Cape landscape artist, Alice Elahi, returns to her roots with this exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum.
This holiday season the UCT’s Irma Stern Museum celebrates the artist’s lifelong passion for the city, the Cape and the sea in an exhibition of her work entitled Alice Elahi – a Capetonian at Heart, which runs from 12 December to 23 January 2016.
At the beginning of this year the Pretoria Art Museum, of which she was a long-term member, honoured her with a three-month long retrospective. The University of Pretoria also held a retrospective of her work in 1988, and plan to acquire her archive, which contains many of the images of Namibian wilderness areas that have been one of the major subjects in her oeuvre.
Growing up in the leafy suburb of Bishopscourt as the daughter of an MP and founder of the Oros soft drinks company, Alice showed her interest in art at an early age, and this show opens with a linocut of a river near Oudtshoorn she made as a 14-year-old. She was destined to take up the role of chemist in the Oros factory, but her time completing a science degree at UCT was filled more by organising the art society than anything else, and she jumped at the chance to study art in London on finishing her BSc.
In the early Seventies Elahi discovered the thrill of the boats preparing for the Cape to Rio yacht race and her work of this era is filled with the colour and bustle of sails and masts. At the time, the city docks were a working area which required a permit to enter, and on the quays of what is now the V&A Waterfront Elahi sat night after night painting sunsets and howling South Easter gales, painting a series of inks of the little Penny Ferry and the tugs going out to the tankers, the ropes that tied up the huge ships, and the cranes that dotted the docks. The reflections of boats in the water also fascinated her, and this era captures historic images not only of the city harbour, but also the fishing harbour in Hout Bay and Simonstown’s naval dockyard.
Some of these works are on show here, having been in the artist’s own collection since they were first exhibited in the Seventies, including a large oil of the view of Table Mountain from one of the Union Castle liners, the Pretoria Castle.
Art patron Harrie Siertsema, who owns a large collection of Elahi’s sepia inks of Cape Town Docks, was determined to bring the artist’s work back to her home town, where she last held a show over twenty years ago. Along with Nushin Elahi, one of her daughters, he has curated an exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum that includes a range of works to take the viewer on a journey from the early paintings of storms in Cape Town’s harbour, to seals playing in the foam at Cape Cross, way up Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.
WHERE: Irma Stern Museum, Cecil Rd, Rosebank, Cape Town 7700
INFO: T 021 685 5686 visit
HOURS: Mon to Fri 09h00 – 17h00 Sat 09h00 – 14h00
