Jo’burg art picks: September 10 2010

There’s an interesting mix of old and new on show in Jo’burg this week.

• The very first works in the Johannesburg Art Gallery collection were acquired in 1910, and the foundation stone of the museum laid in 1911. That makes the JAG and its contents 100 years old. As one of the several events scheduled over the next year to celebrate, Hollard Insurance and Villa Arcadia host National Treasures, a curated exhibition of works from the JAG collection. A preserved Herbert Baker home, Villa Arcadia was the residence of JAG’s founding benefactors Florence and Lionel Phillips. National Treasures is open to the public every Friday and Sunday in September. Opening hours on Fridays are 1pm to 5pm, and on Sundays, 10am to 2pm. Villa Arcadia, Hollard Campus, 22 Oxford Road, Parktown. Tel: 011 351 2061.

• On September 11 at 2pm, Richard Penn opens his first major solo exhibition, titled ‘And to that Sea Return’, at Art on Paper. In this exhibition of prints, pastel drawings and paintings, Penn uses both analogue and digitally-rendered marks, magnified to the point at which their detail becomes obscured, as metaphors for peering through time to some point of origin. Sometimes this origin is personal, and sometimes scientific. For Penn, what we see in the present is the residue of the ancient past, just as ‘static’ or ‘snow’ on an untuned analogue television set is purportedly caused by residual energy from the Big Bang. ‘I am intrigued by the very large and the very small and our inability as humans to fully grasp either of them,” Penn Says. Art on Paper, 44 Stanley Avenue, Milpark. Website: www.galleryaop.com