Time is about memory and remembrance – a precious commodity

Passages through time – the Retro by  very talented abstract artist, Coral Fourie, can now be seen at the NWU Potchefstroom Campus’ Gallery in Hoffman Street from 12 October till 10 November, with the official opening being tonight, 12 October at 18:30 for 19:00. Entry is free.
The magical lan-guage contained in the painted symbols and rock engravings of sub-Saharan Africa serves as a point of departure for artist Coral Fourie’s investigation of time and space.
Where Coral’s oeuvre previously explored the mystery surrounding these marks of unknown origin and age, her focus has now shifted to the cyclical nature of the time-space continuum.
Rock art has thus become a metaphor or marker for time against the timelessness of the natural habitat that shaped her as a child of the Kalahari and Namib deserts.
For Fourie, time is about memory and remembrance – a precious commodity to be          treated with circumspection.
She reads the symbols in a very personal way, conjecturing possible meaning devoid of scientific interpretation by archaeologists, ethnologists and socio-anthropologists.
This intuitive and spiritual action allows her to become a post-colonial observer of African cultural production, linking pre-modern life of  unidentified people to a postmodern context
Like the artists of prehistory, her  non-figurative abstract work is devoid of people.
She rather recognises mark making in nature – be it in shapes the wind leaves in the sand, that of a snail spoor on the sea rock or the magnificent petroglyphs that people of antiquity created.
Fourie contextualises the residue or meta-phorical pointers as an intervention at a certain time, thereby merging the concept of time with that of the landscape or space from    where it originated in vibrant colours reminiscent of the African sky and earth.
Her work is a testimonial of her physical and metaphysical travels and keen  observa- tion of this vast continent with an understanding of the colour of the spaces in which time is reconstructed.
Condensed biography:
Coral Fourie (neé Knobel) was born in Mahikeng in 1937.
She spent a large part of her formative     years in the Kalahari and Botswana where she befriended and built steady friendships with the Bakwena tribe of Batswana, Bakgalagadi, G/hana, G/wii and Khua San people.
Some of the major in-fluences during this time were meeting South African writers, such as P.J. Schoeman and W.A. de Klerk, who were friends of the family, as well as her father’s cousin, Hein Knobel, who was a keen photographer and anatomy student.
The impressions that impacted most on her psyche, however, were doing traditional wall paintings with mud and cow dung with her playmates’ mothers and watching Bushmen doing etchings on ostrich eggshells.
After school, she attended the Pretoria Teachers’ Training College where Walter Battiss was one of her tutors.
Bill Ainslie from the Johannesburg Art Foundation followed in this role in the later  years while she was an art teacher.
Coral has participated in 32 exhibitions, mostly solo shows, throughout her adult life, completed numerous commissions, has been included in numerous collections and has written three books, with one translated into German, and another one published in four languages simultaneously; Afrikaans, German, English and French.
At an age when   people are supposed to  retire, Coral started with a full-time professional career as an artist.
This year (2017), she will be celebrating her 80th birthday with her    retrospective exhibition at the university gallery.
Together with her husband, Jan, and their four children,  Fourie has lived in Lichtenburg, Pietersburg, Thabazimbi, Tsolo in the Transkei, Lebowa and Hartswater (teaching in Taung).
She presently  resides in Parys in the Free State.
Be sure not to miss this exhibition of a truely talented artist