The way in which art fairs are perceived in conversations that centralise the argument that the visual arts is not as important as other art forms is wide open for all sorts of arguments. One could argue that the views shared can be distorted for someone who has not been to any art fairs in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Miami. Luckily for many, who attend, the art fair in Cape Town are privileged to see the tone being set for what is to be expected from galleries, artists and curators, alike, in 2022. At the same time, we can also understand that as an artist creates in the midst of such an enormous puncture in our reality, the reigns of power, drastically change, bringing a new dawn of works. 

Cinthia Sifa Mulenga

No one could have prepared us for the rise of Cinthia Sifa Mulenga. She has continued from strength to strength. Her mixed media works of sensual images of black women, moving forward through their lives, navigating ‘beauty’ and its contradictions has catapulted Mulenga as a maverick in her own right. Unlike most creatives, her social presence is consistently showcasing her ability to engage multiple audiences and remain relevant to communities of a broad spectrum.

Black women remain active in her art – making, bestowing dignity, respect and substance for many to witness at this year’s fair. A debut showing at this year’s fair, Mulenga presents 3 works, in collaboration with Botho Project Space as well as Latitudes Online. Botho Project Space was created by Nelson Makamo in 2019, to provide a natural transition for artists such as Mulenga, who choose to create on their own terms. Mulenga, a young force has been absolutely certain of her trajectory and talent through their mentoring.

The investment value of Mulenga’s work is increasing with each exhibition, project and her participation in international shows, which Latitudes Online has enabled for close to 2 years. Mulenga’s works encourage the viewer to see the parallels in which she draws from, pursuing a narrative,unique to her own heritage, background and experiences.

Mavis Tauzeni

A masterful, magical combination of figurative and abstract painting imparted by Tauzeni cannot be missed in 2022. One is immediately captured by her use of colour surrounded by patterns of grand size. Not a single of Tauzeni’s pieces leaves you not desiring to surrender to a tone of a world with harmonious rapture.

The point of Tauzeni’s work is to denote much more than the technique, which may very well be an outstanding feature to also be one of the Cape Town Art Fair’s Tomorrow /Today Art Prize recipients, however it is also to marry enormous ideas of pleasure and freedom and also mourn many other parts of Zimbabwe’s unpredictable circumstances. A word that comes to mind while witnessing Tauzeni’s works is omniscient. Mavis Tauzeni is part of the artist roster for the Harare – based, First Floor Gallery.

Luyanda Zindela

It’s no surprise to see Zindela honouring narratives of safe spaces, friendships, kindred spirits and times that represent kin when moments require such bonds. Much of Lindela’s body of work is steeped in memory and archiving the messages from encounters he has had with his peers. A Sepedi reference to this kind of creation would be the word, “Thake”, denoting someone who can be or is your peer. Life takes shape and is real within the margins of conversations with those we choose to be family and that is something Zindela does so well in his work. The artist is at ease with the people he profiles, capturing each and every comment, without fail..

As a curator and an artist, Zindela references his friends to enter a space of unadulterated territory, taunting the viewer to interrogate the ways in which they measure the depth of each conversation they are able to have with their own “people’. How real are these conversations? What is the main purpose of the conversations? Do they ever become more than just conversations? And when can it be that these conversions become reality? In 2021, Zindela had his solo show at SMAC Gallery and continues to be part of the artist roster. 

Investec Cape Town Art Fair

18 < 20 February 2022

CTICC, Cape Town (South Africa)

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It is not often that a curator implores you to listen to visual artworks. Yet strangely this is what Gcotyelwa Mashiqa asks of viewers at the Black Luminosity exhibition currently showing at Smac Gallery in Stellenbosch. This unconventional appeal, which fortunately doesn’t manifest in visitors having to wear an eye mask as well as a face mask, speaks to two concepts that interest this independent South African curator. First; the visibility and invisibility of blackness and how the one might feed the other, and second, the idea that artworks speak to us in ways that transcend vision. By the latter Mashiqa wishes to draw attention to the way that we view images with a set of expectations and a language that could be a barrier to what the artist might be communicating. Put more simply, in overthinking the visual appearance of an artwork and deducing what it might mean, we often overlook how they make us feel and the ephemeral states they evoke. 

