/ 13 January 2017

Arts news : Cape Town gets a new art fair and Lady Skollie sexes up London

Global ap-peel: Popular South African artist Lady Skollie is preparing to imprint her mark on the international art scene.
Global ap-peel: Popular South African artist Lady Skollie is preparing to imprint her mark on the international art scene.

Lady Skollie probes politics of lust in debut London show

After being tapped as one of the top five artists to see at London’s Frieze art week last year, South African artist Laura Windvogel, better known by the moniker Lady Skollie, is cutting her international teeth as she prepares for her first solo exhibition in London this month at the Tyburn Gallery.

The artist will exhibit new ink, watercolour and crayon paintings and will paint a large-scale mural for the gallery on site the day before the opening.

Lady Skollie’s oeuvre is synonymous with the tensions around sex, gender and the body, with provactive phallic papayas, bananas and repeated patterns of “pussy prints” being her trademark. In the new works, delicate and bold colours are blended within images that transcend her own take on sexual fantasies and desires.

The show, titled Lust Politics, will open on January 19 and stay up until March 4. Visit tyburngallery.com

Artists invited to submit works for inaugural Art Africa Fair

A new commercial art fair, the Art Africa Fair, has put out an open call to artists and galleries to participate in what is described as Africa’s first fully curated international art fair, set to be held at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town from February 24 to March 5.

The open call is for artists working in any medium, photographers, designers, galleries that can present artists or works, collectives and institutions whose work focuses on social, political or environment impacts.

Participants are asked to propose works that “challenge parochial perceptions surrounding Africa and provoke alternative artistic visions of the continent as defined by individual, lived experiences’’.

The fair is being developed by acclaimed curators Salimata Diop, Uche Okpa-Iroha, Pierre Christophe Gam, Thembinkosi Goniwe and others. Visit thatartfair.com to enter.