Art Gallery Project

Art Exhibition Assignment | Yuvan Naidoo 12C |

Gallery: Everard Read Gallery.
Location of Gallery:
Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg. This Gallery is a Contemporary gallery. When I visited the gallery on 11 March 2013, the gallery was mainly exhibiting works by Keith Joubert and Dylan Lewis along with a few other interesting artists. The gallery was exhibiting a wide variety of paintings and sculptures including mixed media, sculptures and furniture.
Reason for choosing exhibition:
I had previously seen works on the internet by Milan painter, Alessandro Papetti. His works are amongst my favourites and I was excited to be able to see his works in real life. I selected this gallery due to its contemporary nature and my interest in contemporary art. I am also interested in the mixed media and sculpture showcased in this gallery and the high reputation of the gallery further urged me to conduct my research here. The two main artists exhibiting are highly intriguing and their works are shown all over the world, and it was therefore an honour to be able to see these works in real life.

Velaphi Mzimba- Reddish Apple, 2009, 170X170cm, Acrylic on Canvas

Chosen Art Works: 1. Alessandro Pappeti
L’AVANA II, 2004
170cm X 205cm
Oil on canvas.
L’avana II, Alessandro Pappeti
This work depicts a scene in a street with a presumably moving car in the foreground and an urban landscape in the background. This artist’s main style focuses on industrial archaeology along with an in-depth examination of the nude, bodies of ships and humans in their greatness and fragility. In Pappeti’s early life, he began his art career by studying the interiors of work-shops and depicted the way they were affected by time and later developed his style - incorporating human figures, urban landscapes and other industrial-type “scenes”. In almost all of Pappeti’s works, he makes use of calculated yet spontaneous brushstrokes clearly showcasing his talents with oil paint. He makes use of a harmony of dull colours and shapes made from few simple brush strokes. He often makes use of diluted paint and sometimes drips the paint onto the canvas to create various effects (one of which is straight vertical lines). He effectively shows depth in his work through perspective and shades of colour and although he uses rough brush strokes, the viewer can accurately observe the objects within the painting. 2. Keith Joubert
Moonlight Elephants
110cm X 160cm
Oil on canvas.
The main subject matter of Joubert’s works is a journey into the life and soul of Africa. He particularly showcases the point of conflict where species and ideologies collide. He makes use of rich colour on large canvases that unravel the mysteries of survival and Africa’s nature. Joubert was born in Africa and received a formal art education in Johannesburg where he worked as a book illustrator and sign writer before he began to paint full time in the remote bush camps in Africa. He works in oil, watercolours and mixed media and the occasional sculpture with his works being exhibited world-wide.
Moonlight Elephants
In his work, Moonlight Elephants, He makes use of a variety of unnatural primary colours to exaggerate shadows, light and shadings. In the work, we see several elephants all facing the same direction in the foreground with a bright, rough, Africa-themed landscape as a background. This work is part of an exhibition entitled “Predator”. His use of colour in this work is unlike his other works in this exhibition. He makes use of bright un-naturalistic colour whereas in his other works, he makes use of expected colours one would see in an African bush scene. The subjective nature of the colours may be an examination of the wealth of biodiversity and culture in Africa. 3. Vusi Khumalo
Passage in Holomisa Informal Settlement
50cm X 244cm
Mixed Media on Board.
Khumalo is a highly qualified artist with many exhibitions and awards to his name. After teaching and studying, he started focusing on his own art where his early works were in oil paint however; Khumalo felt that his efforts to render South African landscapes, with the “blossoming” squatter communities in particular, were frustrated as he felt that oil painting did not sufficiently render the intense realism he wished to express. This led him to producing strikingly fascinatingly real collages.
In his work, Passage in Holomisa Informal Settlement, he achieves his intense realism by reconstructing the infamous squatter camps and takes the viewer where he/she might, otherwise, fear to explore and maybe remind us that behind the media’s “altered” views of these societies, these growths on said societies are populated by people under hard and trying circumstances. The work depicts a township scene with a city in the background and shacks in the foreground. He makes use of collage and several painted materials one might find in these townships to compose his final work. He also makes use of dark colours such as black and emphasises an ominous nature within the work with the use of a cut-off person holding a beer bottle.

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Passage in Holomisa Informal Settlement