Stepping up towards Liza Grobler’s studio, my eyes roam quickly up and over my surroundings as I ascend, the morning sun already making its way to the top of the stairwell where she’s smiling at me from, bursts of colour peaking at me through the frame of her glasses. I made a mental note of the high ceilings as I set up my notebook and my phone to record. Her studio is spacious, and busy. There are twists of fabric knotted together, hanging here and there, and the wooden floors are marked with splashes of paint and painter’s footfalls.

Liza describes the process of bringing ‘A Rainbow in my Pocket’ – her new exhibition at Everard Read –  as somewhat back-to-front. Neither the concept nor the name came first, she insists, but rather an emphasis on what lays at the nexus of creativity; the actual undertaking. “My work is more driven by process, and action, and mark-making,” she explains with rolling, wide hand gestures; the same way she likes to paint, it turns out, “A lot of my other work is site-specific. It always has a performative component, but usually in a more understated way.” Evidence of Liza’s mark-making stretches from A Portal Into Monet – Greenpoint Park (Diptych) yet in slower circles than it does in Broadway Bellies, both of which are particularly captivating.

Both Turiya Magadlela & nomThunzi Mashalaba were invited to exhibit in Speculative Inquiry #1, the first exhibition focusing solely on living women abstract artists in Africa. Taking place at the Michaelis Galleries from 8-24 August, this exhibition is a speculative inquiry that considers the contributions of living black women artists and the potential their practices and work stand to contribute to studies on abstraction. Curated by Nkule Mabaso.

Turiya Magadlela has also been featured in Phaidon's recent publication Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art. 
This publication celebrates tapestry, embroidery, stitching, textiles, knitting, and knotting as used by visual artists worldwide. Vitamin T is the latest in the celebrated 'Vitamin' series in which leading curators, critics, and art professionals nominate living artists for inclusion. As boundaries between art and craft have blurred, artists have increasingly embraced these materials and methods, with the resulting works being coveted by collectors and exhibited in museums worldwide. If you would like to purchase this publication click here. 

Date: 8 - 17 June

Time: 09:00 - 17:00

Venue: FynArts Gallery 

In this exhibition Phillemon Hlungwani returns to the etching press which is his first love and whose arcane and ancient skills he has mastered. He also reprises a theme which is seminal to understanding who he is as a person and as an artist.

Raised in a rural African village by a mother widowed young, he grew up watching women work so that they and their families would survive. The unrelenting labour of women is a reality but to Hlungwani it is what nurtured his body and his talents, and he sees in it both love and redemption in their purest sense.

His complex and technically brilliant etchings take everyday subjects and make them clear to us (like purifying murky water) and in some of them he makes delicate use of hand colouring, thus emphasising the femininity of his subjects. These works have been made with the assistance of master printer Pontsho Sikhosana and her team at the Artist Proof Studio.

Exhibition presented in association within Knysna Fine Art and Everard Read Gallery.

The exhibition will be opened by Trent Read on Saturday 8 June at 14:00

Times of walkabouts to be announced.

For more infomation visit: www.hermanusfynarts.co.za

When Brett Murray, a standout even in a particularly bright lineup of star art students, won the grand Michaelis prize in his graduate year, 1983, his aesthetic route was defined: the court jester with the finest of touches; social consciousness to be articulated in the high precision of the artful object.

His master of fine arts a few years later was a riveting triumph, and the chunky cartoon characters to tread his career stage entered in all their metaphorical glory.

One of those, King — a delicious Ubu, rich of ridicule — is coming up for auction on February 16 at Strauss & Co’s contemporary art sale during the weekend’s Cape Town Art Fair. It’s a vivid marker.

Read the full review here

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that South African art’s newest superstar, the 36-year-old Limpopo-born Nelson Makamo, made it to the cover of Time magazine this week. That’s because one of Makamo’s biggest fans is Ava DuVernay, the acclaimed US film director, producer and distributor. And DuVernay was the guest editor of the latest edition of the mag, called “the optimism edition”. She’s posted on her Instagram before about buying paintings from Makamo.

Auction houses show his larger work climbing rapidly above the R250 000 mark but the verdict is out on the value of the gorgeous work featuring a child in red spectacles now that it’s been on the cover of Time. And she’s not the only celeb in love with his bright paintings and famous charcoal portraits, which exude the love and beauty of the innocent African child, marking an upbeat and positive trend in the often dark and conceptual world of contemporary art.

Read the full article here

‘Somehow the orchid fraternity got hold of me,’ smiles sculptor Nic Bladen. It may sound like a plot twist in a floral conspiracy novel, but this was perhaps the turning point in his career. While making a living creating jewellery, he was asked by the president of the local orchid society to cast a few whole orchids in bronze.

A former dental technician, Bladen learned about bronze sculpture under the watchful eye of Otto du Plessis at Bronze Age before going out on his own. He’d been loping along when the orchid request came. ‘I cast a flower one day and that was it. Lightbulb moment.’

Read the full article here

Barbara Wildenboer delicately cuts and extracts the pages of old books to produce sculptural explorations of the contents inside. Thinly sliced paper fragments frame world maps found in old atlases or appear like a nervous system in an altered copy of Functional Neuroanatomy. The works are part of an ongoing project titled the Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginable Large, to which she has been contributing altered books since 2011. The series uses the site of the library as a metaphor for the larger universe, while also focusing on the decrease of printed materials as a result of the digital age.

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Recognized as the World Design Capital in 2014, the art and design scene in Cape Town is flourishing. There are big museums (Zeitz MOCAA) and small galleries (Southern Guild); old ones (Everard Read) and new ones (SMITH Studio). But in Cape Town, it’s not all about the art. The city has a number of unmissable historic and cultural museums that showcase the country’s deep and complex cultural history—from sites such as Nelson Mandela’s former cell to a less-expected museum that showcases the country’s Jewish heritage. Here, our picks of Cape Town's best museums to help you experience a bit of it all.

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Angus Taylor and Rina Stutzer are a force in the South African art world. Not only are they both respected artists in their own right, they also run one of S A’s most advanced sculpture studios and foundries, Dionysus Sculpture Works (DSW), which casts many of our most renowned local fine artists, including Deborah Bell, Joni Brenner and Norman Catherine.

Angus has created some of SA’s most recognisable large sculptures, often combining materials such as bronze, steel and stone, although he also works with more ephemeral materials like rammed earth and packed thatching grass. H is stacked stones in the form of reclining giants evoke some of man’s most ancient interactions with Earth. Angus is probably still associated foremost with his figural work — usual ly male figures, hard to define when it comes to age or race — that engage profoundly with the tension between permanence and the transitory nature of human life. At first glance they might even appear to be made after quite a traditional idiom, but he has always subverted any notion of the monumental bronze statue by putting them in the context of ancient and, beyond that, geological timescales embodied in varieties of carefully selected stone.

Rina ’s role at DSW involves c reative input and implementing core changes on various projects, as well as work on her own large-scale public sculptural works. But she is perhaps best known as a painter. As a counterpoint to the fire, noise, h eat and primal energy at DSW, Angus and Rina ’s studio at home represents a more private, reflective space where a sense of tranquillity and connection to nature allows ideas to germinate. Their home studio is an extension of their house just outside Pretoria, designed for them by local architect Pieter Mathews (Mathews & Associates Architects) and built by Angus. The house is almost a sculpture itself, clad in granite offcuts from one of the stonemasons Angus works with. In fact, Pieter said he drew inspiration from Angus ’s sculptural works, incorporating materials that are bold, raw and honest, so that his plan and Angus’s interventions.

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