Twenty Artist | Twenty Portraits @ UCA Gallery
The brand new UCA Gallery in OBS in Cape Town is launching with a brave group exhibit featuring work from both established and emerging local artists entitled Twenty Artists |Twenty Portraits. The artworks in this salon style summer show range from traditional to more conceptual approaches to the genre across a range of media. Sounds interesting… go go go.
Whereas some of the portraits (such as Lionel Smit’s Chris Divided) are of potentially recognisable, yet probably unknown, individuals, the identities of the subjects in many of the other works have remained deliberately obscured or secondary to metaphorical emphasis and societal commentary. Gabrielle Raaff’s delicate, lyrical watercolour portraits Returning 1-4, and the veiled and blindfolded figures in Christopher Slack’s Virgin in Paradise and Julia Teale’s Annunciation are of particular interest in this regard.
Though many of the works are figurative paintings of individual subjects, Kim Gurney’s Disinheritance, depicting a series of 24 chromosomes related to a hereditary disease, and Robyn Cedras’s sculptural installation Just as useless as the box it came in, mark less traditional approaches to the tension between individual and societal identity.
Other artists include Norman O’Flynn, Jacqui Stecher, Wonder, Rebecca Townsend, Varenka Paschke and Christian Toujours.Work by students from Julia Teale’s Spencer Street Studios in Saltriver will also be on show.
Twenty Artists|Twenty Portraits will open on Wednesday 17 December at 6pm and close on the Saturday 24 January 2009.
UCA Gallery
46 Lower Main road, Observatory
Tel: (021) 447 4132
Email: info@ucagallery.co.za
www.ucagallery.co.za
Hours: Tue – Fri 10am – 5pm, Sat 9am – 1pm
