Walter Oltmann | ARMOUR & LACE: A Bestiary | 2022
ARMOUR & LACE: A Bestiary presents new works by Walter Oltmann comprising wire sculptures, wall hangings, drawings, prints and paintings. In these works Oltmann explores dynamics between humans, animals and plants, highlighting features of armour, protection and disguise. By introducing defensive characteristics such as bristles, quills and thorns as well as engaging with interspecies protective strategies of mimicry, deception and aposematism, he teases the borders between human and nonhuman, presence and absence, fantastic and real.
Hierarchical exchanges between species raise questions around domination, vulnerability and control and allow for an imagining of alternative ways of being. Drawing on the genre of the bestiary (a compendium of allegorical fables about animals both real and imagined used for moral instruction), Oltmann creates a magical world inhabited by a variety of armoured suits next to armoured animals such as the Sungazer lizard (Smaug Giganteus) and the African pangolin (Smutsia Temminckii).
Such works bring attention to the plight of critically endangered species and the impact of climate change. As a collection of descriptions and interpretations of animals, the bestiary affords a cross-species framework where observation and imagination combine to open up fresh perspectives of and with, other living beings. It presents a fantastic imaginary world where borders between the human and non-human become permeable.
Artworks
About
Walter Oltmann
Walter Oltmann (born 1960, South Africa) is a practicing artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. He obtained a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (1981), and an MA Fine Arts degree (1985) and PhD in Fine Arts degree (2017) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He taught in the Fine arts department at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1989 to 2016.
Oltmann has an extensive record of creative work produced since the early 1980s, including a number of public commissions. Since the 1980s he has developed an interest in the relationship between fine art and craft. In his own practice he employs hand-fabricated processes of making and has researched wire craft traditions in southern Africa. His sculptural works are executed by way of weaving in wire and using handcrafting methods that reference African and Western traditions of weaving. He is deeply interested in the influence of craft traditions in contemporary South African art.
In his artworks Oltmann makes connections to domestic textile practices and explores such forms of making in evoking fragility and the passage of time. He often combines aspects of decorative ornament with subject matter that seems somewhat contradictory or disturbing in relation to handcrafted embellishment.
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