A collaborative, or in art language, a co-curatorial venture by two outstanding artists marked the exhibition of their works called Co-Respondences at the Everard Read Gallery in Rosebank. Artists Deborah Bell and Ricky Burnett also shared an in-depth analysis of their works through a conversation with Craig Higginson.
Bell is counted among top-ranking South Africa’s living artists and she brought her over-life-sized monumental sculpture to the exhibition. She explained, “I wanted to learn what rock is. For me, it’s not about knowing but about all the shenanigans coming together and becoming something which you learn from. The sculpture is possessed of a profoundly spiritual decorum.”
When Higginson asked about her use of water in her work, Bell explained that she was fascinated by taking something as gentle as water and yet possessing such incredible power, which she portrayed in her work.
Burnett who currently runs a private teaching studio has been in the art world for decades and he continues to probe the forms and possibilities in modernist abstraction. His works at the exhibition were intensely devoid of representational, symbolic or associative content and were rather predominantly white.
“To be frank, I am too impatient with water colours. There’s a lovely resistance in oil paints because of their infinity, their retention and their weird physicality.”
Ivor Powell for the SA Art Times reviewed Burnett’s work as having occasional minimal tinting of metallic silver. “In Burnett’s paintings, it becomes a material bed of mute nothingness; an absence. By the same token, the working of the paint on a regimentally segmented canvas comes to carry and define presence. But the presence is so minimal in effect and changes according to angle, according to the momentary effects of light and you are never really looking at the same painting you were looking at a moment ago.”
Details: Circa Gallery is on 6 Jellicoe Avenue in Rosebank.
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