Brett Murray

Established Cape Town based artist Brett Murray returns to Goodman Gallery Johannesburg with Hail to the Thief II. This body of satirical work continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness seen in his 2010 Cape Town show Hail to the Thief. In this sequel show, Murray’s bronzes, etchings, paintings and silk-screens form part of a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance and are his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite.

Brett Murray studied at the University of Cape Town where he was awarded his Master’s of Fine Arts degree in 1989. He has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad. From 1991 to 1994 he established the sculpture department at the University of Stellenbosch, where he curated the show Thirty Sculptors from the Western Cape in 1992. In 1995 he curated, with Kevin Brand, Scurvy, at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. That year he co-curated Junge Kunst Aus Zud Afrika for the Hänel Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany.

His solo shows include: White Boy Sings the Blues at the Rembrandt Gallery in Johannesburg in 1996, I love Africa at the Bell-Roberts Gallery in Cape Town in 2000, Us and Them at the Axis Gallery in New York in 2003, Sleep Sleep and Crocodile Tears at the Goodman Galleries in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Murray was included on the Cuban Biennial of 1994, and subsequently his works were exhibited at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Germany. He was included on the group show Springtime in Chile at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile. He was also part of the traveling show Liberated Voices, Contemporary Art From South Africa which opened at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1998. His work formed part of the shows Min(d)fields at the Kunsthaus in Baselland, Switzerland in 2004 and The Geopolitics of Animation at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville in Spain in 2007.

He won the Cape Town Urban Art competition in 1998 that resulted in the public work Africa, a 3.5 metre bronze sculpture, being erected in Cape Town’s city centre. He won, with Stefaans Samcuia, the commission to produce an 8 × 30 metre wall sculpture for the foyer of the Cape Town International Convention Centre in 2003. He was nominated as the Standard Bank Young Artist in 2002.

Murray’s work is housed in numerous South African and international collections including Iziko, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Gallery Tatham Art Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Cape Town, University of South Africa, Sandton Municipality, BHP Billiton Collection, MTN Collection, Sasol Collection, South African Breweries, South African Broadcasting Corporation, The South African Reserve Bank, Vodacom Collection, Collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn, USA.

Murray is a full-time artist who works in Cape Town, South Africa, where he lives with his wife Sanell Aggenbach and their daughter Lola and son Kai.

Established Cape Town based artist Brett Murray returns with a new body of satirical work that continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness. Whereas his last show, Crocodile Tears, sought to parody Mbeki’s still-born African Renaissance, Hail to the Thief uses the populist imagery and language currently in vogue with the present powers that be , to mock and goad. Murray’s bronzes, etchings, paintings and silk-screens form part of a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance and are his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite.

Brett Murray studied at the University of Cape Town where he was awarded his Master’s of Fine Arts degree in 1989. He has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad. From 1991 to 1994 he established the sculpture department at the University of Stellenbosch, where he curated the show Thirty Sculptors from the Western Cape in 1992. In 1995 he curated, with Kevin Brand, Scurvy, at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. That year he co-curated Junge Kunst Aus Zud Afrika for the Hänel Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany.

His solo shows include: White Boy Sings the Blues at the Rembrandt Gallery in Johannesburg in 1996, I love Africa at the Bell-Roberts Gallery in Cape Town in 2000, Us and Them at the Axis Gallery in New York in 2003, Sleep Sleep and Crocodile Tears at the Goodman Galleries in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Murray was included on the Cuban Biennial of 1994, and subsequently his works were exhibited at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Germany. Brett was included on the group show, Springtime in Chile at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile. He was also part of the travelling show Liberated Voices, Contemporary Art From South Africa which opened at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1998. His work formed part of the shows Min(d)fields at the Kunsthaus in Baselland, Switzerland in 2004 and The Geopolitics of Animation at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville in Spain in 2007.

He won the Cape Town Urban Art competition in 1998 that resulted in the public work Africa, a 3.5 metre bronze sculpture, being erected in Cape Town’s city centre. He won, with Stefaans Samcuia, the commission to produce an 8 × 30 metre wall sculpture for the foyer of the Cape Town International Convention Centre in 2003. He was nominated as the Standard Bank Young Artist in 2002.

Murray’s work is housed in numerous South African and international collections including Iziko, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Gallery Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of Cape Town, University of South Africa, Pretoria, Sandton Municipality, Johannesburg, BHP Billiton Collection, Johannesburg, MTN Collection, Johannesburg, Sasol Collection, Johannesburg, South African Breweries, Johannesburg, South African Broadcasting Corporation, Johannesburg, The South African Reserve Bank, Johannesburg, Vodacom Collection, Cape Town, Collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn, USA.

