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Stay Away, 2006, Oil on canvas,
25 x 25cm
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Over Time, 2006, oil on canvas,
100 x 100cm
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PRESS
RELEASE
MATTHEW HINDLEY AT 34 LONG
BEFORE MY TIME
14 November 19h00 – 9 December
34LONG, one of Cape Town’s new generation of contemporary visual art galleries, holds the work of Matthew Hindley in high esteem. A measure of their confidence in Matthew’s art is the fact that they are hosting
Before My Time, an exhibition of his recent works in their upstairs gallery simultaneously with
LIMITED/unlimited , Takashi Murakami’s first solo show in South Africa downstairs.
Hindley has been working in oils for some time now, having started his career with computer generated art work. He loves paint, and he loves the history of paint. Along with Frida Kahlo, Irma Stern, Henri Rousseau, Caravaggio, Kafka, amongst many, he acknowledges Murakami as a formative influence in his work. He looks forward to exhibiting in close proximity to Murakami fearlessly, saying that he no longer thinks comparatively, no longer searches outside himself for ideas: his journey is internal, into his own idiom, his own history, family, relationships, fears, happiness, tragicomedy… He retraces, rewrites and reinvents his own trajectory, but does not see time and space as constraints; hence the exhibition title.
The paintings for Before My Time fall into a self-imposed, mainly naturalistic pictorial genre, in which portraits and landscapes come to resemble action packed movie stills. Skeletons do hip hop dances and burn castles, ghost kittens sit around lonely sad girls, people stare out to sea, trees grow out of clouds, everything happens slowly. Having been a Catholic altar boy in South Africa, Hindley adds, means that religion and race feature also, inevitably. Though this sounds like pure story-telling fantasy, Hindley denies that the paintings are primarily narrative. They are emotionally-laden inventions, events, which could not exist in any other genre.
Hindley is attracted to complexity and intrigued by ambiguity; he likes his paintings to be disorientating and confusing, troubling, without central focus; real, surreal and unreal all at once. That is why he likes deserted beaches, haunted lakes, lonely people and planetary movements that augur darkness and nothingness.
Over time seems to present a classic portrait of a lady. But in Hindley’s lexicon, what does “classic” mean? A cat dangles a naked mouse over her weary face, yet she seems not to notice. Is that because her castle is being burned by the undead? In Hindley’s world, questions burn brighter than answers, riddles are not there to be solved but to be pondered, reworked, committed to memory slowly.
Matthew Hindley is a young painter whose work has received substantial acclaim.
Before My Time, his first solo exhibition, is a burning beacon, indicating a bright future by exhibiting an invented past. Hindley’s works are still affordable, but may not remain so indefinitely. Don’t miss this show.
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All images ©
the artists, 2006
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VIEW
WORK
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34 Long Street Cape Town South Africa
For more information contact Andries Loots: tel. +27 82 354
1500 fineart@34long.com
Gallery
hours Tuesday - Friday 9h00-17h00 Saturday 10h-14h00
or by appointment tel. +27 21 426 4594
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