For this reason Mashiqa selected artworks for the exhibition that didn’t directly appear to engage with being black or blackness  – terms that manifest in this show in multiple ways that stretch beyond racial identity. In the context of Mashiqa’s drive to ‘listen’ to art – the title, Black Luminosity, refers to an absence of seeing – but also the potential in not being able to ‘see’. This makes for an interesting exhibition, particularly given the mix of artists – who are at different stages in their careers from Luyanda Zindela, a Durban-based artists who is garnering attention, to well-known international art stars such as Mary Sibande and Alexandra Karakashian and celebrated mid-career artists such as Usha Seejarim and Wallen Mapondera, who delivers a wonderfully cheeky work fashioned from toilet paper. 

A trio of works dominated by black grab your attention as you step into the gallery.  An almost life-size installation/sculpture, boleta le bofefo (2019 – 2020) by Cow Mash is characteristically fashioned from a mix of different black materials. The Bloom (2021) series of abstract paintings by Karakashian are all rendered in black oil – also a signature of this artist’s work. There are no aural works on the show – Gcotyelwa Mashiqa isn’t directing viewers to literally listen to art but to perceive it via other senses and modes.  

“There are other ways can we engage with artworks. We shouldn’t just look at them. As Mieka Bal (the Dutch artist and academic) says ‘sight is impure’. We have these biases and we are conditioned to see in a certain way. I wanted people to see differently to relearn how they look at artworks. Listening is about refusing to use the terms that were given to us and told to use while looking at images,” says Mashiqa. 

Of course, this approach isn’t only designed to upturn how we might look at art, or at least become more conscious of how our looking is socially conditioned but also pertains to racism, which is grounded in an inherent bias based on appearances. 

It is not surprising therefore to learn that the concepts for Black Luminosity were brewing during the first round of lockdown when the death of George Floyd gave rise not only to protests around the world but as a result heightened an awareness racism and prompted efforts to combat it. Black people were gracing covers of magazines and a form of visibility of black identities appeared pronounced. This response naturally coincided with renewed interest in portraits of black people produced by black artists. 

Indeed one of the artists with a work on Black Luminosity, Zandile Tshabalala, has noticeably been riding this renewed black portraiture wave with her slick paintings depicting a bald black woman who resembles the artist. Tshabalala reconfigures notions of feminine beauty through these glossy self-portraits often picturing the subject in idyllic tropical settings. Self Check: Lady in pink scarf (2021) celebrates blackness – the subject’s skin is pitch-black and her red lips and painted nails pop against this dark shade. This form of celebratory portraiture has being finding traction not only on Instagram but auctions, yet it is the only artwork in this vein on Black Luminosity. 

Gcotyelwa Mashiqa is interested not only in a spectrum of expression and how this may reflect different readings of blackness –  as not only about race, but sight and seeing, feeling – but also in encouraging viewers to look (and listen) beyond appearances she needed to present artworks that weren’t simply about physical presentations of the self. Not that this curator strategically planned each piece with a specific intention in mind.   

“It is only now in retrospect that I am reading the works on the show.  That is what I always enjoy about making exhibitions, I am not engaging with the work visually, I work more intuitively. I wanted to expose myself and discover my own biases as a curator. As a black woman, during Black Lives Matter, I wanted to ask myself: ‘what forms of anti-blackness have I internalised?’” observes Mashiqa.

This young curator first found her feet in this precarious profession at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, where she was appointed as one of the first curating interns. She became a curatorial assistant and gained attention, but found her time there (as many did), under the directorship of Mark Coetzee, not to be very nurturing for a young curator, so she left prior to Koyo Kouoh’s tenure. 

“It didn’t fit into who I wanted to become.”

Curator Gcotyelwa Mashiqa

Though there are now a number of new private art foundations in South Africa – the Javett Art Centre, Norval Foundation and the Joburg Contemporary art Foundation – this hasn’t necessarily translated into more opportunities for independent curators, says Mashiqa. 

