Kalashnikovv Gallery presents ‘A Colour Conflagration of Solo Exhibitions’ featuring the work of three artists at their new gallery space in Cape Town. The artists are Charity Vilakazi, Kylie Wentzel and Simon Moshapo Jnr.
A new body of work from artist titled Alikho izulu? presents paintings and three-dimensional canvas tapestries. Each artwork is a fantasy dreamscape and embodies storytelling based on her dream journals, the wisdom, mythologies, and folk tales carried to her through matrilinear oral histories. The work explores gynocentric norms and influences in an African context, the disruptive potential of female agency through the empowering narratives Vilakazi grew up with.
Charity Vilakazi’s new body of work is informed by loss – the loss of one of her grandmothers – of a woman whose creative influence on Vilakazi is pervasive in her practice. The beauty of her love for her Mtshuku (grandma) is clear through both her words and her paintings in this series.
Kylie Wentzel
Kylie Wentzel | STRAY
Kylie Wentzel’s desire to break away from artistic conditioning has led her to explore mediums outside of her formal training. Now mostly conquering large canvases with acrylic paint, her style is graphic and intuitive, often mimicking her loose lino-cutting techniques. She gathers her inspiration from the natural and constructed environments around her, kitsch prints, strong smells, imported goods for sale on a hot city pavement, passing faces, and Tipp-Ex text scribbled on derelict alley walls. Kylie’s work examines the social fabric of Durban’s “locals only” spaces with deft touch.
Her work bears what the artist calls remnants of this influence, which she explains are evident in the “distinctive borders and using them to contribute to the narrative, mark-making, combining picture and text, [and] black and white bold graphics”.
Whilst Wentzel’s practice is centred around her experiences of the Durban landscapes, there are shared similarities between her immediate setting, and that of the Cape Town beachfront. The apartment blocks, corner shops, places of worship, schools and the streets that carry people on their commute in and around the city. This public oasis, wedged between concrete, offers its people softer grounds to step on, making it an ideal place for playfulness, connection and interaction.
Simon Moshapo Jnr
Simon Moshapo Jnr | BOFU ALI SUMBEDZI LINWE NDILA – A blind person cannot show another blind person the way
This latest collection of works from Moshapo Jnr centres around parables and imagery within Vhavenda traditions and oral storytelling. The hand-carved wooden sculptures depict various animal and human figures, accented in areas of bright colour. Moshapo Jnr’s selective colour palette, coupled with this particular style of figuration within his carvings, seeks to convey particular imagined spaces, in which animals juxtapose groupings of people with immediate connotations in Vhavenda tradition.
Moshapo Jnr’s practice embodies his laboured, experiential approach to art-making. Each sculpture is composed based on his understanding of the raw woods, and how he imagines their stories being made visible within the physical world.
Three good reasons to visit Kalashnikovv Gallery and we welcome them to Cape Town. Kalashnikovv Gallery is participating in the HEAT Winter Art Festival.
WHAT: A Colour Conflagration of Solo Exhibitions – Charity Vilakazi, Kylie Wentzel and Simon Moshapo Jnr
WHERE: Kalashnikovv Gallery, GF, 61 Loop Street, Habitus, Cape Town Central
WHEN: 11 July – 17 August 2024 | Opening Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10AM-4PM, Saturday 10AM-2PM, Available by appointment outside of office hours
INFO: E capetown@kalashnikovv.com | VISIT | @kalashnikovvgallery (instagram) | Linktree with all catalogues
