Opening ‘Plato’s Cave’: The Legacy of Kevin Atkinson (1939-2007), is a landmark exhibition on show at the Iziko South African National Gallery, showcaseing the work of one of South Africa’s foremost but least understood abstract artists. This posthumous tribute to Atkinson, hosted by Iziko Museums of South Africa, is an acknowledgement of the impressive contribution that he made to South African art.
As an artist-philosopher, Atkinson was as much concerned with ideas, concepts and the spiritual as he was with the purely visual and the physical act of art-making. His research interests included philosophy, metaphysics, abstraction, dualism, symbolism and ritual in art, teaching as an art form and the nature of art and the role of the artist within society. Renowned as both artist and educator, Atkinson inspired generations of students with his almost boundless creative energy and probing intellect.
This exhibition offers an opportunity for a serious re-examination of Atkinson’s life’s work, and includes examples of his early drawings, paintings and prints, dating back to the 1960s, which have never been displayed before. Much of the work on exhibition is drawn from the extensive body of artworks, spanning almost half a century, housed in the underground studio which Atkinson nicknamed ‘Plato’s Cave’.
Dubbed by some art critics as the “guru of Abstract Expressionism” in the 1980s he experimented with a variety of different approaches to art making in a career that spanned over 40 years. The enormous exuberant acrylic paintings of the 1980s and earlier 1990s make a powerful statement while the gently evocative pastel landscapes of the artist’s later years offer a glimpse of the joy that Atkinson took in working in moments of quiet reflection with the simplest of art materials.
When he retired from teaching in the late 1990s, Atkinson gathered together a remarkable collection of artwork and archival material relating to his own life and work and that of his late wife, the artist and teacher, Patricia Pierce Atkinson, and secured these safely in his underground studio, “Plato’s Cave”. After his death, in 2007, this treasure was left in the hands of the Kevin and Patricia Atkinson Trust, established by Atkinson to promote and care for his artistic legacy and that of his late wife.
Opening ‘Plato’s Cave’: The Legacy of Kevin Atkinson, 1939-2007 was co-curated by Hayden Proud, Curator of Historical Collections of Painting and Sculpture, Iziko Museums of South Africa and Stephen Croeser, on behalf of the Kevin and Patricia Atkinson Trust. The exhibition has been made possible through collaboration between Iziko Museums of South Africa and the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town which have collaborated in establishing a new postgraduate Honours degree in curatorship funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation; three students on the programme have assisted in the mounting of this exhibition.
WHERE: Iziko South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Cape Town
WHEN: until 28 February 2014
INFO: T 021 481 3970 www.iziko.org.za
