Battiss... & Company
30 Jun - 06 Aug 2011
BATTISS... & COMPANY
30 June - 06 August, 2011
In a curated selection of Walter Battiss’s oeuvre, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg presents well-known as well as rarely and never before exhibited work by the late artist, widely considered one of South Africa’s first and most significant modernists. Titled Battiss & Company, the show will also include a section of the gallery dedicated to work by artists and people close to him both personally and professionally.
Rather than presenting a retrospective, Battiss & Company – curated by Neil Dundas – brings together a selection of early drawings and sketches as well as prints and highly significant oils, from the 1940s to the ’80s, that reveal the development of Battiss’s influential approach to art-making. A particular focus of the show is the artist’s distillation of a visual language based on San rock art that would ultimately impact both his contemporaries as well as the generations that followed. Battiss first became interested in archaeology and rock art as a young boy after moving to Koffiefontein in 1917. “As a boy,” Battiss said, “William Fowler [a family friend] led me by the hand to the ancient stones and only very much later did I realise how my creative subconscious had been affected by this revelation of early art.”
Never before exhibited sketches, drawings and watercolours display some of Battiss’s first manifestations of this “revelation”. Further works continue what academic Karin Skawran refers to as Battiss’s reiteration of rock art combined with his use of an “intuitively modernist approach”. This reiteration was ultimately concerned with various ways of capturing his surrounding environment. “In his sketches and watercolours he captured,” Skawran continues, “in a remarkably rapid, immediate and direct manner, the particular quality and the very essence of the African landscape. In his oils, subjective colour and surfaces rendered in thick impasto with incised linear forms, recall the graffito of rock engravings, adding to the dramatic impact of these works.” In Battiss & Company, two significant oil paintings (one curiously double sided), variably display the artist’s idiosyncratic use of impasto, colour and form, revealing the refinement of what became a new South African mode of expression.
Also on exhibition are iconic prints and other paraphernalia produced after Battiss’s travels to Greece and Seychelles in the 1960s and ’70s, which inspired his fictional opus – Fook Island. This well-considered myth included imaginary maps, people, plants, animals as well as an invented social history, a set of postage stamps and a newspaper called Fooks Nookspaaker, which will be on display.
Battiss’s context and influence can be seen in a section within the gallery displaying watercolours by his wife, Grace Anderson, as well as a rare self-portrait painting by John Muafangejo – internationally known for his black and white linocuts – also intriguingly double-sided. There are also works by Ephraim Ngatane, Cecil Skotnes, Rain Battiss, Norman Catherine and collaborations with renowned weaver Marguerite Stephens.
Walter Battiss was born in Somerset East, South Africa in 1906. In 1924 he became a clerk in the Magistrates Court in Rustenburg and five years later he began his formal art studies at the Wits Tech Art School, followed by a Teacher’s Diploma at the Johannesburg Training College. Battiss continued his studies while working as a magistrate’s clerk, and finally obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at UNISA at the age of 35. Battiss published nine books, wrote many articles and founded the periodical De Arte. He taught at Pretoria Boys’ High School for 30 years, and at the Pretoria Art Centre, where he was principal from 1953-58. He also taught at UNISA where he became Professor of Fine Art in 1964. After he retired in 1971 he was awarded the gold medal for painting by the Suid Afrikaanse Akademie, and was elected an honorary academician of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence for his services to art. Battiss exhibited at the Venice and São Paulo Biennales, and also founded the South African Council of Artists as a branch of the International Association of the Arts, Paris. He passed away in Port Shepstone, Natal in 1982.
30 June - 06 August, 2011
In a curated selection of Walter Battiss’s oeuvre, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg presents well-known as well as rarely and never before exhibited work by the late artist, widely considered one of South Africa’s first and most significant modernists. Titled Battiss & Company, the show will also include a section of the gallery dedicated to work by artists and people close to him both personally and professionally.
Rather than presenting a retrospective, Battiss & Company – curated by Neil Dundas – brings together a selection of early drawings and sketches as well as prints and highly significant oils, from the 1940s to the ’80s, that reveal the development of Battiss’s influential approach to art-making. A particular focus of the show is the artist’s distillation of a visual language based on San rock art that would ultimately impact both his contemporaries as well as the generations that followed. Battiss first became interested in archaeology and rock art as a young boy after moving to Koffiefontein in 1917. “As a boy,” Battiss said, “William Fowler [a family friend] led me by the hand to the ancient stones and only very much later did I realise how my creative subconscious had been affected by this revelation of early art.”
Never before exhibited sketches, drawings and watercolours display some of Battiss’s first manifestations of this “revelation”. Further works continue what academic Karin Skawran refers to as Battiss’s reiteration of rock art combined with his use of an “intuitively modernist approach”. This reiteration was ultimately concerned with various ways of capturing his surrounding environment. “In his sketches and watercolours he captured,” Skawran continues, “in a remarkably rapid, immediate and direct manner, the particular quality and the very essence of the African landscape. In his oils, subjective colour and surfaces rendered in thick impasto with incised linear forms, recall the graffito of rock engravings, adding to the dramatic impact of these works.” In Battiss & Company, two significant oil paintings (one curiously double sided), variably display the artist’s idiosyncratic use of impasto, colour and form, revealing the refinement of what became a new South African mode of expression.
Also on exhibition are iconic prints and other paraphernalia produced after Battiss’s travels to Greece and Seychelles in the 1960s and ’70s, which inspired his fictional opus – Fook Island. This well-considered myth included imaginary maps, people, plants, animals as well as an invented social history, a set of postage stamps and a newspaper called Fooks Nookspaaker, which will be on display.
Battiss’s context and influence can be seen in a section within the gallery displaying watercolours by his wife, Grace Anderson, as well as a rare self-portrait painting by John Muafangejo – internationally known for his black and white linocuts – also intriguingly double-sided. There are also works by Ephraim Ngatane, Cecil Skotnes, Rain Battiss, Norman Catherine and collaborations with renowned weaver Marguerite Stephens.
Walter Battiss was born in Somerset East, South Africa in 1906. In 1924 he became a clerk in the Magistrates Court in Rustenburg and five years later he began his formal art studies at the Wits Tech Art School, followed by a Teacher’s Diploma at the Johannesburg Training College. Battiss continued his studies while working as a magistrate’s clerk, and finally obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at UNISA at the age of 35. Battiss published nine books, wrote many articles and founded the periodical De Arte. He taught at Pretoria Boys’ High School for 30 years, and at the Pretoria Art Centre, where he was principal from 1953-58. He also taught at UNISA where he became Professor of Fine Art in 1964. After he retired in 1971 he was awarded the gold medal for painting by the Suid Afrikaanse Akademie, and was elected an honorary academician of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence for his services to art. Battiss exhibited at the Venice and São Paulo Biennales, and also founded the South African Council of Artists as a branch of the International Association of the Arts, Paris. He passed away in Port Shepstone, Natal in 1982.