SUMMER
DEBORAH BELL, Elegy
Bronze, 120 x 37 x 34 cm
DEBORAH BELL, Silence of Stone
Bronze, 54 x 15 x 13 cm
Deborah Bell is one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary artists. She works in a range of media on canvas and paper, produces dry point etchings and large-scale bronzes. Her earlier more political work has given way to a broader, deeper investigation into the border between mortality and immortality, matter and spirit, presence and absence, the quotidian and the mythic, the grounded and transcendent. In recent years she has developed an immediately recognisable visual language, her images simple, stark, symbolic – grounded, silent, still, poised.
In her iconography she draws from a range of cultures (including African, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, early Christian and European) and a range of philosophies (especially the Buddhist preoccupation with stillness and the shedding of attachment and the ego) and psychologies (more Jung than Freud) – but her work digs deeper, arriving finally out of an internal and personal place that Bell occupies in the world as an artist, a woman and an explorer. A central task is to make the unknown present – apprehended in a series of powerful images that are both of her and beyond her.
Bell’s earlier figures, characterised by entrapment (in the country, in the body), gave away to figures embodying the seeker – often accompanied by boats, horses, chariots. Images of lions, dogs, horses and angels recur. These are often intermediary figures between the physical world and a higher more spiritual realm. They are also aspects of herself – the powerful daemons that reside in all of us, which are often accompanied by solitary female figures, some full of assertive confidence, others more vulnerable and less sure of their agency.
Bell is interested in the half-formed image – the unwritten, as yet unformed spaces we move towards in our quest for self-knowledge. Her recent work has also become more concerned with surrender – to the higher self, the mystery of the universe, the simplicity of the present. All her art, she has stated, works towards the Zen mark: the single gesture of absolute presence. Her quest is ongoing – and has left in its wake a series of hugely powerful, totemic images from what Yeats called Spiritus Mundi.
Bell has worked with a great variety of media during her career and has collaborated on various historically significant projects with contemporaries such as William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins.
DEBORAH BELL, Unheard Centre
Bronze, 83 x 21 x 20 cm
ARABELLA CACCIA, Blue Planet III (unique)
Bronze and ultra marine blue, 32 x 27 x 27 cm
ARON DEMETZ, Advanced Minorities Maquette
nutwood, 27 x 8 x 5 cm
Aron Demetz has achieved international prominence with exhibitions at the Venice Biennale in 2009, PAC in Milan, MACRO in Rome and the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, Germany.
‘For me, the act of burning is so important; for what remains is Truth, clear and unmistakably raw. It’s a way of not only being clear and unequivocal, but a means by which one reverts back to zero.’ – Aron Demetz
The process of working with wood is the foundation of Demetz’s oeuvre and aesthetic. Using an ancient woodcarving technique that originated in the 17th century in South Tyrol, Demetz explores the possibilities and limitations of wood as a material and celebrates its textures and ability for transformation by deploying a range of innovative techniques, including controlled burning, lacerating the wood or applying layers of natural resin. Indeed, his sculptures evoke themes of injury and healing; of metamorphosis.
The stark contrast between the smoothly carved figures and the highly textured distressed wood surfaces; the pale limewood and charred wood cast in bronze, serves as a visual metaphor for this ambivalent relationship between humanity and nature, our coexistence with the natural world and our alienation from it. Through Demetz’ craftsmanship, his figures and the material from which they are hewn become an inseparable whole.
ARON DEMETZ, Ruben
Limewood, 64 x 23 x 15 cm
Aron Demetz has achieved international prominence with exhibitions at the Venice Biennale in 2009, PAC in Milan, MACRO in Rome and the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, Germany.
‘For me, the act of burning is so important; for what remains is Truth, clear and unmistakably raw. It’s a way of not only being clear and unequivocal, but a means by which one reverts back to zero.’ – Aron Demetz
The process of working with wood is the foundation of Demetz’s oeuvre and aesthetic. Using an ancient woodcarving technique that originated in the 17th century in South Tyrol, Demetz explores the possibilities and limitations of wood as a material and celebrates its textures and ability for transformation by deploying a range of innovative techniques, including controlled burning, lacerating the wood or applying layers of natural resin. Indeed, his sculptures evoke themes of injury and healing; of metamorphosis.
The stark contrast between the smoothly carved figures and the highly textured distressed wood surfaces; the pale limewood and charred wood cast in bronze, serves as a visual metaphor for this ambivalent relationship between humanity and nature, our coexistence with the natural world and our alienation from it. Through Demetz’ craftsmanship, his figures and the material from which they are hewn become an inseparable whole.
OLIVIA MUSGRAVE, The Fates (Klotho)
Bronze, 91.4 x 48.3 cm
Olivia Musgrave was born in Dublin to an Irish father and Greek mother. Her work is taken both from life and from the imagination where she draws inspiration from Greek mythology, as well as influences from 20th Century Italian sculptors most notably Marino Marini.
This trio of sculptures are Musgrave’s take on the three goddesses of fate who personify the inescapable destiny of humankind. According to Greek mythology, the Fates assigned to every person his or her fate.
- Clotho was the "the spinner," who spun the thread of life
- Lachesis (la·kuh·suhs) was the “apportioner of lots” who measured it
- Atropos was the goddess who cut it short.
Reminiscent of the monolithic human heads carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island, Musgrave’s Fates have a sense of timelessness and peacefulness - indeed a calm resignation to their inescapable fate.
ANGUS TAYLOR, Entangled Head: Layered
Bronze and various stone: Banded Iron, Tiger's Eye, Magnetite, Dolomite, Hematite and Black Chert, 67 x 31 x 19 cm
Specialists in contemporary art from South Africa. Established in 1913. South African artists are part of the global conversation. We seek to make their voices heard.