It was the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale that provided her with a platform after she left Zeitz Mocaa in 2019 – she co-curated From the Vault exhibition, which is still showing a the university gallery in that town. She has also worked with the renowned Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu and has a project coming up with him in Nigeria later this year. However, it is a struggle finding opportunities in South Africa as an independent curator. Black Luminosity, came about when Smac gallery asked her to compile a proposal for a high-profile art fair. It isn’t easy curating shows in commercial spaces for the simple fact that commercial ends are not her goal, says Mashiqa. 

“The work I do is so museum like. The pieces I chose for this exhibition by Usha Seejarim and Cow Mash might not be able to sell. I have no other motive other than to explore my academic work. More galleries should explore inviting curators, people would probably not miss those exhibitions.”

Her interest in looking, visibility and perceiving conditions and expression beyond the naked eye can be attributed to Mashiqa’s early training as a photographer – but also an interest that underpins a master’s thesis which is focussed on analysing a photographic archive of ethnographic imagery. This led her to the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman, a French philosopher who presents some controversial perspectives on the way we read images. Black Luminosity was inspired by his essays. 

“Huberman writes that people are exhibited to disappear. I found that a provocative statement – particularly reading this in the lockdown when we are all online and we see everything. The article was written five years ago and addresses how hypervisibility produces invisibility. So what we see every day we stop seeing,” observes Mashiqa.  

Can we look at Mary Sibande’s work in a fresh manner – given this South African artist’s oeuvre is so familiar to us? Mashiqa was willing to take up this challenge including two works by this famous artist. A photographic work by Sibande titled Turn, turn, turn, turn (2019) juxtaposes two female figures, which  seem to represent a deity and a follower. The artwork brings into focus spiritualism and religious worship, an aspect that perhaps has been present but overlooked in Sibande’s art since her well-known Sophie series – depicting a subject in a Victorian-ised domestic worker’s outfit. 

Mashiqa wanted to not only draw attention to the relationship between spiritualism and blackness but also a metaphysical condition – that escapes logic, visualisation. In other words she is drawn to artworks that evoke states beyond the visual – that compel what she terms listening. 

Works by Usha Seejarim were intended to provide an unexpected turn in this exhibition, says Mashiqa.

“Usha’s works appear so masculine yet they refer to domestic objects.”

Curator Gcotyelwa Mashiqa

Slanted Representation and Art History at Home, are sculptures made from reclaimed frames. In the latter work Seejarim uses the frames to create a giant peg. In using the frame for images rather than presenting an image Seejarim sidesteps visual representation itself and digs into the collective history of imagery, transposing it into the domestic realm where women have and continue to toil in – and are forced to create their own visual history, expression – using what is at hand. In this way she evokes the difficulty in articulating and accessing a history of marginalised people that have had no suitable or recognised ‘frame’ for their labour and expression. In this context ‘listening’ to art might entail, sensing an absence – imagining the stories that haven’t been told, have had no place to be seen. – African Art Features Agency funded by the National Arts Council of South Africa. 

Black Luminosity is showing at Smac Gallery in Stellenbosch until May 20. 

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Bringing together 45 galleries from 19 countries, 1-54 will be presenting 16 galleries from Africa and over 140 artists of both emerging and established profile. 15 galleries will be welcomed to the London fair for the first time including, Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, Claire Oliver Gallery, espace d’art contemporain 14N 61W, Galerie Ernst Hilger, Galleria Anna Marra, Guns & Rain, The Hole, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Luce Gallery, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Nil Gallery, Sakhile & Me, SMITH, Tabari Art Space and Ubuntu Art Gallery.

Building on the success of the expanded programme of non-profit Special Projects, 1-54 will once again present a number of collateral projects, including including Mary Sibande’s first solo exhibition in the UK, I Came Apart at the Seams presented in partnership with Somerset House running through the 7 January 2020. 1-54 is also proud to renew the partnership with the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF) to commission a large-scale installation in The Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court at Somerset House.

Curated for the first time by curator Kerryn Greenberg, Head of International Collection Exhibitions at Tate, 1-54 FORUM returns over four afternoons. Dedicated to the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, the programme will convene leading cultural practitioners to discuss the questions at the core of Silva’s practice.