Murray is a full-time artist who works in Cape Town, South Africa, where he lives with his wife Sanell Aggenbach and their daughter Lola.

This March, Goodman Gallery Cape presents a group exhibition of work in a wide range of media. Titled Editions, the show brings together photographs, sculpture, video/multimedia works, lithographs, linocuts and photogravures by a variety of South African and international artists, with the common thread that each work forms part of an edition.

Kudzanai Chiurai shows a new film from his Conflict Resolution series, last seen at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, as well as a new photograph from the same body of work. New prints by Gerhard Marx and Walter Oltmann find them engaging with etching, lithography and woodblock printing in new and exciting ways.

Alfredo Jaar’s photographs of Serra Pelada, an opencast gold mine dug by human hands in Brazil, are shown as color transparencies mounted in lightboxes, and sit in uneasy relation to Liza Lou’s Gather Forty, a sculpture made from gold-plated beads threaded and bound in a sheaf.

The exhibition also includes new prints by Clive van den Berg and Diane Victor; photographs from Candice Breitz’ recent Extra!, last seen at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and David Goldblatt’s characteristically quiet colour landscapes; and a portfolio of photolithography by Moshekwa Langa.

Also on show is the full series of Robert Hodgins’ experimental Officers and Gents, to coincide with the Wits Art Museum’s exhibition of his print archive; a selection of lithographs from Sam Nhlengethwa’s recent Conversations series; Mikhael Subotzky’s Don’t even think of it, a film made from a series of still photographs shot by the artist in 2004; and a set of 7 photogravures by William Kentridge titled Zeno Writing II.

This March, Goodman Gallery Cape presents a group exhibition of work in a wide range of media. Titled Editions, the show brings together photographs, sculpture, video/multimedia works, lithographs, linocuts and photogravures by a variety of South African and international artists, with the common thread that each work forms part of an edition.

Kudzanai Chiurai shows a new film from his Conflict Resolution series, last seen at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, as well as a new photograph from the same body of work. New prints by Gerhard Marx and Walter Oltmann find them engaging with etching, lithography and woodblock printing in new and exciting ways.

Alfredo Jaar’s photographs of Serra Pelada, an opencast gold mine dug by human hands in Brazil, are shown as color transparencies mounted in lightboxes, and sit in uneasy relation to Liza Lou’s Gather Forty, a sculpture made from gold-plated beads threaded and bound in a sheaf.

The exhibition also includes new prints by Clive van den Berg and Diane Victor; photographs from Candice Breitz’ recent Extra!, last seen at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and David Goldblatt’s characteristically quiet colour landscapes; and a portfolio of photolithography by Moshekwa Langa.

Also on show is the full series of Robert Hodgins’ experimental Officers and Gents, to coincide with the Wits Art Museum’s exhibition of his print archive; a selection of lithographs from Sam Nhlengethwa’s recent Conversations series; Mikhael Subotzky’s Don’t even think of it, a film made from a series of still photographs shot by the artist in 2004; and a set of 7 photogravures by William Kentridge titled Zeno Writing II.

The Joburg Art Fair was started three years ago by Artlogic with First National Bank as the primary sponsor.

It is the only art fair on the African continent and the only art fair in the world to focus on African contemporary art. Over the three year period it has become a meeting place for those interested in African contemporary art. The Joburg Art Fair is a small, boutique Fair committed to showcasing the best galleries interested in this region.

As it is the only large scale annual visual arts event in South Africa, the Fair makes an effort to give exposure to artists who work outside of the gallery circuit and routinely curate spaces for tertiary institutions, or project spaces that result from proposals submitted to Artlogic.

Each year our visitor numbers grow to include more foreigners, more students, and more of the general public interested in this kind of high-end contemporary event.

For 2011, we are working to curate a space that is welcoming and where visitors can spend an entire day. We are creating a food area that will sport four of the country’s top wine estates and a Pommery Champagne lounge in association with St Leger and Viney and Business Day Wanted Magazine.

‘Language’ is the system of communication, in the form of speech and writing, employed by a specific group of people, usually originating from a specific geographical area or region. Human language is inseparable from human thought and distinguishes man from animals.

Different aspects of language had become the source for many conceptual artworks by the time the group Art & Language was founded by Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, Terry Atkinson, and Harold Hurrell in 1968. These artists considered language to be a crucial aspect of their practice, in which they critiqued the underlying assumptions of modern painting and sculpture, formalist processes, art practices, production, and criticism. Since the 1970s, language has been seen as a means of moving from form and image-based works to a more theoretical and conceptual artistic discourse. This shift, away from the image and towards text, has led to a new relationship between image and text, in which images are translated to symbols, and symbols to text. It has meant that text – rather than image – becomes a basis for art production, which in turn has meant the appearance of ‘art as idea’.

