WIM BOTHA
Opening: 11 September 2015 // 6 - 10 pm
Duration: 12 September - 24 October 2015
The Jette Rudolph Gallery is pleased to present the third solo show of South African artist Wim Botha (*1974 in Pretoria, lives & works in Cape Town) in Berlin. Since his expansive installation consisting of busts and torsi delicately and expressively carved from old books at the Venice Biennale in 2013 the work by Wim Botha is gaining an increasing attention. Recently that was followed by notable institutional solo- and group exhibitions at the Gulbenkian Foundation Lissabon, the Kunstraum Innsbruck, the Museum Biedermann in Donaueschingen and the traveling exhibition The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, curated by Simon Njami, which was presented at the MMK Frankfurt/M and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.
For the exhibition in Berlin, Botha created new series of busts made of finely shaped books, white marble and blackened bronze which oscilate between explicitly elaborated surfaces and direct and spontaneous gestures. This visibly spontaneous treatments increasingly reflect both the technical and formative aspects of his work process taking visual cues from the dynamic way of forming his polystyrene cuts. By using this type of process, the artist contrasts the illusionistic moment of the portrait with relatively impulsive facial expressions, which are in part enigmatically fleshed out and which yet remain intentionally fragmentary. Recognizing that fragility is an essential part of human nature, Wim Botha lets his white marble and black bronze busts show how the principle of dismemberment operates under the primacy of a holistic composition. As such, its wholeness appears simultaneously limitless so that it may conjoin the beautiful with the sublime.
Botha’s white marble heads appear gazeless and turn their attention inward but without creating the impression of stoicism. Their delicate facial expressions – reflected in the soft surfaces that gently scatter the light as though by means of crystals – communicate with the outside world and thereby convey a vague suggestion of thought and emotion. There is one group of bronze busts that seem less fragmentary in their expression if not their formal structure. Exhibiting a structure that is relatively architectonic, these busts are composed of multi-part, block-like modules that partially fray at the edges. It is only when they are positioned on their pedestals to be viewed in the show that they come to actually represent heads. The sublime as a representation of reason and power is thus confronted with a deconstruction of vision, which takes the viewer to the limits of thought. This movement requires a certain circularity that creates pressure towards “a sublime moment, where the foreclosed collapses in an explosion of beauty” (J. Gilbert-Rolfe). As an exception of the grotesque the concept of beauty reflects an unpredictability which is to be found within the „professionally comical and clownesque online-portraits and selfies" displaying a distorted and disturbing comedy which is directed against itself and which ultimately is aware of the failures and afflictions of the contemporary forms of representation that "can not fulfill the yearning for an ideal life“. (Chris Dercon) Since the beautiful evades notions of power and morals, it is at this moment that it becomes glamorous.
Surrounding the described busts, the main installation features blue-lacquered glass-panel surfaces, lines made of blackened wooden strips, abstract objects and sculptures exemplifying Botha’s typical repertory of forms. Botha uses these items to carve out a separate sphere within the exhibition, an illusionistic space that gives equal measure to site-specific conditions as well as the items’ own autarchic impulses. Developed in-situ, the installation becomes a dynamic space in which the objects, architectural forms and sculptures are brought into relationships with one another. As such they constitute a complex artistic system that reflects, in concentrated form, the perceptual patterns of contemporary social structures. Botha stages his artificial spaces as though they were a de-territorialized instance of an illusionary, pictorial space, by arranging their contents according to the potential interrelationships among their various elements: Floating weightlessly, layered, staggered and processed in a diversity of materials, lines, objects, surfaces and shapes interact with one another, observe the sometimes strangely unlikely laws and generate a coexistence of the factual and the possible. The artist leaves openings within the texture of the installation so that the chimeric rooms can unfold as changeable and diverse constellations and illusionistic conditions, realized as a temporary form running parallel to reality’s temporality and spatiality – as transient and therefore melancholy moments. (Text by Ellen Martin & Jette Rudolph // Translation by Cathy Lara & Associates)
