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Details:

Themba Shibase
Wena Wendlovu (Big Al), 2008
Oil and acrylic on canvas
175 x 96 cm
Gallery Manager and curator, Lucy Rayner travels to New York in June with a show of South African work by artists, Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, Nina Barnett, and Robyn Nesbitt.

The New Spell opens at David Krut Projects, New York on the 5th of June and runs until the 30th of July.
With a certain shift in tone, an equivocal and satirical vocabulary has developed within the language of recent South African art. Artists are teasingly subverting contemporary politics and societal norms with a liberated sense of detachment and satiric self-reflexivity. Works are consciously current, sometimes self-consciously hip, and self-consciously oppositional.

Bringing together the work of six artists who share an affinity for a particularly vulgar aesthetic, The New Spell aims to consider one of the many enlivening tendencies within this socially aware and outspoken approach. The exhibition explores how the grotesque is exercised through works of art to reveal the fetish in African social and political relations of power. The term ‘fetish’ has become somewhat voguish and hackneyed of late. Essentially, it is the attribution of value or power to an object or way of thinking, but it is used here as an ironic comment on the ‘rational’ mindset of state-sanctioned culture in Africa.

By contemplating the grotesque in works by Shibase, MacGarry, Mntambo, Maljevic, Barnett and Nesbitt, The New Spell hopes to invite viewers to consider such relations of power with a greater sense of intimacy – and perhaps even humor – by moving beyond the binary categories of autonomy versus subjection or resistance versus passivity. The works kidnap instances of the fetish and force them to examine their own vulgarity, exposing ways in which official culture in South Africa is characterized by a distinctive style of improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion.

The grotesque is not usually difficult to identify in a work of art, but it can be challenging to define the term itself. What most definitions share is a sense of ambiguity and paradox. Used here with reference to literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s egalitarian interpretation of the medieval Carnival, the grotesque object or situation may contain recognisable elements, yet in its entirety, it conflicts with systems of decorum and preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible.

It also violates principles of identity and difference where identity depends on the definition and difference of the other. In conversation, grotesque commonly means strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre, and thus is often used to describe peculiar shapes and distorted forms. In fiction, characters are usually considered grotesque if they induce both empathy and disgust, where the reader becomes piqued by the grotesque’s positive side, and continues to see if the character can conquer their darker side. This element of empathy is important as each of the artists show a capacity simultaneously to show affection for something and to think critically about it. As a result, their works appear as if matured with a degree of sympathy.

Lucy Rayner and two of the artists, Michael MacGarry and Robyn Nesbitt, will be present at the opening.

For more information please visit http://www.davidkrut.com/project.php?id=99

The New Spell
Opens: Thursday June 5, 2008
18:00 – 20:00
Closes: July 30, 2008

DAVID KRUT PROJECTS
526 West 26th Street, #816
New York, NY 10001
212 255 3094
www.davidkrut.com
Tue – Fri 09h00 – 17h00
Sat 09h00 – 16h00

Keywords: Lucy Rayner, Maja-Maljevic, michael macgarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Nina Barnett, Robyn Nesbitt, The New Spell: An Exhibition of Contemporary South Afri, Themba Shibase