Questioning the process of art production, American artists like Jenny Holzer have built on the traditions of conceptual and installation art of the late 1960s. Holzer developed a mode of textual art during the 1970s, using electronic signs and various printed media to explore language and text as a form of art. Her ‘Inflammatory Essays’, conceived in the late 1970s, are indicative of the way in which she has created a division between text and image. Prior to this, Joseph Kosuth proposed the use of text in his work as means of replacing painting, exploring the production and role of language and meaning in art. Text in Kosuth’s work of the 1960s facilitates a conceptual mode of production and the dissolution of the art object.

Language continued to be fundamental in the work of many American artists during the 1980s. Lorna Simpson, for example, used language as a device to move away from purely image-based photography. Simpson’s combination of text and photography allowed her to construct readings of the black woman as an erotic curiosity and, at the same time, to change the simple reading of images, and to create layers of signification in her work.

In the contemporary South African context, artists such as Willem Boshoff make works which are informed by language. Boshoff’s sculptures and dictionaries suggest a relationship with language that extends beyond the simple use of text, to a specific interest in language itself and what constitutes language as a form.

Similarly, Frances Goodman has explored the desires, compulsions, insecurities, and obsessions hidden in our use of language, saying that ‘After working with a number of media I eventually found that words and language had the uncanny ability to unnerve and get under people’s skins, in a way that visual images and modes could not … sometimes [words] are simple and clear, and yet they are often full of innuendoes and subtexts’.

Language also defines power relations, and in the colonial context, the language of the coloniser reinforced power structures and symbolised authority. Artists have often made reference to this in their works, showing the role that language plays in our relation to society and to power. Brett Murray for example, plays with words in order to critique South African politics. Kudzanai Chiurai uses posters, such as the kind used in political campaigns, , to demonstrate state violence, political unrest, and corrupted power.

Kendell Geers uses language to interrogate the art establishment and society in general, questioning our existing moral codes and suggesting new approaches. He has argued that ‘Language is a self-replicating virus that can only be destroyed by a stronger, more resilient virus. Through the mirror of the colloquial, the tongue gets twisted and forgets its place in collecting our thoughts’, and that ‘language is oppressive for it only acknowledges that which can be named. It is not the result of any particular individual’s design as much as the external manifestation of culture’.

Works by these artists and the others on this show have been chosen for their engagement with language and discourse. Sometimes this engagement is enacted on the level of form – so that words and characters become images – and at other times the engagement is an interrogation, through text, of what constitutes the image.

Ryan Arenson | Walter Battiss | Deborah Bell | Justin Brett | Lisa Brice | Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin | Adam Broomberg | Kudzanai Chiurai | Marlene Dumas | Claire Gavronsky | Robert Hodgins | William Kentridge | David Koloane | Moshekwa Langa | Alexandra Makhlouf | Brett Murray | Sam Nhlengethwa | Walter Oltmann | Jonah Sack | Kathryn Smith | Jaco Spies | Clive Van Den Berg | Diane Victor | Jeremy Wafer | Sue Williamson

For many artists, drawing forms part of a larger process – a loose way of visualizing an artwork before committing to it in a more permanent medium. But the act of drawing itself remains one of the oldest and most eloquent forms of artistic expression. Goodman Gallery Cape is proud to present a group exhibition of drawings entitled ‘The Marks We Make’, exploring notions of mark-making as assertions of ownership and expressions of violence, memory and play.

Drawing usually refers to pencil marks on paper. In this exhibition we approach the term more loosely, featuring a range of media to question what constitutes a drawing and what gives it power. Works will include photographs from the Red House series by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, depicting the marks left behind by prisoners of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; wire and sculptural elements by Walter Oltmann and William Kentridge; installations by Jeremy Wafer, Jonah Sack and Justin Brett, as well as more traditional pencil, oil and charcoal drawings by Sue Williamson, Lisa Brice and Sam Nhlengethwa.

‘The Marks We Make’ brings together South African artists to explore the ways in which marks shape our environments and inform our perspectives. Bodies are circumscribed, silenced or marginalized by the invasive marks of violence. But these marks can also be used to express an identity, stake out a position or form communities. Territory is claimed, land contested, and ownership asserted through the use of marks, both physical and symbolic. The exhibition seeks to interrogate the ways in which these marks act to create the contingent, political spaces within which we form ourselves, and the role they play in shaping our personal and cultural memories.