VOTED BEST BusinessDay November 2013 MAGAZINE SUPPLEMENT N IGH T C LU B B I NG IT’S PARTY TIME A RT David Koloane. Helen A Pritchard. Night Rythm. 2012. Untitled - Carrier 3. Mixed media on 2013. Oil and canvas. 102cm x pigment on canvas. 75cm 140cm x 100cm artists who just got on with the business of making art. Over time Koloane has emerged as both unavoidable and influential. Nineteen of Koloane’s abstracted figural drawings from 1998 were included on the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and he is due to show drawings alongside Kemang wa Lehulere on a group show at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin this month. Ko l o a n e ’s journey as an artist, much like that of Clarke, who left school at 15 and became a dockworker, was never assured. When Koloane’s father fell ill he dropped out of school to support the family. In the 1960s he attended the Polly Street Art Centre in central Johannesburg and befriended abstract painter Louis Maqhubela, who became an influential mentor. In 1974 Koloane began a three-year apprenticeship at the Johannesburg Art Foundation under Bill Ainslie, a painter who was also a formative influence on William Kentridge. Ainslie, who was represented by an enormous stuttering AB STRACTION canvas on Sandri’s launch exhibition, advocated an expressive abstraction that leaned more to the jazziness of HISTORIC WORKS HANG NEXT TO FRESH PIECES IN AN EXHIBITION THAT American painting than the formalism and existentialism of WANDERS THROUGH SA’S TRADITION OF ABSTRACT ART European abstraction. His influence on Koloane was formative, enabling him to host his first professional exhibition. Unlike Clarke, whose work has only ever flirted TEXT SEAN O’TO O L E with abstraction — his collaged artist’s books recently shown at Stevenson Gallery stand in contrast to his paintings and prints, which are resolutely figurative — Koloane was a committed abstractionist. BAYLON SANDRI, THE QUIETLY FORCEFUL CAPE TOWN despite its obvious enthusiasm, felt a bit like stumbling across “I saw abstraction as a way to resist the way life in the city dealer and restaurateur, has been ploughing a lonely furrow a stash of moth-eaten copies of Artlo ok magazine from the was depicted in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the label of ever since he opened Stellenbosch Modern and 1960s and ’70s. being a ‘township artist’,” says Koloane. “I wanted to liberate Contemporary (SMAC) seven years ago. Every year his Works by forgotten local artists whose names once myself from the incestuous kind of work that everybody was Church Street gallery in Stellies hosts an overview exhibition implied power, privilege and applause vied for attention doing at the time. Some of the artists working in this mould that, in some form or shape, revisits SA’s rich, albeit, peculiar alongside artists who, despite the near wholesale rejection of sold well, which prompted everyone else to follow the trend. tradition of abstract painting. abstraction in the early post-apartheid years, still possess I found that it inhibited any potential for growth.” Sandri, who in a recent public talk during Creative Week currency. Among the latter, the one’s who endured, was He singles out Ephraim Ngatane as an important model of likened Cape Town to those other alternative creative David Koloane, a Johannesburg-born artist who was an artist. “He modernised the depiction of township life, capitals Miami, Rio and Istanbul, kicked off the process in represented on SMAC’s launch show by a large agitated incorporating elements of abstraction. As a young artist, I 2007 with a show called Abstract South African Art from the abstract expressionist canvas painted in 1988. believed we should be following his lead and develop our Isolation Years. It was a melancholy cut-and-paste affair that, Koloane, like Capetonian Peter Clarke, is one of those own signatures.” 48 NOVEMBER 2013 WA N T E D A RT Composition in Blue Sandile Zulu. Kevin Atkinson. and Brown A b s t ra c t . Undated. 1966. Acrylic on canvas. Fire, water, earth, 122cm x 107cm. BELOW: Barend de Silverskoon ii air, canvas. 109cm Wet. 2009. Enamel on x 79cm canvas. 