Contemporary Art South Africa brings you A Drawn Conclusion

Diana Hyslop
The awkwardness of parting
Oil on canvas
50 x 50cm, 2012

Brent Meistre
Verneukpan, Northern Cape, South Africa
Colour photograph on cotton rag paper
Edition /10
88 x 111.8cm, 2007

Themba Shibase
From Umhlaba Kabani? Series – Who’s Land?
Acrylic and pastel on paper
123 x 169cm, 2007

Jan Neethling
Maiden strolling through landscape
Acrylic on board
122 x 84cm, 2008

A Drawn Conclusion is a collaborative project between Erdmann Contemporary in Cape Town and the North-West University in Potchefstroom that is on from 20 March to 6 May 2013.

Carla Erasmus, Brent Meistre, Brendhan Dickerson, Jan Neethling, Wilhelm Saayman, Thembalakhe Prospect Shibase, Diana Hyslop and introducing Robert Plotz.

The location of this gallery – set in a botanical garden - provided the curatorial framework for this exhibition.  The title, A Drawn Conclusion extends this narrative, exploring the co-existence between humans and nature.  The works by the seven artists selected (from Johannesburg, Grahamstown, Cape Town and Durban) for participating in this exhibition not only comments on this dichotomy but also provide viewers with a wide range of use of media. 

New comer, Carla Erasmus’ atmospheric photographs were all shot using expired film; her methodology thus alters the familiar and the known.  This altering of the familiar landscape is present in most of the other works.  Established artist, Diana Hyslop’s cartoon like creatures that are both human and animal further extends this dialogue.  Photographer Brent Meistre’s evocative landscapes comment on land ownership whereas Durban artist Themba Shibase’s work invites the viewer to explore what lies beneath the surface.       

Participating artists include Carla Erasmus (photography), Diana Hyslop (painting), Brendhan Dickerson (sculpture), Jan Neethling (painting), Wilhelm Saayman (painting and work on paper), Themba Shibase (work on paper) and introducing Robert Plotz (drawing).

Residing in Cape Town, Carla Erasmus in is an emerging talent to watch. She is a University of Pretoria graduate where she specialised in photography. Since graduating she took some time off to travel and take photographs in Europe, where she participated in several exhibitions. She was a finalist in the Ekhuruleni Art Competition in Pretoria in 2007. For the past 4 years she has regularly participated in group exhibitions in South Africa. Her series of work entitled Landskap (Landscape) received critical acclaim.

The photographs were shot using expired (1997) slide film. The landscapes are recognizable, albeit evocatively altered by the fading colour of each expired roll of film. These moody and softly focused landscapes create a visual idiom that is abstract, thereby evoking a fragmented and stifling atmosphere. The photographs, often showing a horizon that is crooked, have a slightly blurred feeling, with the grain visible and often too little contrast. The works contain a distinct minimalist feel. The photographs show compositional essentials, and seem to be a slice from a larger whole, both visually and in time. It is as if something happened in the past or is about to happen, making these landscapes intermediate images.

Landskap focuses on two crucial issues, memory and landscape. Photographed in South Africa and the Netherlands, the images are not nostalgic, but rather show how we elaborate our own images inside ourselves, how the land is constantly transformed and what we expect to see in an image and what we really need to see. These abstract landscapes never provide an answer, but rather leave the task of finding one in the eyes of the viewer.

Diana Hyslop who lives and works in Johannesburg worked for Marvel Comics in London in her mid-twenties. In the late eighties she studied painting at Bill Ainslie’s Johannesburg Art Foundation. In the nineties she spent a year at the Santa Monica Fine Arts Studios in California.

In 1998 Hyslop committed to full time painting. In 2002 she joined the Fordsburg Artist Studios (Bag Factory Studios) as a permanent tenant artist and has been part of this downtown collective for nine years. Largely informed by comics and film, Hyslop’s work explores magical realism and a universe of possibilities in which unexpected combinations are viable, all co-exist, and where everything can happen at once. She is interested in the duality of existence, a solitary/social phenomenon through which an eminent encounter can sometimes determine our pathways and go beyond it.


