Manfred Zylla @ Erdmann Contemporary

by | Mar 12, 2014 | News | 0 comments

Manfred Zylla – I Want to Swim a Thousand Miles –  opens on Wednesday 12 March (6-8 pm) at the newly located Erdmann Gallery in Kloof Street.

The Opening Speaker will be Prenesh Lalu (Professor of History & Director of Centre of Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape) and the opening performance  will feature Manfred Zylla (paint) and Garth Erasmus (Saxophone).

“By 2011 I felt drained. Inexplicably my focus had shifted. It was not as if the issues of the world had been resolved, or that I was no longer affected by them, but I suddenly had a longing to paint landscapes again. I experienced a need to be out in the open, surrounded by nature. And I wished to paint only the physical world, the world that I could see and feel.

But this was not to be.  On 22 November 2011 the South African parliament passed the Protection of State Information Bill, turning back the clock to the darkest times of the apartheid era.  Now is not the time to paint landscapes, my work as a resistance artist was not over. Aluta Continua….”  (Extract from Manfred Zylla: Art and Resistance)

Zylla did not resign himself to painting landscapes, and there are no signs of this artist losing any momentum.  His latest exhibition is a testament to the continuation of a remarkable career spanning more than five decades.

Zylla series, I Am, was started in Munich, Germany in 2013.  Shuttling between the two continents had become a routine for this artist since the 1970’s, each continent providing a different stimulus.  I Am, is a self portrait series featuring three different gazes and multiple personalities painted on brown paper bags.  It reflects the artists continuing relationship with movement and comments on issues of identity, commodity, and consumerism.

An activist his whole life, Zylla continues to use his work as a platform to probe and question global issues affecting our daily lives; fracking in the Karoo, pollution of our beaches and seas and factory farming of animals are amongst the issues one is to expect to be interrogated.

WHERE: Erdmann Contemporary, 84 Kloof Street, Gardens, Cape Town 8001

WHEN: opening 12 March 2014 at 6pm

CONTACT: Erdmann Contemporary

NOTE: Public Lecture
Manfred Zylla will give a public lecture at Michaelis School of Fine Art (Hidding Campus) on Wednesday 19 March at 13:00.  The lecture will focus on the works produced for his exhibition I Want to Swim a Thousand Miles.

 

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