Art Exhibition Review

Art Exhibition Review

Artist:  MAJA MALJEVIC

Bubble & Leak

David Krut Art Resource & Projects Space presents ‘Bubble & Leak’ exhibition by Maja Maljevic which will be up from the 10^th February to the 11^th March 2011 in 140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood.

 Maja, Yugoslavian born artist, is a symbol of how contemporary abstract art has shifted throughout its invention. She has brought into the South African visual art arena a vibrant and energetic surprise. Her works are intuitive and are slightly informed by the name of a popular British dish called ‘Bubble & Squeak’. However the dish is not a central subject matter to this body of work. She has an outstanding ability of creating art and has a unique way in which she composes her interpretation of the dish on the canvas. It is emotive that the audience she is trying to builds seems to be interested in collecting what she has produced.

It is not a surprise that a few of her works were sold even before the opening of the show. Her choice of colour, scale, patterns and medium is exuberant. Maljevic’s paintings and monotypes continue to fight their way to the audience with their unsophisticated character, humour and peaceful mood. Her abstract paintings create a background which forms a sharp contrast to language and friendliness which utterly pushes the viewer into studying the language she has invented. She works on a variety of scales which makes her art more appealing to different collectors.

Her artworks are decorative, both paintings and monoprints. The body of work reflects humour which she invites in her effectual process, freedom of creation, often encapsulating intentional mistakes and the pleasure of allowing messy marks such the dripping of paints to grace the canvas. This springs from her self-confident personality. Her abstracts are very simple and collectable as they can be easily related to.

Patterns, texts and choices of colour are the most important elements of her creative process. There is something very human about them, but they are composites: suggestions of people in the bottle-like figures and patterns built from layer after layer giving the artwork more life and movement. The text brings more information in an abstract formation, scattered like patches all over the surface of the canvas for the viewer to translate. Her choice of colour offers no distraction to the observer because of the obvious richness, freshness and subtleness. The colours are perplexed by the shifting reflection and suggestion of tone that marks them.

In this exhibition, conversation plays a significant role. In it, the viewer finds vigorous conversations which exist between Maja and the canvas. She then put it across to her audience for them to relate. It can be said that Maja is an abstract storyteller and shares the challenges and absurdity she experiences with her audience on the canvas.

Review by: Khehla Chepape Makgato

2011/02/10

Wayne Barker Art Exhibition review

Art Exhibition Review

Artist: Wayne Barker

Standard Bank Art Gallery presents the conceptualized art exhibition entitled: ‘SUPER BORING’ by Wayne Barker. The show will run from 02 February through to 09 April 2011. It is an opportunity for the public to view this controversial retrospective body of work which is part of creative project Barker embarked in 2009.

Barker started out his art career as an apprentice woodcarver before enrolling at Pretoria Technikon in 1986 to study Fine Art. He then started to build his career as a professional artist. After being into the art industry for more than two decades now he distinguished himself as an expressionist and deconstructionist. He had played a critical role in the transformation of South African contemporary art. He had questioned and commented extensively on different issues in our country such as political, social, cultural and historical context. He has pushed boundaries of art-making.

This conceptualized exhibition is where the viewer sees whatever he wants and that is exactly what the artist wanted it to be. The artist acknowledges that, with this continuation project of ‘Super Boring’ the burden is on the viewer more than it is on the art-creator to draw conclusions.

He continues to highlight his enthusiasm for colour, provocative, religious and rebellious persona in his work as an art maker who lives a life of a visual interpreter in the democratic South Africa. He views himself as an ordinary South African who is as equal as someone begging from the streets of Johannesburg. When you get into the entrance of the Gallery, you are greeted by a big notice board inscribed like as if someone is begging for foods at the traffic lights. In this notice he is asking for the cadaver, cow dung and other found objects which he indicated clearly that he will make a huge public sculptor from such public donations.

The exhibition is informed by variety of art mediums such as video and audio installations, sculptures, strung beats, paintings, and lots of found objects. When you enter into the gallery, on your left-hand side there is an installed exhibition of gloves, some empty and others filled with objects like plastic bottles, blood-like liquid, old clothes with a significant historical bearing and stencil photographic drawings made of distinctive mark makings, lines and texts.

‘Super Boring’ is the subject theme accompanied by other themes from Barker’s early works. It is a wholesome irony suggested to the viewer by the artist. Under the subject theme, Barker seems more adamant in bringing back the morale of his fellow South Africans, lost of heritage, identity and the richness of beauty in landscapes. He breaks the web of indignity which confronted our country from the time when apartheid was entrenched.

He projects visual questions to the viewer with very slightly suggested portraits of people whom have inspired him directly or indirectly onto a canvas. While the viewer is challenged by the unassuming painted portraits, he comes back to the viewer with an electronic text-like bulbs inserted in the painting with an intention to throw out clues.

The pay of tribute has distinguished Barker from other contemporary artists in that the approach he used has embraced different important historical and public figures such as Walter Sisulu, Steve Biko, Enoch Sontonga, Gerald Sekoto, Jackson Hlongwani, Miriam Makeba and JM Coetzee.

Beside such honorary tributes, speeches and works of such icons form part of the honour in this exhibition. It is a visual art feast which takes a viewer into a South African ride for historical and cultural discovery.

The show upstairs is taking the viewer into the reminiscence of how blanket of apartheid has shaped the democratic society which became a paradigm of a rainbow nation. It reflects ashes and sweats of blood which people of our country had to endure in those dark ages of apartheid.

The evidence is from the audio installation of the greatest living global figure Nelson Mandela’s speech during the Rivonia Trials. His powerful speech reminds the listener that the democratic society of South Africa did not happen overnight. Freedom and apartheid collide with each other as the visual retrospective of Wayne Barker unfolds.

 

Review by: Khehla Chepape Makgato

Date : 16/02/2011