Collectors' Selection #002 by Stevenson

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3 - 24 june 2022

Collectors’ Selection #002 3 – 24 june 2022

stevenson collectors’ selection

#002

3 - 24 june 2022

Over time, our individual concerns evolve and shift, and as a result there are occasions when works, regardless of their importance and merit, no longer resonate in the curation of a collection. It is this sensitive moment, when a collector makes the often difficult decision to let go of a work, that is the premise for our Collectors’ Selection presentation. In this second iteration are works by artists we have worked with over the 19year history of the gallery, almost all of which we have exhibited in solo shows and curated exhibitions. The works went to collections in the USA, Europe and South Africa. They are now available again and offer an opportunity for new and seasoned collectors to engage with pieces they might have missed in the past. And in a new collection, and in a new prism of personal interests, each work will now reflect new concerns in a different context for years to come.

Prices exclude taxes, framing and shipping (please note locations listed) The artist will recieve a 4% share of the resale price

stevenson collectors’ selection

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Alfred Neville Lewis On board ship, undated Oil on board 33 x 23.5cm Inquire location: Cape Town

Captain Neville Lewis was South Africa’s first appointed war artist. He was born in Cape Town and studied fine art in the United Kingdom, at the Slade School of Fine Art. Lewis served in the British Army and established himself as a portrait painter of international renown in the years between the two world wars. On 4 December 1940, he was appointed as the first of seven official war artists in the Union Defence Force, as South Africa’s military was known. In the three years that he spent as a war artist, he travelled in and between South Africa and the battlefronts in East and North Africa. In On board ship, Lewis paints a subject seldom recorded - the participation, and thus recognition, of black soldiers in the world wars. The painting depicts four men washing on the deck of a ship. The work evokes the Quattrocento period with its palette and painterly stay and the reductive sense of perspective. Lewis was included in South African War Art at the Royal Academy (1948) and Overseas Exhibition of South African Art at Tate (1952). His work is now held in the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; and, in Britain, in the National Gallery, Tate and the Imperial War Museum.

stevenson collectors’ selection

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David Goldblatt Stevedore, Durban (3_1302), 1953 Vintage silver gelatin photograph on fibre based paper 10 x 16cm Inquire location: Cape Town

In a biography of David Goldblatt, James Merle Thomas describes the photographer’s early life: “Born into a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution, he grew up believing in equality and tolerance for people from other cultures and religions. This can be seen in his 4 earliest pictures of dockers, fishermen and miners, taken between the ages of 14 and 18. As well as this respect, there was a sense of curiosity about attitudes he did not share, and a desire to understand rather than dismiss them. Goldblatt took this photograph in 1953, at the age of 23, when he was just starting out on his lifetime’s work of documenting the complex racial history of South Africa. This is a rare vintage print that he gave to Michael Stevenson in the early 2000s.

exhibited: David Goldblatt: Fifty-one years, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2002

stevenson collectors’ selection

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David Goldblatt: Fifty-one years (2001, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona)

stevenson collectors’ selection

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Nicholas Hlobo Ndiyafuna, 2006 Glass fibre, rubber inner tube, ribbon, jeans, sneakers, lace, wood 110 x 170 x 100cm (approximate) Inquire location: Munich

Ndiyafuna occupied centre stage in Nicholas Hlobo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery Izele in 2006. Hlobo discussed the work in an interview with Sophie Perryer in the exhibition catalogue: “The meaning of ‘ndiyafuna’ depends on the context of the sentence – it could mean ‘I am looking’ or ‘I desire’. It’s about needing something, desiring something, looking for something. For example, someone could say, ‘would you like to go out with me?’ – ‘uyafuna uyafuna?’ It could mean looking for something you’ve lost. It’s looking at the idea of searching for or concealing one’s identity. And it makes reference to certain fashion trends. The teenagers who are into hip hop wear their pants halfway down their buttocks with their boxers revealed – something that is very challenging to older people! And the kids, when they dress like that, they feel very good about it.”

exhibited: Nicholas Hlobo: Izele, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2006 Nicholas Hlobo: Sculpture, Installation, Performance, Drawing, National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo, Norway, 2011

stevenson collectors’ selection

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Nicholas Hlobo Ndiyafuna, 2006 “This could be a creature swallowing a person. There’s something about it that I can’t describe. It has this round breast, just one, and valves – which are used to inflate something, to blow into. This man could be giving a blow job to this bag, so that it gets its shape – maybe that’s what he’s doing there. It’s playing with the idea of not knowing, the world of the known and the unknown. We don’t know what’s happening inside there. And the title is Ndiyafuna. When you read the title or say it out loud, it’s in the first person so it is you, the observer, who is desiring. You would like to go in there and see what is happening. There’s also the position – you’d love to be behind him. And when you have to carry it around, there’s no other way of holding it – you’re forced to do this, to put your hands between his legs. This man is hot. Izele exhibition with an alternate view of Ndiyafuna

