PRESS
RELEASE
RECOVERY
A selection works by various artists
23 September – 17 October 2009
upstairs at 34 Long Fine Art
Recovery showcases new talent, handpicked by 34Long, alongside work by some well-known artists with whom the Gallery has long been associated.
Leonora van Staden’s work was last seen at 34Long with her Masters in Fine Art graduate exhibition in January 2006. Since then, she has had many successes locally and abroad. Her style reflects the inspiration of both the European and Canadian comic traditions, and her defining black line reveals her admiration for Eastern calligraphy. She regards the fluidity of animation movies as her main inspiration and she is currently experimenting with handmade stop-animation. 34Long will be showing some recent works combining drawing and painting.
Roelof Louw is a well-known Cape Town artist with a distinguished international reputation as pop artist and printmaker extraordinaire. His images are culled from advertising, newspapers and other media. Relentless reworking transforms then into hybrid narratives containing visual satires, parodies and puns clowning around in glittering, colourful strokes of exquisite madness. His consummate understanding of the silkscreen printing process allows him to manipulate his material in subtle ways, erasing all traces of the artist's hand while paradoxically insisting on an unmistakably personal vocabulary.
Jop Kunneke holds a National Higher Diploma (
Fine Art ) Technikon Pretoria, now Tshwane University of Technology.
Numbskulls, his 2008 solo show at Salon 91 in Cape Town, was a commentary on sheer media diversity. Jop’s outstanding artistic and technical skill is impressive. He explains that he uses “tongue-in-cheek humour to take a satirical look at our collective narcissistic greed – and the driving forces behind it.” His point of reference is contemporary popular culture, street and skin art. Artists like Banksy have brought underground urban creativity into the limelight, adding credibility and value to a previously reviled and criminalized art form. Similarly, tattooing has made it out of dingy back alley parlours onto coveted spot-lit catwalks, with the success of Ed Hardy transforming vintage tattoos to Haute Couture. The art world has followed suit and wide-scale celebrity endorsement has ensured that pop culture has emerged as the golden trend of our times. Jop’s outlook and creativity fits the profile of 34Long perfectly. He is a fine sculptor in bronze and also excels at charcoal sketching and oil painting. He delights in surprising elements like gilded glam veneers, stencils interacting with gold-leaf, reworked digital imagery, graphic novel-style canvasses and eye-catching aluminium-cast heads on psychedelic pop backgrounds.
Sulette van der Merwe completed a National Diploma in Fine and Applied
Arts at Tswane University of Technology in 2005. Majoring in painting and printmaking, she explored relationships between illustration, film and painted narratives. Her current work includes favourite literary references, such as Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey and a film based on Witches by Roald Dahl that she saw in early childhood. She has appropriated the idea of transformed portraits, changed, as if by magic, inside the painted picture plane. Her earlier work endeavoured to create portraits where transformations are brought about by sculpturally adapting her paintings into semi-mechanised two-dimensional surfaces with built-in buttons and coo-coo clock birds. Sulette continues her quest to simulate movement in paint by building toy television sets into her painted surfaces, recalling the neo-dada and pop art aesthetics of readymades and combines. Her evolving body of work called zoetrope, encompasses a series of playful self-referential portraits which neither fully exist as digital compositions nor as complete narrative portraits. Her ultra bright square portraits, hand-rendered depictions of digital collages, resemble childrens’ picture book illustrations with a cute pop appeal.
Recovery also includes a new edition by Jeff Koons. There
will be no formal opening event. Exhibition on till 17 October
VIEW WORK
