Barnard Gallery presents Finding New Life in an Old Form, Cape Town painter Tom Cullberg’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his seventeenth one-man show since graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1997.
The exhibition is composed of eight large paintings and a number of smaller works, all rendered in Cullberg’s meticulous yet allusive figurative style.
The centrepiece of Cullberg’s exhibition is the large painting Finding New Life in an Old Form (see photo above), which depicts eighteen newspapers on a neutral ground. The work is reminiscent of his well-known Book Portraits series (2009–on-going) and was inspired by an October 2015 edition of the Cape Argus guest edited by eight students involved in the #FeesMustFall student movement. Cullberg, a compulsive newspaper reader since his youth in Sweden, was deeply moved by the student-edited edition.
“It felt like it was something that was alive, something that was direct. It didn’t have all these filters,” states Cullberg in a publication accompanying the exhibition. “It had something personal, the translation of personal experience into print.
Current Tom Cullberg Exhibition
Among the large paintings on exhibition, many are rendered in the style of his earlier Book Portraits series, but here include idiosyncratic montages of vinyl LPs, magazines, newspapers and objet d’art. His paintings also depict mid-twentieth-century domestic furniture by Danish designers Børge Mogensen and Hans J. Wegner and Italian-born American Harry Bertoia.
“I know what it is like to sit in those chairs,” says Cullberg of the furniture portrayed in his work. “I know the feeling of the material. I have memories of those objects.” This sensorial knowledge is, however, not a sacred value. Many of the objects in Cullberg’s paintings are altered and lightly fictionalised. The inauthentic has equal value in his paintings, which offer more than simply unprocessed descriptions of the material world.
Finding New Life in an Old Form is accompanied by a new publication; it features an essay by art critic Sean O’Toole that contextualises Cullberg’s new paintings and their relationship to his artistic practice. “Undergirding his absorption with the material world is an abiding commitment to rendering sensation,” writes O’Toole.
WHAT: Tom Cullberg: Finding New Life in an Old Form
WHEN: 21 August – 2 October 2018 – opening reception on Tuesday 21 August at 18:30
WHERE: Barnard Gallery 55 Main Street | 7700 Newlands | Cape Town | South Africa
INFO: T: +27 21 67 11 55 3 | E: gallery@barnardgallery.com | Visit
PHOTO: Finding New Life in an Old Form, 2016, oil and acrylic on linen, 201 x 260 cm