What I find fascinating about the rubber I use, from used inner tubes, is the patches where there’s been a puncture – which goes to the idea of treatment I did not intend, somebody else had to do it for me. The label on this patch says ‘Two Way Tube Repair’ and ‘13’ – I don’t know whether this is 13 inch or what. The tubes themselves come in sizes, which are in inches. It’s like saying ‘you’re a size queen’. Even though the man is going into the bag, he could be being ejected by this creature. It’s confused. On the one hand he’s being consumed, on the other hand this thing is giving birth to him.”

Hlobo working in his Johannesburg studio, 2006

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Nicholas Hlobo Ndiyafuna, 2006

“There’s something very sexual about it, the way the figure is standing with his pants halfway down his buttocks. He’s wearing rubber. Here I was playing with top and bottom, inside and outside. The body is black rubber, and so is the underwear. There are bits of my clothes – the shoes, the underwear I had to sacrifice for the elastic band, on which is written ‘urban survival’. It’s almost like someone prostituting himself, because of the position, and having to give up parts of yourself to survive. The trousers are from the Young Designers Emporium. Aspects of the work relate to things we know, our particular heritage. Instead of using new shoes, and new jeans, these garments have some history.

Hlobo interacts with Ndiyafuna during the performance Umkwetha, 2006

This man is going into this bag – I think of the shape of the bag almost as a caterpillar. It’s as if he decided to go into the bag looking for something. I don’t know what this bag contains. This could be a cultural bag. It could be an identity bag.”

Installation view of Nicholas Hlobo: Sculpture. Installation. Performance. Drawing, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, 2011

stevenson collectors’ selection

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Nicholas Hlobo Ndiyafuna, 2006

Nicholas Hlobo: Sculpture. Installation. Performance. Drawing (2011, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo)

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“My motto was ‘Buy a picture a day’ and I lived up to it.” – Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim at the Greek Pavilion,Venice Biennale, 1948 photo: Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche

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Pieter Hugo Dambe fighter, Kano, Nigeria, 2005 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Paper size: 112 x 110cm Image size: 100 x 100cm Edition of 5 + 1 AP Inquire location: Cape Town

Of the ‘Gadawan Kura’ - The Hyena Men series I, Pieter Hugo explains: “These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.” A 2006 Art South Africa review of Hugo’s exhibition of the series, discusses the Dambe fighter image: “One is a full-length shot of a Dambe boxer from Kano, Nigeria, standing feet firmly planted, right hand swathed in the traditional cloth-and-cord glove of the Dambe fighter, nose showing all the signs of the pugilist’s trade. The portrait is a deeply moving meditation on machismo, resignation, and vulnerability, the boxer seeming to draw together all of these qualities in the steady gaze he directs at the camera.”

exhibited: Pieter Hugo: ‘Gadawan Kura’ - The Hyena Men series I, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2006

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Pieter Hugo Dambe fighter, Kano, Nigeria, 2005

“Instead of speaking in words that court emptiness and the void, Pieter Hugo's images confront viewers with the necessity of speaking in a new vocabulary, one that celebrates the fullness of being.” Sean O’Toole, 2004

Dambe fighter, Kano, Nigeria, 2005 (detail)

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Pieter Hugo Dambe fighter, Kano, Nigeria, 2005

Pieter Hugo: This Must Be the Place (2012, Prestel)

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Moshekwa Langa Untitled [Three huts], 2002 Gouache and watercolour 122 x 86cm Inquire location: New York

“The idea of geological strata is relevant but my archaeology is very imprecise. I am stimulated at every turn both by what I remember and what is around me, so there's a dual aspect: at the same time that the paintings go deeper into the ground, they suggest an aerial view, with fields, hills, mountains, and lakes going into the distance.” Moshekwa Langa, 2003

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Moshekwa Langa Untitled [Three huts], 2002

Nkgolopeng Moloi writes: “Langa’s practice concerns itself with explorations of place and “placeness”. His origin story begins with being born and growing up in Bakenberg (which resulted in him being teased about coming from a hole in the ground because his hometown could not be located on various maps). Bakenberg foregrounds our understanding of Langa’s explorations throughout his artistic career. However, the story of one’s life is not limited to the story of one’s origins. One is born, they grow up, they encounter different experiences and they evolve, “losing touch with a couple of people we used to be along the way”, as Joan Didion put it. It is for this reason that I wish to move away from Bakenberg as an entry point to reading Langa’s work and would like to propose a different one.

