PRESS RELEASE
TRANSITORY TERRAIN
Jun 3 – Jun 29, 2021
TRANSITORY TERRAIN
LIZA GROBLER | LADY SKOLLIE | PENELOPE STUTTERHEIME | RINA STUTZER | BARBARA WILDENBOER
3 - 29 June 2021
REQUEST PORTFOLIO | +44 (0) 20 7590 9991
Everard Read London presents Transitory Terrain, a group exhibition of five South African artists. Although the works were made without collaboration, they collectively allude to the transience of all things and are imbued with a sense of shifting sands.
Liza Grobler’s paintings spill over with runaway scribbles and vigorous mark-making, her compositions evoking morphing landscapes - perhaps echoing the artist’s own relocation from urban to rural - and the immediacy of their energetic brushstrokes and dribbles of paint harking back to Abstract Expressionism.
Lady Skollie’s works are fluid, whimsical, and teeming with floating figures and the fleeting beauty of florals in full bloom. Her imagery is playfully transgressive, defying stereotypes and taboos, while confronting issues of history, race, sex, pleasure, consent, violence, and abuse. In this exhibition a pair of works on paper call to mind rock art and cave paintings. Entitled Wipe Us Out, they are tangled webs of entwined bodies with a chilling allusion to erasure and disappearance.
Penelope Stutterheime's series of paintings collectively entitled Shrine speak of a spiritual architecture, “my inner Jerusalem” as she suggests. The title also alludes to the artist’s place of making, her studio in Cape Town, and the spiritual process she undergoes in the making of her work. The composition of of the paintings appears to shift endlessly, with patterns and hues surrendering the foreground and then claiming dominance again - an eternal, elusive dance of colour, shape and form.
Rina Stutzer’s work poignantly telegraphs the impermanence of all things. The tent is a recurring image in her work and here Stutzer’s structure is made of delicate and ephemeral twigs - a temporary dwelling, not unlike our own skins, that we inhabit during our journey through the world. Stutzer’s female form in “corpse pose” is between life and death, a state of transition between different realms, impossible to pin down.
Barbara Wildenboer’s reimagined maps are ticking timepieces that speak of shifting borders shaped by geopolitics, geology, and climate, while her altered books breathe renewed life into previously prized objects that are disappearing into obsolescence in our digital age.
