Bonham’s London names Ablade Glover as one of the founding fathers of modern African art.
Indivisible showcases some of Ablade Glover’s colourful paintings in which people conglomerate in numbers, at the marketplace, civil protests, during mass prayers and carnival festivities.
These are impressive urban topographies, so bustling and captivating sceneries that conjure up the human rhythms, beats and paces of metropolitan Ghana. Preoccupying most of Glover’s paintings, evidently, are outdoor activities that allude to a critical engagement with the public sphere wherein people are captured from an aerial angle as if viewed from a god-above watching eye.
So remarkable is Glover’s creative approach: a combination of pointillism, abstraction and realism that also is informed by and articulated via African cultural sensibilities and modern aspirations, all making up his African modernism.
Glover’s paintings are palatable in their bright, passionate, animated colours. Even their rich textures that create rough yet impressive surfaces are not without seduction.
Indivisible, Glover’s solo exhibition in Cape Town, is a significant development in the maturing history of art in South Africa, a history that is expanding to artists from various African countries and the diaspora.
The exhibition strengthens the ongoing moves to integrate South Africa into the broader African landscape whose fracture and divide is thanks to colonial apartheid. It is becoming easier and with more with confidence to say South Africa is no longer a geographic region historically construed as a fragment and yet an insular island on the African continent.
Ablade Glover, a living pioneer of contemporary Ghanaian art, is part of this significant development in the history of African visual arts.
WHERE: Christopher Moller Gallery, Â 7 Kloofnek Road, Gardens, Cape Town 8001. (Parking: Secure parking available at the Jan van Riebeeck School Grounds – opposite the gallery)
WHEN: Exhibition concludes 6th May  Mon to Fri 10h00 – 17h00 Sat 10h00 – 13h00