Langa’s childhood home in Bakenburg, Limpopo, 1995

If, indeed, we are forced to speak of Langa’s work in terms of his origin story — the dusty streets of Bakenberg as the place where he comes from (travels towards and away from), then I’d want to point out the lyrical relationship that exists between dust and the beauty of mists and the clouds.”

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Nicholas Hlobo Amaqabaza, 2012 Ribbon, watercolour, tea stain on Fabriano paper 230 × 150cm Inquire location: London

In a TATE exhibition text Kerryn Greenberg describes works like Amaqabaza: “...a tea stain on white watercolour paper forms the basis for the drawing. Meandering tentacles of pale brown are emphasised by intense orange and red stitches and further defined and textured by pale coloured ribbon sutures around the tea stain. The shape resembles an underwater creature, with several of the stitched lines ending abruptly, like stunted limbs. The sexual connotations of the forms, fleshy tones and slippery surfaces found in this work are confirmed by its title. Hlobo has cut and sewn the paper together with his signature ‘baseball’ stitch, which is not just decorative, but also very strong. The cuts in the paper are sharp and clean, determining where the ribbon sutures will be made and how they will overlap.”

exhibited: 18th Biennale of Sydney, 2012

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Nicholas Hlobo Amaqabaza, 2012

“Hlobo always titles his works in isiXhosa, an Nguni language widely spoken in South Africa. Attracted to the formal qualities of the grammar, the sounds of the words, and the linguistic flexibility of Xhosa, Hlobo’s use of the language, with all its poetic idioms, proverbs, and double entendres, is as much about defining himself as it is an effort to convey difficult truths and encourage dialogue around homosexuality, male circumcision and other culturally sensitive issues. Amaqabaza means ‘droplets’ but also meams ‘comments’ in isiXhosa the dual meaning of this word is one that Hlobo was interested in. Hlobo typically stitches and weaves together disparate materials such as ribbon, rubber, gauze and leather to create tactile sculptures and drawings. His works are richly layered, anchored in references to Xhosa culture and the experience of life in postApartheid South Africa, while reflecting upon themes of language and communication, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity.”

Amaqabaza in Hlobo’s Johannesburg studio before being sent to Sydney, 2011

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Nicholas Hlobo Amaqabaza, 2012 “The process of making is fundamental to Hlobo’s work. By utilising techniques such as stitching and weaving, traditionally undertaken by women in South Africa, he challenges gender-based assumptions about the division of labour. His choice of materials is similarly charged. The old and punctured inner tubes of car tyres that he gathers from repair shops in Johannesburg are a symbol of industrialisation and the urban experience. Resembling condoms, the inner tubes are also a symbol of masculinity and sex, something that is made explicit by his use of phallus and sperm shapes, and forms resembling orifices, umbilical cords and internal organs. The satin ribbon that he uses to make his marks on paper suggests femininity, domesticity and unification, in contrast to the more ‘masculine’ materials that it binds together.”

Tyaphaka, a whale-like sculpture made from rubber inner tubing and ribbon, also exhibited at the Sydney Biennale 2012

Amaqabaza, 2012 (detail)

Amaqabaza hanging next to Typhaka at the Sydney Biennale, 2012

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Viviane Sassen Mimosa, 2007 C-print 80 x 65cm Edition of 3 + 2AP Inquire location: New York

At the time of her 2010 exhibtion with the gallery, Moshi, the following was written on Sassen’s work and upbringing: “Viviane Sassen grew up in East Africa and has been taking photographs on the continent since her first return visit in 2002. Her imagery is infused with memories of her youth, from the beauty of the landscape and the children with whom she used to play to the poverty of the shanty towns and her doctor-father's terminally ill patients. Sassen's working method is intuitive. The first impulse for an image manifests in her sketchbooks, which include quotes, Polaroids and drawings. When travelling, Sassen lets herself be taken by the appearance or behaviour of people she encounters; conversations and drawings follow, with the camera coming into play at the very last. The final images - some staged, some spontaneous - are realised in collaboration with 'the model'. Many of Sassen's photographs are portraits, yet the viewer is seldom easily able to distinguish the facial features of the subjects. Their personal identity is symbolically - and sometimes literally - left in the shadows.”