Full list of exhibitors

• 50 Golborne (London, United Kingdom)
• Addis Fine Art (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)
• AFRONOVA GALLERY (Johannesburg, SouthAfrica)
• AGorgi (Tunis,Tunisia)
• Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (New York, USA)
• Circle Art Gallery (Nairobi,Kenya)
• Clare Oliver Gallery (New York, USA)
• Ed Cross Fine Art (London, United Kingdom)
• espace d’art contemporain 14N 61W (Fort de France, Martinique)
• Galerie Anne de Villepoix (Paris, France)
• Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire / Dakar, Senegal)
• Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna, Austria)
• Galleria Anna Marra (Rome, Italy)
• Gallery 1957 (Accra, Ghana)
• Gallery Nosco (Marseille, France)
• Guns & Rain (Johannesburg, South Africa)
• The Hole (New York, USA)
• HUBERTY & BREYNE GALLERY (Paris, France / Brussels, Belgium)
• Jack Bell Gallery (London, United Kingdom)
• James Cohan (New York, USA)
• Kalashnikovv Gallery (Johannesburg, South Africa)
• Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London, United Kingdom)
• L’Atelier 21 (Casablanca, Morocco)
• Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai, UAE)
• Loft Art Gallery (Casablanca, Morocco)
• Luce Gallery (Turin, Italy)
• MAGNIN-A (Paris, France)
• Mashrabia Gallery (Cairo, Egypt)
• Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, USA)
• Nil Gallery (Paris, France)
• October Gallery (London, United Kingdom)
• Primo Marella Gallery (Milan, Italy)
• Sakhile & Me (Frankfurt, Germany)
• Selma Feriani Gallery (Tunis, Tunisia)
• SMAC (Stellenbosch / Cape Town / Johannesburg, South Africa)
• SMITH (Cape Town, South Africa)
• SMO Contemporary Art (Lagos,Nigeria)
• Sulger-Buel Gallery (London, United Kingdom)
• Tabari Art Space (Dubai, UAE)
• TAFETA (London,United Kingdom)
• Tiwani Contemporary (London, United Kingdom)
• Ubuntu Art Gallery (Cairo, Egypt)
• Vigo Gallery (London, United Kingdom)
• WHATIFTHEWORLD (Cape Town, South Africa)
• Yossi Milo Gallery (New York, USA)

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair 

3-6 October 2019, Somerset House

London Somerset HouseStrand, London WC2R 1LA

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Painted paper sliced into strips. Narrow strips of paper tessellated to form complex patterns. Bonding tape, ink, scissors, cutting. The rhythm forms as she works. She is navigating the terrain of life through this meditative process. The textured surface as an arena for reflection. Gesture upon gesture. Layer upon layer, fragments of her thoughts stained onto paper. Through this reflective process, paper soaks up and stores memory and the surface becomes a form of an archive – a register and record through a collection of repeated gestures.

cellular state is Gluckman’s first solo show with SMAC Gallery and it coalesces large-scale multi-faceted assemblages made with textured paper and acrylic, in conjunction with a new series of miniature sculptures. This variation in size creates what the artist refers to as “oscillations between bigness and smallness” where the small-scale works enhance the experience of the larger works. Suspended installations bridge the distance between works on paper and sculptural works, allowing for resonance while facilitating a contiguous conversation.

The title of this exhibition; ‘cellular state’,  speaks to cellular memory, the notion that the body has the capacity for memory. Although the conscious mind recalls specific moments, the body gathers and accumulates experiences —what the mind forgets, the body remembers and will in its own way narrate these stories back to us. ‘cellular state’ is a space where ideas and emotions manifest as visual auras and where memories are made tangible. Gluckman’s creations traverse between painting, sculpture, and collage —becoming interdisciplinary constructions filled with small elegant details. What she is unable to express in words, she communicates through repeated arrangements that take on non-organic forms. The works speak of love, of passion, exploration, and chaos, or rather what presents itself as chaos is simply a tension between fragments of thought, feeling, and memory. This process reveals the efforts of thinking and feeling through making.