Brent Meistre is Senior Lecturer and Sectional Head of Photography in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Meistre works mainly with traditional photographic processes (including hand colour printing) incorporated into bodies of work which also feature video, stop-frame animation and sound installations.

Much of his work investigates the possibilities of single and multiple images as cinematic and thereby plays with the veiling of meanings and narratives. His works are often positioned within particular timeframes and frameworks within Southern Africa evoking melancholia, loss and longing. In this context he uses the photographic and filmic to unravel and complicate the notion of the photograph being a document of historical fact, contra the medium’s possibilities for suggesting the unsaid.

Jan Neethling, who Lives and works in Johannesburg, has participated in numerous group and two-man exhibitions since 1970, most notably, eight collaborative showings with his lifetime friend, Robert Hodgins.

Neethling has also participated in several group showings with other well-known South African artists that include William Kentridge, Deborah Bell, Paul Stopforth, Frank van Schaik and Joachim Schonfeldt. His long and close association with Hodgins shaped the course of the artist’s career.

Neethling’s works comment on a variety of typical and current South African issues. Neethling's bold painting style and his extraordinary use of colour are all present in the new works. Voluptuous nudes, businessmen, politicians, warriors, drug-lords, celebrities and celestial beings are all featured in what has become Neethling's signature style.

Wilhelm Saayman was born in Robertson, Cape Town and now Lives and works in Johannesburg. Wilhelm Saayman’s work has recently moved from drawings and watercolours to larger scale oils on paper and canvas. His latest body of work investigates the very act of painting, exploring the emotive power of mark and line on cloth. Inspiration is taken from the power of erasure and vandalism; graffiti as a tool to create visceral marks and palimpsests. Neighbourhood message-boards and cryptic messages in public spaces offer further stimulation.

Saayman’s paintings become objects that can be used to commemorate the detritus of the dead, prod the living into action, or comment on acts of injustice, exposing or shaming perpetrators. Restless and bristling with energy, these paintings engage the viewer in a very direct and tactile way. The work poses questions about our place in this world and simultaneously points out that our position, regardless of who we are, can never be permanent or secure.

Themba Shibase from Durban is a multi-talented emerging artist from Kwa-Zulu Natal. His work is inspired by daily life encounters in the city in which he lives and focuses on a variety of issues centered around identity, particularly racial and political, within the context of an urban environment. He interrogates the often stereotypical and homogenized notion of an authentic African culture.

Shibase recently completed his Master of Technology degree in Fine Art at Durban University of Technology where he also lectures Painting, Drawing and Art Theory.
Over the past 5 years he has exhibited in numerous major group exhibitions in Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and recently New York. His work featured in the Spier Contemporary Art Award - 2007 exhibition as one of the finalists. In 2008 he was again nominated as a finalist in the MTN Young Contemporaries Art Award. His work is included in corporate, public and private collections both locally and internationally. Shibase is currently enrolled for a PhD in Gender Studies at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

Robert Plotz has a degree in Architecture from the University of Cape Town. He has a further ten years experience as a Creative Director in Advertising and Media. But it has always been about the paint. After studying under various teachers, Robert now paints almost full time from his studio in Salt River.

Plotz says, "I paint people, faces and figures. It´s not about capturing the likeness, it is rather about using the paint and brushstrokes to reveal the underlying. The layers of paint, like skin, envelope a myriad of emotions, as a painter I chase those feelings, peeling away at the protective layers to reveal a fragile sub structure of delicate line and under painting i.e. vulnerability.” For Plotz, It is a process of deconstruction and the outcome is an intricately woven skin of interlocking fragments and plains that at times falls away or wears thin to delve beneath the surface. This is where you find the true being.

What intrigues Plotz is the subject’s story. Using the paint to map the journey or freeze the experience in time. “My people have lived, suffered and survived. Therefore the final result aims to confront the rawness of their experiences, stripped bare of any pretense. Although my paintings can be unnerving and challenging at times, they request only one thing. Recognise the beauty in real life," adds Plotz.    

Text Naomi Menyok and Maileshi Setti Images courtesy of Erdmann contemporary