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Viviane Sassen Mimosa, 2007

Viviane Sassen: Flamboya (2008, Contrasto)

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Penny Siopis Pinky Pinky: Damage, 2002 Oil and found object on canvas 92 x 152cm Inquire location: Cape Town

In Kathryn Smith’s 2005 monograph on Siopis’ work, Pinky Pinky as a series is discussed: “The 2001–2004 series is the visualization of a South African urban legend Pinky Pinky. A hybrid creature of amalgamated forms. Half-human, halfanimal, bi-gendered creature of indeterminate race, Pinky Pinky preys on school children in toilets and threatens girls in pink underwear. Siopis embarked on a personal exploration of Pinky Pinky, and according to verbal accounts by schoolchildren she interviewed on the topic, produced visual embodiments of this processual hybrid figure of no stable identity. Furthering a practice in manipulating paint and form to simulate skin and flesh, Siopis allows the paint to stand in as object of unspeakability. Located within Freudian theory and Lacan's ‘real’ , Siopis explores humans' ability to work-through personal feelings that exceed language by projecting things you cannot do in real life, onto and within fiction, myth and fantasy.”

exhibited: Pinky Pinky and other Xeni, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2002 Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town, 2014

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Penny Siopis Pinky Pinky: Damage, 2002

“In her visualisation of Pinky Pinky, Siopis inserted various human prosthetics into the pink, fleshy paint – plastic body parts like eyes and fake eye lashes; teeth and finger nails. In these 'fake horrors', Siopis allows viewers to feel both connected to and distanced from their own fears. Commenting on Siopis’ Pinky Pinky paintings in relation to their exploration of the vulnerability of the body, Colin Richards notes that the power elicited by the inclusion of fake body parts and wounds into the thick painted surface ‘lies not only in the permeable integrity of the skin, but also in its wounding’. He reflects that what is interesting about Pinky Pinky: Damage ‘is the fact that the bullet hole is not on the body, but rather on the flat, painted field on the lower right. The displacement encourages us to think of the modernist ‘flatness’ of the ground as simultaneously skin and body, simultaneously figural and abstract, counterintuitive to the formalism which usually dominates modernist painting’.”

Installation view of Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2014

Pinky Pinky: Damage, 2002 (detail)

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Penny Siopis Pinky Pinky: Damage, 2002

Penny Siopis: Time and Again (2014, Wits University Press)

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“Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.” – Claude Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss in Amazonia circa 1936 photo: Apic/Getty Images

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Andrew Verster Man in profile, with rainbow above, undated Oil on canvas 91 x 121.5cm Inquire location: Cape Town

Andrew Verster studied design at the Camberwell School of Art in London and furthered his studies at Reading University. Upon returning to South Africa he lectured at the University of DurbanWestville and the Natal Technikon until 1976 when he gave up teaching to become a full-time painter. He held more than 50 solo exhibitions and is represented in many major public and private collections. He was honoured with two retrospective exhibitions at the Durban Art Gallery, in 1997 and 2019.

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Andrew Verster Man in profile, with rainbow above At Verster’s memorial service in Durban in 2020, fellow artist and friend Clive van den Berg gave the following eulogy: “The primary responsibility for the artist is to be true, not just to the act of seeing but to the feelings, ideas and indeed the politics of seeing. Andrew knew this, and when he felt desire and love for men, he did not censor that recognition, nor clothe it in innuendo or code. He declared and lived and imaged it, and thus bequeathed to us who follow him a language and a political framework of looking. Such is the grace of his hand that he makes this look easy, but as Aiden might have said ‘it were never’. It is not easy now as our world is still full of prejudice, but in 1970s South Africa it was dangerous.

David Hockney, California Art Collector, 1964

Apartheid spawned many toxicities and one of the most fiercely enforced was that of a narrowly defined idea of masculinity. Andrew in his art and his life celebrated a more generous conception of love and association, and this is, I think, his great contribution to our cultural history.”

Man in profile, with rainbow above (detail)

Polaroid portrait of Verster in his studio, circa 1985 PHOTO: Penny Siopis

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Sabelo Mlangeni Nkululeko and a Friend from Durban, 2003 Hand-printed silver gelatin print Image size: 40 x 30cm Paper size 36 x 24cm Edition 2 of 7 + 2AP Inquire location: Cape Town

In the Country Girls catalogue essay, Graham Reid gives context to the series: “Glamour and grittiness combine in Sabelo Mlangeni’s Country Girls series, an intimate portrait of gay life in the South African countryside. The photographs were taken in small towns and rural areas in the Mpumalanga province: Driefontein, Ermelo, Bethal, Platrand, Piet Retief, Standerton and Secunda – nodes of mining, agri- culture, forestry and coal-fed power stations. These are bleak environments where township life is rough and poor. But there is also glamour here. Country Girls vividly demonstrates that fashion and gay life go hand-in- hand in the countryside. In fact it is not uncommon to hear of gay lifestyles referred to, with some disapproval, as ‘a fashion’, a modern phenomenon. To some, gays are seen as un-African, un-Christian or the unfortunate by-product of a liberal constitution. But, as Mlangeni’s evocative photographs show, this is only a small part of the story. Narratives of gay community formation are almost invariably citybased and tell a familiar story: the relative anonymity of city life, the loosening of family and kinship bonds and the wage-labour economy free individuals to follow their personal desires and to explore more varied erotic lives. Mlangeni’s work shows that gays have also carved spaces for themselves in the countryside – in seemingly unlikely places where they work, play, love and create community.” stevenson collectors’ selection