In this particular body of work, Gluckman is more willingly embracing a darker palette by combining elements and by using a series of gradual changes in value and intensity. The result is a strong and vivid texture that manages to remain warm, sensual and elegant. The tone is controlled and therapeutic. In discord, surveillance and sway, hints of gold and brown emerge from the black surface, glistening and giving the effect of burnt charcoal. Because of the muted tones and darker palette, the viewer is not distracted by colour. The artworks are bold. There exists an interesting relationship between the works on paper and miniature sculptures beyond just scale; works that present as sculptural adjacent to ‘conventional’ sculptures complicate the very clear lines often imposed to delineate different mediums. This relationship poses a question; where does a sculpture begin and where does it end?

Gluckman is using abstraction to contemplate the human condition; the cutting and tiling of different fragments of paper create a moment to contemplate life in all its complexities. This complexity reminds us that life is robust and the same time nuanced—even as we are enthralled by love and passion, we’re still a little bit sad inside. A sentiment Bukowski expresses in his beautifully crafted poem Let It Enfold You:

“not forgetting centuries of the living and the dead and the dying, the pyramids, Mozart dead but his music still there in the room, weeds growing, the earth turning”

Bukowski

—life as all of these together; hope, joy, fear, transience, impermanence, imperfection. ‘cellular state’ is resonant of life’s unpredictable journey. Life as a condition shaped by many different small components that intersect, diverge, collide and merge.

Gluckman engages essential elements of tactility— strips of paper arranged diagonally are blocked by bits of other paper arranged horizontally, inky tones are nestled between fringing edges (revision and discord) and conventional materials are pushed in different angles. By tiling and overlapping painted paper onto the surface, the surface itself becomes concealed (and so are the previous layers of paper tiled before). This concealment is ruptured by Gluckman’s own attitude and relationship with the materials, she understands them to be forgiving and is therefore liberated by their infallibility.  Her technique of creating microscopic and macroscopic inventions that embrace non-organic compositions stretch the edges of the spectrum between simplicity and complexity. The work is incredibly labour- intensive and time-consuming and yet the output is light and unburdened. The visual essence of the work is not overshadowed by the complexity of the making.

In migration, copper coloured lines form squares and rectangles that enclose depth and create a three-dimensionality that pulls you in towards the work. These polygons create tangible patterns with solid shadows. The same gesture is repeated at increasingly smaller scales until finally, the image collapses into sheer texture and a spatial illusion of verticality.

Read together (in pairs, groups and so on) different works offer multiple vantage points and usher in new multidimensionality—protest (a gold horizontal suspended artwork) and recall are made almost entirely of gold painted paper and are grounded by the richness of gold. Restoration and Revision offer a flattened matte finish exaggerated by the use of black paint. With discord and migration, tessellations are more pronounced while tufts of loose thread hang loosely on the rims of discord and revision, extending beyond the edges of the paper.

Galia Gluckman’s work stretches our imagination of the length to which simple materials can go. The long time required to complete the process creates moments of reflection and meditation where one gesture calls for another and another and another until a complex pattern erupts. This complex pattern becomes a record of memory and experience. ‘cellular state’ is a pattern of activity, a method of process.

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We have come a long way since the days when abstraction was a sore thumb in the South African art landscape and the stakes were higher for black artists on whom the burden of responsibility for more representational art was imposed. In our contemporary moment, we can now witness adiversity of styles and approaches to art in ways that aren’t only reflective of our time and place, but also indicative of a relief from any kind of superego imposition on what is appropriate, and what is not.

Abstract art has been one of the vehicles with which artists have used their rights to refuse certain forms of co-optations, representation, and identity. While a form of social commentary through a refusal, it must be said that this [refusal] didn’t at all mean that these artists weren’t concerned or critical about the state of the world.

Today, new forms of representational expectations are enforced, and artists from marginalized societies are urged to once more stage their marginality and exclusion by representing, performing and speaking to their backgrounds. To opt to disengage, retreat or to flee can be a form of expressing valor, for those (as Sun Ra would say): “who wish to be attuned/To the vibrations of the outer Cosmic Worlds,”
Artists like Mongezi Ncaphayi insist on speaking to the world, but not necessarily in the languages and forms that are convenient to our tastes and expectations. They tap into the recesses of their souls, to the nothingness of the cosmos, to determine their ways.

