Group curated by Candice Cruse
The works of art in this group were loosely grouped together around the theme of ‘landscapes.’ Groups of works sometimes come together through visual art elements: line, shape, texture, to name only a few.
In the case of these works coming together, we begin with the bird’s-eye zoomed-in view of Annelie Venter’s painting. The work shows a lone flower pushing itself out and into bloom amidst haphazard lines of twigs and natural debris. From these lines, so the eye is led to Le Roux’s Woodland scene, the use of a frenetic layering of entirely different lines imprinting on the viewer the movement of trees, our eyes then winding, as the trees do, across the foregrounded path into Nichola Leigh’s “Imaginary landscape, Ngunis and bushveld.” The tops of these trees reminded me of a work I had to hook off the wall and hang next to Nicky’s work, Heidi Fourie’s “Cumulopestis Pigmentus,” a dark and gritty cloud; nothing close to the colour of the trees in the work before it, but somehow so close to the form of the crown of Nicky’s imaginary tree.
As someone who is often entrusted to put artists’ stories and intentions together, it is a joy to sometimes get lost simply in the creator’s mark-making and to draw a mental line through their mark-making to marks and forms and textures in other works of art.
There was February… and then, October! At JMFA we have missed our usual (pre–COVID) pace of putting works together to rub shoulders with one another. One of the most fulfilling aspects of our consultancy is telling stories and encouraging conversations by looking at art. We choose works which relate to the people who live with them, and support artists in whom we believe.
And so, in our bid to put us all in a positive place in the surreal year that is 2020 and bring you some stories, we have made our own groups:
- 8 groups of 8 works which we will release on our website, week by week, every Monday, for 8 weeks
- hung and photographed in friendly spaces to give you a sense of scale
- for the release week only, if you buy 2 or more, you will pay 8% less on the total cost of the works. You can, of course, purchase only one but you will be missing out on the discount.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us to enquire about the condition or to arrange to view the works at either our Cape Town or Johannesburg studio, depending on where they (and you!) are.