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David Goldblatt Victoria Cobokana, housekeeper, in her employer’s dining room with her son Sifiso and daughter Onica, Johannesburg, June 1999.Victoria died of AIDS on 13 December 1999, Sifiso died of AIDS on 12 January 2000, Onica died of AIDS in May 2000 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper 59.5 x 60cm Edition of 6 + 2AP Inquire location: Cape Town

Exhibiting this series in 2009, Galeria Elba Benitez stated: “In the time of AIDS features colour photographs that highlight the psychological state caused by the AIDS epidemic throughout the South African landscape. In this specific image, the tragic effect of AIDS is starkly exposed with all the sitters pictured having succumbed to the disease. The photographs in the series possess the same qualities identified in David Goldblatt’s older work: a direct confrontation with the subject, without recourse to odd angles or optical effects. The results are images that are forthright and frank … [T]he hallmark of Goldblatt’s perspective is his empathy with the subject, and as he puts it in his own words, ‘I was completely engaged by what I saw, and tried to penetrate and hold with the camera, of the wholly uneventful flow of commonplace, orderly life’.”

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David Goldblatt: The Pursuit of Values (2015, Standard Bank)

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Deborah Poynton Train Journey, 1998 Oil on canvas 80 x 80cm Inquire location: Cape Town

In the Paintings exhibition catalogue Andrew Lamprecht writes: “There is a noteworthy lack of finality to the work of Deborah Poynton. If we compare her paintings to our dreams we are reminded that while we may wake up with a start or slowly tumble from our slumbers to waking, the dream itself does not come to an end like a neatly plotted novel or a three-act play... Consider for a moment the issue of windows. We see them in several of Poynton’s works. Train Journey connects the ever changing but pictorially frozen view from a train window with a sleeping figure. In her dreams the figure is unaware of the night visions endlessly unrolling beside her.”

exhibited: Paintings, Everard Read, Cape Town, 1998

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Deborah Poynton Train Journey, 1998

Deborah Poynton: Selected Paintings 1998-2000. Text by Andrew Lamprecht. Cape Town

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Guy Tillim Lubumbashi City Hall, DR Congo, 2007 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Small: 49.7 x 71.4cm Edition 3 of 6 + 2AP Inquire location: New York

Curator of Tillim’s 2011 presentation at MoCP Karen Irvine wrties: “In his project Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Guy Tillim records the architecture and infrastructure of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Patrice Lumumba (1925-61) was one of the first elected African leaders in modern times. In 1960 he became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo after his country won independence from Belgium. Only ten weeks after his speech at the independence celebrations, in which he listed various injustices and human rights violations implemented by the Belgians, Lumumba’s government was deposed in a coup. He was imprisoned and murdered in circumstances suggesting the complicity of the governments of Belgium and the United States.”

exhibited: Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba, MoCP, Chicago, 2011

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Guy Tillim Lubumbashi City Hall, DR Congo, 2007

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Guy Tillim Maputo, Mozambique, 2007 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Small: 49.7 x 71.4cm Edition 3 of 6 + 2AP Inquire location: New York

Guy Tillim speaks about the series: “There’s a ten-year period in the late modernist world where there was this grand colonial architecture built in Francophone Africa and Lusophone Africa. It was this strange contemporary mythological time. These buildings are impressive, for all their inappropriateness they nonetheless form part of a contemporary African stage. If you look at them in a certain way, they’re just kind of floating worlds. These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist-era colonial structures, but a walk-through avenues of dreams. Patrice Lumumba’s dream, his nationalism, is discernible in these structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry memory so well.” exhibited: Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Contemporary Arts, Center Cincinnati, 2011

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Guy Tillim Maputo, Mozambique, 2007

Karen Irvine continues: “Lumumba became revered as a liberator of independent Africa, and streets that bear his name in western and southern Africa have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream. Originally a photojournalist, Tillim has spent a large part of his career documenting social conflict in Africa for media agencies including Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Yet Tillim seeks not only the action and drama typical of a journalistic approach, but also quieter scenes, allowing his work to straddle the media and fine art worlds.

Installation view of Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Stevenson Cape Town, 2008

In Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Tillim avoids intense action entirely, and instead focuses on the architecture, landscape, and people in African countries where the legacy of colonialism forms a backdrop but does not capture the essence of individual lives unfolding. His pictures portray the crumbling institutional buildings - post offices, schools, hotels, and offices - that were built by colonial governments in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Mozambique.”

Installation view of Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, 2011

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Wim Botha Untitled (II), 2011 World Books, Year Books (1983-1991), wood, steel 98 x 150 x 85cm Inquire location: Cape Town

In 2011 Wim Botha’s show at Stevenson Cape Town, All This, consisted of two large installations. Untitled (II) was in the first group, relatively dark, dense and heavy. Composite figurative sculptures were carved from bibles, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and wood, in a continuing evolution of the paper busts for which Botha is known. These were suspended in space, fragmenting and morphing. While the elements of traditional portraiture suggested some kind of coherent identity, in this case nothing more concrete is delivered than a sense of flux and transition.

exhibited: Wim Botha: All This, Stevenson Cape Town, 2011 Imaginary Fact: South African Art and the Archive, the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013

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Wim Botha Untitled (II), 2011 In 2013, Untitled (II) was included in a group of sculptural works which formed part of the South African Pavilion at the 2013 Biennale di Venezia. Botha’s installations reflect on the individual’s absorption into the encompassing hierarchical structures of statehood and society. By visually interfering with venerated forms of art, artefact and decoration, he offers comment on the distorted and ephemeral nature of grandeur and tradition. Wings and winged creatures are a recurring presence in Botha’s large-scale sculptural installations. More often than not based on detailed process drawings and preparatory models, Botha has produced a number of installations accenting disembodied winged presences. These include Leda and the Swan (2005), which interprets the classical Greek myth in bone meal and epoxy resin; Time Machine (2008) and Solipsis (2011).

Untitled (II) installed at, the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013

Untitled (II), 2011 (detail)

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Wim Botha Untitled (II), 2011

Wim Botha: Busts 2003 - 2012 (2012, Stevenson)

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“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.” – Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s portrait, 1922. photo: Man Ray

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Zander Blom Untitled 1.300, 2012 Oil on linen 239 x 182cm Inquire location: Cape Town

Tracy Murinik discusses how Blom titles his work in the Phaidon compendium Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes: “The name of this series is at once specific and arbitrary; historically, the painting denotes an original, but for Blom it is clustered into a series of 'untitled' creative moments, definitive only in variation from other studies, and by means of a unique cataloguing number.”

exhibited: Zander Blom: New Paintings, Stevenson Cape Town, 2012

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Zander Blom Untitled 1.300, 2012

In the press release for Zander Blom’s second solo show with the gallery, New Paintings in 2012, the artist had the following to say: “A quote from Françoise Gilot's biography on Picasso made a lasting impression on me at the end of last year: ‘[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.’

Untitled 1.300 in Blom’s Brixton studio, Johannesburg

The added benefit of such a limitation in painting is that it has the potential to facilitate a refinement and expansion of one's language and ability. A limitation by its very nature forces one to seek out alternative avenues or ways to solve problems, and in doing so it can open up a range of new possibilities. After last year's exceptionally colourful paintings I found myself moving back towards a monochromatic palette with newfound drive, purpose, clarity and intent. This year I'm narrowing my focus and sharpening my craft.”

Installation view of Zander Blom: New Paintings, Stevenson, Cape Town, 2012

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Zander Blom Untitled 1.300, 2012

Zander Blom: Paintings Volume 1 (2013, Stevenson)

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Julie Mehretu Unclosed, 2007 Color hard ground etching with spit bite aquatint and drypoint Image Size: 91 x 113.5cm Paper Size: 103.5 x 127.5cm Edition 7 of 25 Inquire location: Cape Town

exhibited: Disguise: The Art of Attracting and Deflecting Attention, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2008

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Julie Mehretu Unclosed, 2007 “Buildings are the places we shape and reshape our lives. There is a red house at the end of the street with a purple door, in the land of Mordor. Corridor. And crows that sit in parliaments. Riddle me this. My father has fallen into earth and his language follows behind him. My love is like a breath in a cold dark cave and time. I pick through the ruins of Julie’s art in silence. ... Her characters do not colonize the clean lines of architecture. The lines colonize the chaos. This is Lagos. So what if the streets end in swaps? It’s like when you begin by drawing a circle, matt says, and end up with an eye. • What do you see in this work? There is a trumpet blowing a black star. Bald-headed African soldiers goosestep with rocket launchers. They haven’t eaten in days. Gandhi’s funeral cortege moving through the heart of a nation and Einstein weeps for his loss. DBNL Squared, I believe is the right equation. Somebody is throwing a poem at a tank and another to the left laughs as his lover says, yes, yes, yes. Is that Gandalf dressed like the Pope? A dark sun, a dark son. In the storm there is a motorized crane reaching for a power line, its neck bent out of shape like a giraffe with a broken neck. African women swaying in the sun. Julie believes Addis Ababa is the center of the world. No she doesn’t. This is nothing more than a child drawing the world in the sand. A careless foot smudges it. It is still the world. ... Perhaps it is not Julie’s paintings that need excavation. Perhaps the paintings demand that we excavate ourselves. Perhaps Julie is not a cartographer, but a lens grinder. Perhaps these paintings are layers of reality and history and politics. Perhaps Julie is a shaman and these marks are her personal language. • How come we all speak it?” Chris Abani Excerpt from ‘Layer Me This’ in Parkett, No 76, 2006

Disguise: The Art of Attracting and Deflecting Attention, Michael Stevenson, 2008, illustrated on page 45

Julie Mehretu working on a large-scale canvas in 2017 PHOTO: Nathan Bajar

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Steven Cohen Plaese Help, 1993 Hand-coloured silkscreen on canvas 146 x 157cm Inquire location: Cape Town

exhibited: Steven Cohen: Life is Shot, Art is Long, Stevenson Cape Town, 2013

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Steven Cohen Plaese Help, 1993

Plaese Help (1993) was shown at Stevenson as part of Life is Shot, Art is Long in 2013. At the time, it was Steven Cohen's first solo exhibition in South Africa in more than 10 years. As the gallery wrote at the time, Cohen has lived in France since 2003 and has become internationally recognised for his performance art, yet his work has been seen infrequently at home and in the gallery context. This exhibition refocused attention on Cohen as a maker of extraordinary images and objects, in addition to presenting his latest performance work on video.

Plaese Help, 1993 (detail)

The exhibition - which took its title from an “inspirational” found object, a small tapestry bought at the roadside which charmingly misquotes Hippocrates’ aphorism - included a selection of the hand-coloured screenprints for which Cohen first became known in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A piece like Plaese Help is powerfully resonant of that era, an iconoclastic mash-up of apartheid politicians, armoured vehicles, anatomical diagrams, apes, beggars, body parts, screen icons and self-portraits of the artist as Princess Menorah.

Installation view of Steven Cohen: Life is Shot, Art is Long, Stevenson Cape Town, 2013

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Steven Cohen Plaese Help, 1993

Steven Cohen: Life is Shot, Art is Long (2010, Michael Stevenson)

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Pieter Hugo Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009 C-print Image size: 82 x 82 cm Paper size: 98 x 98 cm Edition of 10 + 2AP Inquire location: Berlin

Pieter Hugo writes: “This essay was photographed on a densely populated triangle of land in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. Bounded by the Abossey Okai Road and Odaw River, a polluted waterway that flows into the Korle Lagoon, Agbogbloshie is the second largest e-waste processing area in West Africa. It abuts Old Fadama, an impoverished settlement that offers northern migrants to the city the cheapest rents and a convenient base close to the central markets, a major employer. Home to an estimated 80 000 inhabitants, this mixedused area on a former wetland consists not only of formal and informal residences for disenfranchised migrants to the city, but a commercial bus depot, and a vast and differentiated marketplace that includes specialised e-waste markets. An irregular activity until a few years ago, large volumes of end-of-life computers and television are now handled by Ghana’s port daily. Shipped under pretext of being reusable electronic goods, items that are not saleable end up at Agbogbloshie, nicknamed by locals as ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.”

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Pieter Hugo Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009

“It is here that circuits, transistors, capacitors and semiconductors are reduced to their base metals. There is, one has to admit, something beautifully alchemical about what’s happening there: these devices that are the pinnacle of cultural achievement get transformed back into their base elements. Of course, this is the sympathetic reading of an artist. The political ecologist Paul Robbins has described the dump as ‘a bizarre engine that maintains a self-replicating worldwide system of over-production’. I think it is fair to say that Agbogbloshie is a dark and dirty monument to the digital age, to our faith in technology and its built-in obsolescence. This idea of surplus and waste, which is key to our digital experience, is not one that many people seem comfortable addressing. Being in an environment like this, where geopolitical imbalances are being exploited to effectively dump waste on poor countries, it is hard not to take a political position. And so I have let my photographs be used by advocacy groups. I first encountered the dump in a photograph published by National Geographic. This is a recurrent theme in my photography, how photographs prompt me to make my own photographs. The work was produced during two trips of two weeks each. I tend to photograph over twoweek stretches. I find this is a period in which I can keep my eye fresh. After that you become too accustomed to a place. It was something I realised in Rwanda, how quickly one becomes desensitised and acclimatised to completely unacceptable situations, how the mind is capable of this.”