The language of abstraction in Mongezi Ncaphayi ’s work is a journey that vacillates between the real and the ethereal. Its exploratory thrust investigates the realness of the artistic materials at its disposal; with materials that are conventional but subjected to a process that never guarantees predictable outcomes. Left to chance, this unknowable fate opens the paper or canvas to be more than a substrate but also a site of exploration; a map from which we seek and discover the unknown via the chitchat of the paint, the ink scissors, brush, the cut-offs, and the water.

Mongezi Ncaphayi ’s paintings, largely minimalist, vacillate between collages and painting using the wet-on- wet technique. Wet-on-wet refers to a procedure based on water based pigmentations, whereby a watery pigment is applied on top of another in a semi controlled way, causing a complex and rhythmic orchestra of painterly effects. These images tend to resemble a topographic layout, a blurred form of mapping out. Here the art object becomes a cartographic sign in which we trace the labyrinth of self-developed shades, rendered elegantly and seemingly effortlessly. This is something Mongezi Ncaphayi extends on in the current exhibition.

Of the seeking or the finding continues on this trajectory into the abstract and incorporeal worlds, embracing serendipity and improvisation. Mongezi Ncaphayi has the unexpected relentlessness of a seeker. The title of the current exhibition is pulled out of a poem by African American poet and writer, Langston Hughes called Old Walt. In the two stanza piece Hughes employs the rhythmic and repetitive language that loops, rocks and sways back and forth.

Old Walt Whitman Went finding and seeking, Finding less than sought Seeking more than found, Every detail minding Of the seeking or the finding.

Athi Mongezeleli Joja

The loneliness that characterizes Old Walt’s journey, the movement that portrays his endless pursuit and impossible satiation, inspecting every crevice “pleasured equally/ in seeking as in finding,” is an apt description of Ncaphayi’s process. The solitude, the movement and pleasure that pervades ’Hughes’ poem is analogous to Ncaphayi’s own satisfaction in the enriching procedure of searching and spontaneity.

This is “poetry coming as blues and the blues coming as poetry” as Jayne Cortez once said. Music haunts, which is to say, it hones in on and harnesses Ncaphayi’s art. The current works are somewhat musical, not only because they follow a kind of theatrics of the muse or musing, but because they also entail a great deal of “play.” As a saxophonist himself, Ncaphayi somewhat employs the notion of play in the very development of the pieces. This sense of play also affects the way our eyes receive the subtle and runny palette, making the art works lighter and inviting to the eye. The shapes, lines, dots, and other interrupting but subtle features of these beautiful images extend this sense of play, without being frivolous or necessarily decorative.

This is a body of work that asks of us to think about forms of embodying freedom, as elusive, fantastical and tenuous as that might be. It’s a collection that explores issues of time travel, spatiality (literally and imaginatively), beauty and play. Mongezi Ncaphayi’s Of the seeking or the finding concerns itself with issues of spiritual freedoms, material exploration, and virtues of human exploratory practices.

Text by Athi Mongezeleli Joja

To be seen until 5th of June 2019
At SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg

1st Floor, The Trumpet
19 Keyes Avenue
Rosebank
2196
T: +27 (0)10 594 5400

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What makes a portrait? What do we uncover through creations and recreations of our own image? As the beauty of each image is revealed, so are the limitations of language.

This exhibition explores the idea of portraiture as a tool for charting the psychological make-up of the human subject.

Dr Ernst van der Waal

It coalesces works by thirteen South African artists who, through their work,  wrestle with notions of the self. It includes traditional types of portraiture (painted and etched) punctuated by contorted and disorienting works —Marlene Steyn’s in her feel her out her face mask (2019), an oil on canvas painting, depicts a woman’s face, she has blue hair and is wearing a  blue and white striped t-shirt or sweater. The woman’s face encompasses multiple figures and at least nine sets of eyes are visible —peculiar repetition. The image is alluring and perplexing.

Works take on different styles; from the John Murray’s clean and compelling acrylic works, Georgina Gratrix’s self portrait of altered proportions, Mostaff Muchawaya deep and tactile outline to Alexis Preller’s muted brushstrokes and palette —an all embracing rendering.

Portraiture is one such way of grappling with the human exterior (of grazing the surface of the body and to translate the traces of emotion into marks on canvas or a piece of paper), whilst also delving deeper, trying to peel away the layers of the human subject to explore its inner workings.