170cm x 120.5cm There is a valuable point nested in all of this. Koloane’s use of abstraction marked a form of resistance to the parochial white art market, which preferred formally naïve pictures of “carefree, happy” and “musical” black subjects. In his hands, much as it was for Ernest Mancoba and Maqhubela before him, making non-figurative work represented a viable and authentic avant-garde practice, one that in Koloane’s case allowed him agency in defining his I saw abstraction as a way to resist the way life in the city was depicted in the multifaceted experience of the city. Of course, Koloane’s story is only one of many tangents 1960s and ’70s, as well as the label of being a ‘township artist’ — David Koloane describing the strange and multi-faceted history of abstraction in this country. This history, writes Michael Stevenson in his 2004 book Moving in Time and Space, “is rich and complex, with permutations, interactions and influences that cannot be reduced to a single linear and chronological pioneered a syncretic abstraction that fused African and n a r ra t ive ”. This complex and sometimes contradictory story Western influences. His work shares something of the remains largely untold. There is no definitive book on the ambition and beauty of the Jazz Epistles, the short-lived subject, merely scattered essays and magazine articles. bebop band from the early 1960s that included Dollar Brand, Two essays by art historian Marilyn Martin, from 1990 Kippie Moeketsi, Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela. and 2008, represent important statements on the subject. I Unfortunately, being an exile, his work only registered commissioned and helped Martin prepare her 2008 essay, locally in the late 1980s, by which time, as Martin writes, art which elegantly recapitulated the rise and fall and current, attitudes had shifted, chiefly towards figuration, political tentative reemergence of abstraction. “Of the locally based engagement and dematerialised new media, leaving “no artists working in an abstract manner, Walter Battiss was an room for art born of spirituality, intuition and that which important precursor, both as artist and teacher, in preparing exists beyond vision and perception”. Unlike Mancoba, the way for an art that no longer had as its sole purpose the Douglas Portway, who also eventually chose exile, did play a imitation of nature,” she wrote of abstraction’s early days. key role in influencing local attitudes to abstraction. It was only after WW2 that things shifted locally. “As More so than Coetzee, who eventually forsook his raw painterly abstraction gained ground internationally and and experimental abstract practice of the 1950s, Portway became fashionable, from the 1950s onwards, many South remained a faithful proponent of abstraction. Born and raised African artists took to it,” writes Martin. Many of these artists, in Johannesburg, Portway initially worked as realist painter, among them Christo Coetzee, Nel Erasmus (a former director this, as he once put it, “in a culture without any real tradition of the Johannesburg Art Gallery), Charles Gassner and Dirk in art”. In 1952 he travelled to the US, encountering first- Meerkotter, have been disinterred and shown on SMAC’s hand the new painterly avant-garde. A year after he annual showcases. represented South Africa at the 1956 Venice Biennale, he Two artists stand out as lighthouses during the isolation emigrated to Europe, in 1967 settling in St Ives, Cornwall. years. Mancoba is an obvious name. Born in Johannesburg in Portway, who developed a distinctive and layered 1904, Mancoba moved to Paris in 1938 to study painting, scraffito technique and was influenced by the restraint of Far and later Denmark, where he was a co-founder of the Eastern painterly traditions, did not entirely forsake SA after influential CoBrA group of abstract painters. Mancoba leaving, often showing locally. Joe Wolpe, a prominent Cape 49 NOVEMBER 2013 WA N T E D A RT Jaco van Schalkwyk. 17. Umuzi.) A successful exhibition at dealer Alet Vorster’s ( M o n o c u l t u re ) . 2013. Lithographic ink on paper. Gallery AOP in 2011 enabled him to move to Cape Town, 100cm x 66cm RIGHT: Jaco van which, as Atkinson’s survey show reiterates, is a kind of Schalkwyk. 16. (Constraint). colony for colourists. 2013. Lithographic ink on “Here colour is everywhere and it is just absolutely mind- paper. 100cm x 66cm bending to be able to walk through colour like I get to do on a daily basis,” says Van Schalkwyk of his adopted home. Colour is also integral to Van Schalkwyk’s new work. Where Vivian van der Merwe. [P121] his 2011 show comprised agitated black abstract marks on 07/03 (Originally [P55]12/01 but Saunders Waterford paper, a highly durable paper produced reworked and completed in 2013). 2001-2013. Oil and mixed by a mill in England, his forthcoming show with Vorster lays media on wood. 121cm x 77,5cm down vibrant fluorescent colours on an aluminium substrate. The move from black to colour is not strictly a reflection on the influence of his new geography. Colour paint costs money. “With the first show, it was affordable to buy 3kg of Here colour is everywhere and it is just absolutely mind-bending to be able to black ink with which I could produce an entire body of wo r k ,” explains the artist, who repeatedly returns to Bridget walk through colour like I get to do on a daily basis — Jaco van Schalkwyk Riley in conversation.