Installation view of Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012, The Photographers Gallery, London, UK, 2012

Installation view of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, 2017

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Pieter Hugo Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009

Pieter Hugo: Permanent Error (2011, Prestel)

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Hylton Nel Pale Cat with Pink Blush, 2013 Glazed ceramic earthenware 36 x 20 x 18cm Signed ‘N.H.H’ and dated 23.5.13 at the base Inquire location: Cape Town

“Instead of being blatant and making people, I do these cats. They are also a kind of shape that has been used as an ornament for a long time. From another perspective, being gay is a sort of minority position and at some levels one is not quite what one should be, and so another reason why I make cats is to try and fit into the world because such ornaments seem like regular things.” Hylton Nel

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Hylton Nel Pale Cat with Pink Blush, 2013

Hylton Nel in his Caltizdorp studio in 2021

A studio view of Pale Cat with Pink Blush (2013)

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Moshewka Langa Untitled, 2001 Mixed media on paper 140 x 100cm Inquire location: Amsterdam

This work features elements now considered characteristic of Moshekwa Langa’s mixedmedia practice. Everyday materials that remain unconventional to fine art - like tin foil and reflective tape as well as maps and magazine cut-outs of 80s cover stars - are stuck haphazardly onto the canvas. Imagery and motifs recurring within Langa’s language such as huts, homesteads, cars, elongated figures, rogue animals, and single line portraits form a harmonious yet disparate swirl. Maps of Oceanic countries like Nicaragua and West Indies Islands allude to new geographic curiosities; across the middle is a large area dripping blue spray paint, under which, upon closer inspection, is written ‘let them eat cake’. Langa leaves these words open for discovery and allows the viewer to connect them with the surrounding images, creating a playful, open-ended experience for an onlooker into the artist’s mind at a moment in time.

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References

Pg 3 – ‘Alfred Neville Lewis’, 2022 LINK Pg 4 – Biography of David Goldblatt, James Merle Thomas, The Walther Collection LINK Pg 5-8 – Izele: Nicholas Hlobo, 2006, interview with Sophie Perryer pg 14, Stevenson LINK Pg 10 – A short biography of Peggy Guggenheim LINK Pg 11 – ‘The Dog’s Master: Pieter Hugo’, Michael Stevenson, 2007 LINK Pg 11 – Art South Africa archival listings, 2006 LINK Pg 12 – Sean O’Toole, Art South Africa, Volume 03, Issue 01, Spring 2004 LINK Pg 14 – ‘Moshekwa Langa in Conversation’, Kobena Mercer in Looking Both Ways, pg 108 LINK Pg 15 – Nkgopoleng Moloi, ‘Dust, beauty and geography combine in Moshekwa Langa’s Tropic of Capricorn’, 2019 LINK Pg 16-18 – ‘Nicholas Hlobo’, Tate, 2010 LINK Pg 20 – Stevenson, 2010 LINK Pg 22, 23 – ‘Prima Facie: Surface as Depth in the Work of Penny Siopis’ Colin Richards in Penny Siopis, Kathryn Smith, 2005 pg 16 Pg 25 – Marc Allum, ‘The Antiques Magpie...’ (2013) LINK Pg 26, 27 – ArtThrob, Remembering Andrew Verster, Clive van den Berg, 2020 LINK Pg 28 – Sabelo Mlangeni: Country Girls, Stevenson, 2010 LINK Pg 30 – South African History Online, ‘David Goldblatt: In the time of AIDS’ by Galeria Elba Benitez, 2009 LINK Pg 32 – Deborah Poynton: Selected Paintings 1998-2000. Text by Andrew Lamprecht, 2000 Pg 34-38 – ‘Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba’, Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2011 LINK Pg 39 – Stevenson, 2011 LINK Pg 40 – Stevenson, 2012 LINK Pg 43 – ‘Moveable Feast’, Ernest Hemmingway, 1964 Pg 44 – Tracy Murinik ‘Zander Blom’ Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes, pg 146, Phaidon LINK Pg 45 - Stevenson, 2012 LINK Pg 50 - Disguise: The Art of Attracting and Deflecting Attention, Michael Stevenson, 2008 LINK Pg 53 – Stevenson, 2010 LINK Pg 55, 56 – Pieter Hugo: Permanent Error, 2010 LINK Pg 58 – Hylton Nel: For Use and Display, ‘Introduction’ by Michael Stevenson, The Fine Art Society, 2017 LINK

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Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road 7925 Cape Town +27 21 462 1500 46 7th Avenue Parktown North 2193 Johannesburg +27 11 403 1055 Prinsengracht 371B 1016 HK Amsterdam +31 62 532 1380 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info @stevenson_za

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