Goodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present A Quiet Stature, an exhibition highlighting mainly recent work from the late David Koloane. This show is a tribute to the artist at the third anniversary of his passing on 30 June 2019 and commemorates his skill and influence as a multidisciplinary artist whose work has made a profound impact on South Africa’s cultural landscape.
Koloane is held as an authority figure for African artists. This reverence stems from his dedication to his artistic practice as well as his other cultural endeavors including writing, curating and establishing spaces for artists of colour to be mentored and grow. Beyond these actions, his temperament empowered friendly engagements within the framework of his resoluteness.
Koloane in earlier years was an artist and writer full of righteous anger, expressing this sometimes harshly, with his ballpoint pen eventually tearing through his paper, or breaking pencils to put that feeling into drawings. Yet he generally spoke quietly, with an economy of words. He could be stern, voicing furious resistance to apartheid authoritarianism but maintained a gentle attitude to the people he dealt with and worked alongside. In his later years, Koloane was still the man of righteous anger, the champion of human rights for all, a voice for the disadvantaged. He became a respected elder who used his art and writings to promote those rights, demand greater understanding of the other, demanding better from those in power.
Artworks
About
David Koloane
David Koloane (1938 – 2019) was born in Alexandra, Johannesburg, South Africa. Koloane spent his career making the world a more hospitable place for black artists during and after apartheid. Koloane achieved this through his pioneering work as an artist, writer, curator, teacher and mentor to young and established artists at a time when such vocations were restricted to white people in South Africa. A large part of this effort involved the initiatives Koloane helped establish, from the first Black Art Gallery in 1977, the Thupelo experimental workshop in 1985 and the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in 1991, where he served as director for many years. Koloane also tutored at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in 1979 and became the head of the fine art section and gallery from 1985 to 1990.
Through his expressive, evocative and poetic artwork, Koloane interrogated the socio-political and existential human condition, using Johannesburg as his primary subject matter. Koloane’s representations of Johannesburg are populated with images of cityscapes, townships, street life, jazz musicians, traffic jams, migration, refugees, dogs, and birds among others. Imaginatively treated, through the medium of painting, drawing, assemblage, printmaking and mixed media, Koloane’s scenes are a blend of exuberant and sombre, discernible and opaque pictorial narratives.
Koloane’s work has been widely exhibited locally and internationally. In 1999 he was part of the group exhibition _Liberated Voices_ at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC. In 2013, Koloane’s work was shown on the South African pavilion at the 55th la Biennale di Venezia and on the group exhibition _My Joburg_ at La Maison Rouge in Paris. In 1998, the government of the Netherlands honoured Koloane with the Prince Claus Fund Award for his contributions to South African art. Koloane was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate twice, once from Wits University in 2012, and again from Rhodes University in 2015. In 2019 Koloane was the subject of a travelling career survey exhibition, _A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane_, which opened at IZIKO SANG and later travelled to Standard Bank Gallery and Wits Art Museum in October.