and emotions of the endless creation. In most of my craft my main focus is scale, my scale gives the artwork a feeling or an idea of freedom, movement, something out of this world. Scale has everything to do with pride, being bold,  expressing myself open and honestly as an artist.”

Langelihle
2019
mixed media on cardboard
approx 152 x 108 cm

Paul Daniels

“Born on the 12th of July 1975, I have been an artist from an early age, as a youngster in the early 1990’s I was well aware of the many shortcomings I would have to face and overcome, yet I never stopped drawing. I developed a fascination for watercolours and oil point. After I finished matric I went to further my studies at Athlone Technical College, where enrolled to study boiler making. I loved working with forms and sheet metal. I love creating art pieces whether in metal form, clay, paint or ink sketches. I sold numerous paintings to private clients local and abroad.

I work in an abstract-semi realistic style. I take inspiration from life and natural forms. The work I produce are presented sometimes as collages and colourful yet addressing very serious social issues, and my background as a graffiti artist and my keen interest in cartooning makes it easy to form together the puzzle of my paintings and raise awareness .I try to draw the viewer into my world and my thoughts. I render my works both colourful and dim moods to illustrate the concern or the joy of being in these diverse spaces. It is my mission to both entertain and make aware socially and politically the difficulties of our daily realities.”

Norman O’ Flynn

Norman O’ Flynn is a South African artist living and working in Cape Town. He was awarded the Irma Stern Award for Excellence in Printmaking and is well known for his distinctive painting style and witty sculptures.

The state of humanity is questioned and interpreted in his work, and this is ironically portrayed in very playful and harmless manner – though there is a decided and intentional cynical and dark sense of humour exhibited. His work brings into play, a unique visual language ranging from comic book superheroes to demi-gods, triumphant ballet dancers, and space age fertility figures – all employed in his satirical observation of society. For The Countdown series he uses acrylic paint on plexiglass, whereby he incorporates a technique of layering and patterning.

Norman has held eight solo exhibitions in Africa and participated in numerous group shows nationally and internationally. His work is widely sought after and hangs in private, corporate and museums collections around the world.