Kevin Atkinson, Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart, c.1976, oil on canvas, 5’ 6” x 5’ 6”.
THE NEW CHURCH MUSEUM
102 New Church Street, Tamboerskloof
December 2–April 25
CAPE TOWN
The history of painterly abstraction in South Africa remains atomized and fragmentary in part because of lingering animosities about its bland rehearsal of an imported style and, decisively perhaps, its inability to visualize the struggle against apartheid, which prompted curators and publishers to bypass the abstract in favor of social-realist and agitprop work. This exhibition, rather than recapitulating history, offers a selective survey of this overlooked genre and draws predominantly from the holdings of the New Church Museum. Guest curator Marilyn Martin named this show after a billowing black-and-white composition, Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart, ca. 1976 by Kevin Atkinson, a former teacher of Marlene Dumas. It hangs in a room adjacent to the entrance and next to the show’s oldest work, an atypical jumble of black calligraphic marks titled Abstract on White and Blue from 1957 by Walter Battiss.
Martin eschews chronology in favor of juxtaposing works by first- and second-wave abstract painters with recent works by contemporary artists. Sometimes this strategy yields insightful results, as in the pairing of two untitled Ernest Mancoba drawings, dated c. 1970s and 1993 respectively, with a paper sculpture sutured with ribbons and rubber tubes by Nicholas Hlobo titled Andilibali Okwendlovu, 2008. The curatorial conceit is resisted, though, by works such as Dineo Seshee Bopape’s installation Uncontested Metaphor, 2013, an asymmetrical piece of fabric accompanied by a work on paper and a length of rope that is essentially modular in form. Along with Gerda Scheepers’s Medium and Modality Piece [Speak Easy], 2013, a uniformly blue canvas with fabric embellishments featuring rudimentary marks and displayed as a sculpture, these two cryptic and magnetic works are the unexpected highlights, as both artists have produced singular works that refuse company or comparison.