Double dose at Parkwood gallery
PARKWOOD - Graffiti art and sculpture dominate in July.
This month, Lizamore and Associates Gallery offers visual art lovers not one but two exhibitions of wildly different works.
Observa714, a body of graffiti art by Kilmany-Jo Liversage, is on exhibition in the main gallery, while Uwe Pfaff’s I am a Lone, is on show in the sculpture garden.
“After two years of focusing on international projects, including the 2013 Venice Biennale, Liversage is back on home soil with a double solo exhibition,” said gallery spokesperson Suen Muller, adding that Observa714 is being shown in Joburg and Cape Town simultaneously.
“Liversage is known for her work in a relatively new genre called ‘urban art’, recognised as an art form inspired by street aesthetics, most notably spray painted graffiti and stenciling,” she said.
According to Muller, Liversage’s “rare and desired” style combined street and fine art, which made for portraits both “classic and distinctly urban”.
“During the machine age, artists would reduce their compositions to [their] smallest constituent parts,” said Liversage.
“With the paintings in Observa714, I manufactured this deconstruction by combining the painting tradition of portraiture with idiosyncrasies from the urban culture of tagging.”
The artist added that this process enabled her to explore the “intersection between street art and fine art while reconstructing them into a new genre of portraiture”.
Muller said that I am a Lone, Pfaff’s exhibition, also introduced a new artistic element.
The artist said his new body of work reflected a “deeper, braver approach to dreaming in metal”.
“Life-sized figures stand in the garden, either solitary or on ghostly tandem, glowing with primary colours that [are] a novel diversion from the silver sheen of my previous forays in mapping out the unconscious in such tactile fashion,” said Pfaff.
Muller said the body of work was a “novel variation on his myth made flesh structures”.
“Metal profiles full of play [and] yearning, the new Pfaff unveiling [was] precisely that – a shedding of an emotional outer layer,” she said.
The exhibitions will run until 5 August at Lizamore and Associates Gallery, 155 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood.
Details: 011 880 8802; www.lizamore.co.za
