WALL will present a collection of key artworks along established art historical themes, highlighting the eclectic approaches that South African artists adopted to over more than six decades.  The deliberate juxtaposition challenges the accepted historical development presented by popular art historical narratives.

‘Still Life’?

A selection of paintings dating from the 1940s such as Harry Trevor’s ‘Interior with Chair and Fruits’, sets the tone with a typical contrived composition of fruits and furniture, yet the use of colour and brush mark introduce a modernist element quite foreign to the South African artworld at the time. 

The works of Christo Coetzee, Alexis Preller and Cecil Skotnes are distinctive exemplary pieces demonstrating how South African artists had absorbed much of the developments of the globalising artworlds yet were able to establish personalised visual vocabularies reflecting their position outside the established metropolitan centres of celebrated artistic production.

The selection is topped off with ‘Setting’ a 1985 painting by Penny Siopis.  The lavish use of paint and the opulence of the table layout quotes the Dutch Baroque traditions, but without the moralising reproach, reminding one of one’s mortality.  Here the opulence turns into a metaphor for decadence and excess – a theme that is adopted by several rising artists in South Africa in 1980s, such as William Kentridge, Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell.