Brenda Atkinson On exhibition in Johannesburg
An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Lionel Abrams opened at the Standard Bank Gallery last week to warm tribute from local cultural luminaries. One of these, an article by Albie Sachs in the Sunday Independent, provided a poignant and poetic insight into the man who was Sachs’s friend and neighbour, and who died last year, aged 66, a relative unknown, but considered by some to be one of our most influential post-war artists.
Based on this exhibition, which was curated and inaugurated by Sachs, I would hesitate to grant Abrams the historical status of post-war painterly icon. Installed in part in dialogue with another show – Cafes, Caf, which rather tackily recreates famous Parisian drinking places – A Tribute is uneven, if interesting, in terms of its range of media and subject matter.
While the majority of the 40-odd works are paintings, Abrams is strongest when working with the bleak sepia of charcoal: his Untitled Charcoal series, produced in 1988, breaks from the highly personalised puns of his earlier paintings. These are haunting works, their planes, grids and shadows suggestive of unnamed political menace. There is indisputable talent here, but not, I would argue, the stuff of Hodgins or Sekoto.
Deborah Bell’s Displacements, an exhibition of new drawings, graphics, and ceramics which opened recently at the Goodman Gallery, confirms Bell’s status as one of our strongest contemporary artists. Bell continues her examination of the (mis) appropriation – and subsequent displacement – of African artefacts and myths, in complex and layered dialogue with the discourses of damage that surround the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Building on her Ubu works, Bell explores the mind-boggling shades and degrees of colonial and post-colonial fallout through a range of media, from delicate hand-coloured monoprints (see particularly Expulsion one and two, her take on the Creation myth), to enormous ceramic gourds and spoons that explode with pregnant despair and rage.
Bell’s command of her subject and materials has always been impressive, but Displacements proves that she is getting better all the time. Not only are these works beautiful aesthetic objects, they are haunting interrogations of a scarred African history and an uncertain future.
Lionel Abrams: A Tribute is on at the Standard Bank Gallery, cnr Simmonds and Fredrick Streets. Deborah Bell’s Displacements can be viewed at the Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood until August 29.