Dr Ernst van der Waal

Portraiture holds a very precarious position within the history of art —beginning at a time when portraits (particularly painted portraits) were reserved for the privileged few to of course now; a time when self capturing has become ubiquitous following wide accessibility of the camera. Between these two extremes, we find a language that allows us to consider deeply what it means to see ourselves and others through imagery —this becomes an inquiry into notions of beauty, desire, the self and the soul.

The complete list of participating artists includes; Albert Adams, Braam Kruger, Peter Clarke, Christo Coetzee, Kate Gottgens, Georgina Gratrix, Johann Louw, Mostaff Muchawaya, John Murray, Alexis Preller, Gerard Sekoto, Marlene Steyn and Simon Stone. Works will be on view until April 19th.

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An increasingly large contingent within Investec Cape Town Art Fair is made up of prominent galleries from around the globe. These galleries represent exciting, established and emerging artists with a presence in museums, biennials, and important private collections around the world. International galleries returning to the Fair are:

• Perrotin (Paris)
• Galleria Minini (Brescia)
• Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Abidjan)
• Galleria Continua (San Gimignano)
• Circle Art Gallery (Nairobi)
• Officine dell’Immagine (Milan)
• Gregor Podnar (Berlin)
• First Floor Gallery (Harare)
• Tyburn Gallery (London)
• October Gallery (London)
• Galleria Giovanni Bonelli (Milan)
• Addis Fine Art (Addis Ababa)
• Afriart Gallery (Kampala)
• ARTCO Gallery (Aachen)
• Caroline Smulders (Paris)
• THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE (Luanda)
• Sulger-Buel Lovell (London)
• Galerie Pascal Janssens (Ghent)
• Art First (London), MOVART (Luanda)
• THIS IS NO FANTASY (Melbourne).

There is also an influx of international galleries participating in Investec Cape Town Art Fair for the first time:

• Templon (Paris)
• MAGNIN-A (Paris)
• LOOM Gallery (Milan)
• Ayyam Gallery (Dubai)
• Retro Africa (Lagos)
• Lia Rumma (Milan)
• LKB/Gallery (Hamburg)
• Omenka Gallery (Lagos)
• Montoro12 Gallery (Rome)
• Eduardo Secci Contemporary (Florence)
• Art Twenty One (Lagos)
• Apalazzo Gallery (Brescia)
• Barbara Paci Galleria d’Arte (Pietrasanta)
• Nil Gallery (Paris)
• Cellar Contemporary (Trento)
• ELA – Espaço Luanda Arte (Luanda)
• NOMAD Gallery (Brussels)
• Sitor Senghor (Paris)
• Louis Simone Guirandou Gallery (Abidjan)
• Matter Gallery (Toronto).

Investec Cape Town Art Fair serves as the hometown fair of local galleries with a significant international presence. ICTAF 2019 will see new presentations by leading South African galleries including Goodman Gallery, Everard Read CIRCA, Stevenson, SMAC Gallery, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Gallery MOMO, SMITH, and Blank Projects. Alongside their presentations at ICTAF these galleries, each of whom are pillars of the art scene in Cape Town and South Africa at-large, will form a captivating programme of exhibition openings and events to coincide with the Fair.

Tomorrows/Today, the section of the Fair which aims to place a spotlight on emerging and under-represented artists, will be curated by Fair Curator Tumelo Mosaka. The artists presented in Tomorrows/Today are positioned to be tomorrow’s leading names in contemporary art. The presentations in the section have continued to be thought-provoking and experimental since its inception at the 2016 edition of the Fair. Tomorrows/Today reiterates the Fair’s support of artists who may otherwise be overlooked by the art market.

The second iteration of the SOLO section, will explore the effects of the digital world on artistic production and our lived realities. Each edition of SOLO aims to present a more in-depth insight into the artistic practices of a varied selection of artists than is commonly found in the commercially-driven art fair setting. The selected artists have varying aesthetics and contexts, are situated in different stages of their careers, and have unique perspectives on each edition’s thematic focus.

Artskop3437 is an official partner of Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF)

See the full exhibitor list here

© Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) 2019

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