Cape art picks: January 27 2012
They might employ vastly different mediums and explore equally divergent themes, but artists Viviane Sassen and Nandipha Mntambo share a common preoccupation with perception.
With typical curatorial savvy, the Stevenson gallery is showing their new work in concurrent exhibitions, thereby provoking a dynamic conversation about representation and abstraction, narrative and evocation.
These works may employ a documentary approach, but Sassen’s emotive visual language engages the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography. Mntambo’s new exhibition, The Unspoken, shares Sassen’s interest in abstraction, but she uses visceral media such as cowhide and oil paint to construct visual abstractions that function in an almost documentary sense.
Stevenson, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock. Tel: 021 462 1500. Until February 25. Website: stevenson.info.
■ The arid Karoo haunted the British colonial imagination. Poet Thomas Hardy described its “dusty loam” lit by “strange stars amid the gloam”, whereas Rudyard Kipling’s Bridge-guard in the Karoo notes its “ramparts of slaughter and peril/ Blazing, amazing, aglow”.
British conceptual and land artist Richard Long engages but ultimately upsets these exotic, outsider perceptions in Karoo Highveld.
Comprising works made during the artist’s two visits to South Africa, it highlights his conception of land art as rooted in the act of walking. Shunning object-based practice, he produces fragmented photographic pieces and text and sculptural installations that document the traces his presence leaves in a space.
Iziko South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Cape Town. Until January 31. Tel: 021 467 4660. Website: iziko.org.za.
