norman catherine: now and then @ the JAG

Yeh, I totally forgot that I had these images on my camera; I had gone down to help Khwezi Gule out with some computer trouble at the Johannesburg Art Museum (yes, I am the default art-geek for all Macs in the fine art scene of Jozi), and then did a quick run down to see the Norman Catherine exhibition.

My feelings on NC are always different, depending on my mood. Sometimes I find him frightening, other times, hilarious, and on more than one occasion, boring. Those first two I think would make him happy, but I’m not so sure about the last issue. Still, it was nice to see so much of his work, which is always well-executed, in one place, especially when that place is his home country. Below are some quotes I found online, then a pic of some stuff from the front wall of the gallery show I took these shots at. Good run of solos at JAG this year, for those who have not yet noticed – my faves so far are/were Kentridge and Goldblatt….

From the-artists.org:

In 1969 he held his first solo exhibition consisting of oil paintings on wood, bone, wire and an assortment of found objects. His art has since undergone several metamorphoses, from the pristine airbrush paintings of the 70s to the frenzied, ritualistic mixed media works of the early and mid 80s; the wire sculptures and tin can works of the late 80s, and the primitive-futuristic paintings of the early 90s which provided the seeds for his pre-millennial menagerie of anthropomorphic beasts. In the thirty years spanning his past and present output, Catherine’s visual trademarks have included rough-edged comical and nightmarish forms, rendered in brash cartoon colours. His idiosyncratic vision – a combination of dark cynicism and exuberant humour, as well as his innovative use of everyday materials, has secured his place at the forefront of South African contemporary art.

From cama.org.za:

For Norman Catherine, the crudity and sophistication of an artwork stem from ‘the mixture of the primitive and the futuristic’. Through these imagined timeframes, Catherine accesses his wild dystopian vision of the present. His paintings and figures are darkly comic, bold and lurid in execution. ‘There’s an angst in my work that will never go away,’ says Catherine. ‘It was there before I knew anything about politics, really.’

Catherine’s qualification is critical. The fact that South Africa has changed has done little to soften his ‘black side’, but a mutation has occurred. Gone are the ‘raw expressions of fear and fury that allow no catharsis’: John Howell’s observation made in Art Forum (Dec. 1986) was a response to Catherine’s searing earlier mixed-media works with titles like Suicide, House Arrest and Intensive Care. For Catherine, the dulled sense of crisis and despair, spawned by the States of Emergency imposed on the country by the apartheid government in the ’80s, has fallen away. What has surfaced in its place is a growing awareness of inner-city psychosis caused by escalating violence, the burgeoning underworld of gangsterism and crime, and the spread of corporate corruption and subterfuge. This urban rot Catherine sees as being not limited to Johannesburg, but part of a national and international pathology.

and the show: