Daor Contemporary features ten exciting local contemporary artists in their Autumn Group Exhibition 2021 exhibition.
We’d like you to meet the artists.
Katja Abbott
“The primary source of inspiration for my work is the dark and silent realm of the dreamtime. To maintain equilibrium in an increasingly frenetic world I frequently withdraw into the solace of imaginary worlds. This inclination is combined with an art practice that allows for the unpremeditated emergence of forms, revealing creatures that exist on the periphery of our vision and reason.” (See photo above: Katja Abbott “What On Earth” )
Cheryl Traub-Adler
The process-based, non-linear nature of Cheryls work is a type of abstract reckoning of a visual impulse. The work is linked to mythological, spiritual and literary points of reference that are evident in the layering and depth both on and beyond the surface. These subtle surface tensions are a type of Surreal Expressionism that describes a natural disorder of the 21st Century.
Mermaid’s Dream
Her public work intersects the area’s between performance, embodied practice and localized site-specific disruption. Her daily studio practice focuses on the creative process and is made manifest in printmaking, collage, poetry and painting.
Khulelani Cele
Khulekani Cele was born in KwaZulu-Natal at Mpumalanga Town Ship, South Africa in 1993. Cele has an Honours Degree in Visual Art. He has always recognized his need to be creative and to pursue this as a profession. Cele is currently living and working in Durban.
Owaboyise
“My body of work deals with themes of perception, the politics especially in identity and the transculturation of a black man in contemporary South Africa. The works are an inside out commentary of what it means to be black both light of cultural affiliations as passed on to me by my elders in rural settings, as well as where I find myself now living and working in urban settings.”
JP Meyer
JP Meyer was born in 1960, and grew up in the Free State. After military service he joined S.A.A. where he worked as an international flight attendant for 15 years.
In 1996 he swapped corporate life for that of a full-time art student in Cape Town, graduating four years later. He currently lives and works in Porterville.
The Seer
“I randomly use and juxtapose images and symbols from popular culture, classical and world mythology, medieval manuscripts, tattoo culture, comic strips and many other sources in order to create paintings, drawings and prints that have very little pre-determined narrative or intent.”
Sarah Biggs
Sarah Biggs was born in Ixopo, South Africa, 1990. She completed her BAFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2013, Sarah currently lives and works in Cape Town.
Drifting between abstraction and figuration, Sarah Biggs’ work traces journeys and encounters, histories and secrets between her painterly subjects and the natural world. Her expressive marks serve not only as suggestions of tangible entities – foliage, plumes, figures – but simultaneously as markers of the non-visual; of the ways in which sound, touch and smell are woven into her experience of natural spaces, into her surroundings, and into her subjective associations with these spaces.
Paballo Majela
Born in 1990, in Qwa Qwa, Freestate Province; he currently works and resides in Pretoria, South Africa. He graduated in 2018 from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) with a Btech in Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture. Majela currently lectures at TUT in the sculpture department. His art practice specializes in sculpture and painting. “My current body of work is based on my upbringing in mountainous setting of Qwa Qwa, my Sotho heritage, and the folklore that existed in my youth. I create sculptures and paintings reimagining the Sesotho culture into a fantasy that is inspired by tales that were once told. In visually narrating the fictional realm of The Thaba- Bosiu Guardians, I aim to archive the rich folklore history of the Basotho people within my artworks, while interrogating and documenting the contemporary existence of the black male as a subject”.
Cobus Haupt
Cobus Haupt completed his B Tech. Fine Arts at the Pretoria Technikon in 1998. A bronze sculptor who draws on history, popular culture and tradition to produce artworks that are visually interesting, tactile and playful. The process and method of bronze casting informs Haupt’s work both formally and conceptually. The tendency to include cracks, flaws and unresolved imperfections that bears witness to the casting process catalogues the tactile history and the bronze technique itself, and also comments on his rendering of the human figure. Human beings are understood as unique, fragile and remarkable due to his or her imperfections, flaws and scars. These human ‘defects’ and ‘deformities’ bear, as in the case of the bronze casting process, witness to their engagement with life. Due to the importance of the process, the artist undertakes all the aspects of the sculpting process himself from the mould making to the casting.
Haupt’s work also relies on an autobiographical element as he draws inspiration from his family and objects from his past.
Kristi Mari
Self-taught artist, Kristi was born and raised in Port Elizabeth. After school Kristi moved to Cape Town to study and work as a Graphic Designer before pursing her career as a full-time artist.
Waiting for the Rain
Progressing from mainstream, commercial illustration to a more conceptual expression of thought and emotion. Her work, over time, organically developed into a psychological process of healing anxiety and trauma through viewing her subject matter from a different physical perspective, and as a result arriving at a more abstract conclusion.
Patrick Serewu
Patrick Seruwu is from Kampala, Uganda. His mother raised him and his three sisters in tough circumstances, providing for them by being a street vendor. Forced to drop out of school to help out. Never intending to become an artist, Patrick Seruwu fell under the influence of his close friend, the late artist Benon Lutaaya. The more time Seruwu spent with Lutaaya, visiting him in his studio and attending art exhibitions, the more appealing a career in art became.
A self-taught working artist who has been painting and drawing for the last 4 years.
Her Tranguil Gaze
“My work is about the strength of woman, capturing moments of their daily lives. In a special way it acknowledges the different attributes I always see in my mother. I use charcoal drawing and acrylic painting on canvas, applied in the form of a wash. The washes mimic the constant wish that, some women have to wash away certain experiences they have undergone in their lives. I chose deliberately to wash the canvas and allowing the paint to drip as a metaphor for the women’s tears of pain but also their tears of joy and success. My choice of colour, sepia or pink. This is both a reflection of time, that is needed for healing, as well as to portray the tension of their daily lives.”
WHERE: Daor Contemporary, Code Crescent, Port of Cape Town 8001
WHAT: Autumn Group Exhibition 2021
WHEN: Mon – Fri 9am to 5pm or by appointment
INFO: C + 27 71 624 7130 I info@daor.co.za I Visit
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