Claire Gavronsky

Goodman Gallery Cape Town
3 March – 6 April 2018

Speechless marks rosenclaire’s fourth solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery in which Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky question the power of words to represent and relate to our surroundings.

In the words of the artists: ‘this exhibition registers an inability to comprehend and articulate the political, social and ecological crises experienced around the world today. This implies the breakdown of all secure structures including language, communication and materiality itself. We approach the ‘unspeakable’ from a position of warning but also of wonder.’

Speechless takes its cue from current discourse on the Anthropocene, described by writer Robert Macfarlane as ‘the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record.’ Macfarlane warns that ‘we have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come’ in an attempt to urge human beings to consider the implications of our actions in terms of ‘deep time’ – beyond the here and now.

Deploying different visual languages, rosenclaire propound a shared belief in the world as an ever-shifting fusion of equal components, always in state of becoming. Their work can be read as part of a wave of artists, philosophers, scientists and anthropologists who ask that we look to new ways of relating to each other and to nature or else face extinction.

Shakinovsky’s semi-abstract prints strip back stock media images of recent natural disasters and social upheavals, including the fire in London’s Grenfell Towers, the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’, wildfires in California and the Natal floods, to create ‘a composition without balance or symmetry, mirroring the incoherence and collapse of the social and revenge of the natural’.

Within these alluring works, Shakinovsky boldly attempts ‘to represent the new visual language that may define these times,’ as she puts it, looking to re-represent ‘the underlying structure of disaster and the visual forms it takes.’

Gavronsky’s delicate pastel works posit a deflated colonial male figure as humbled in the face of nature and, at times, crippled by remorse as he is positioned on his knees before people exploited over the ages. In one work a man kneels before a flock of imposing Dodos, joining them in extinction.

Other paintings by Gavronsky evoke a scrapbook, or perhaps a crime wall, mapping key moments of human technological ‘progress’, from industrialization in the 1800s to the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the 1950s through to the present. Current world leaders, such as Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, loom large within this enmeshed narrative assemblage whereby human beings and natural resources continue to be exploited.

rosenclaire began collaborating in the 1980s when they moved from South Africa to Italy, where they run a residency program for international artists. Their collaboration is defined by two distinct artistic languages which grapple with their shared concerns. They have exhibited individually and collaboratively around the world, most recently in the group exhibition Right To The Future (2017) at the Museum of the 20th and 21st Century Art in St. Petersburg. They have collaborated with William Kentridge on a number of occasions and are known for producing public participatory works, such as the Soap Boxes sculpture commissioned by the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 2003.

Goodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present, for our first show of 2014, an exhibition of new works by rosenclaire titled Colour Theory. The exhibition will feature a characteristic mix of collaborative and individual works by Claire Gavronsky and Rose Shakinovsky, presented in conversation.

The exhibition takes its title from a desire on the part of the artists to open up a discursive space between theoretical engagement and visceral response, between contemplation and surprise. Colour Theory can be understood in a social and political context, referring to racial categorisation and discrimination, as well as the ways in which we have been trained to “read” colour culturally. But colour, and our relationship with it, also exists in a place outside of these linguistic and cultural constructs. As the artists write: “Colour… has a voice and impact of its own, directly on the senses and emotions. It resonates in the silence when language reaches its limits, when words fail in the face of overwhelming joy, great suffering and pure aesthetic pleasure”.

Shakinovsky and Gavronsky work together and separately, but their artistic practice is symbiotic – the work, whether solo or collaborative, comes out of individual responses to the same stimuli, individual answers to the same questions. Often emerging from a pictorial dialogue, the content – or the question – dictates the shape and medium of the work, which ranges from unapologetically humble ready-made images to site specific installations. The ambivalent authorship of the works resulting from this dialogue – and their conversation, in turn, with the canon of art history – acts as a challenge to the notion of uniqueness and identifiable style as a signifier of artistic integrity.

Children feature prominently in many of Gavronsky’s paintings and drawings, acting alternately as a pair of naive and truthful eyes for the viewer to look through, and a source of mischief and daring, unhappy with the status quo and prepared to attempt the impossible. In Shakinovsky’s small abstract oils fashioned out of cut and bent canvas and paper, and other mixed media works, she is interested in shifting the viewer’s perspective – whether it be visually or conceptually – to notice or think something not thought a moment before. She often uses found quotidian objects and ready-made images, stripped of their original context and placed in unexpected relationships and combinations.

Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky, collectively known as rosenclaire, were born in South Africa and now live and work between Florence, and Cape Town. They have exhibited extensively both in South Africa and abroad. Together they established and run a prestigious art residency program in Tuscany, and they regularly conduct artist workshops in the United States, Italy and South Africa. Colour Theory is their third solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery.

Immaterial Matters at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg will be rosenclaire’s first exhibition in the city since they left for Italy in 1985. The show is a remix of work from their re.collections show at Goodman Gallery Cape in 2010, work shown recently in Europe and new works created for this exhibition.

In 2010 rosenclaire’s neon sign Invest in the Immaterial illuminated Cape Town, Johannesburg and Dakar calling for action that was not an obsessive amassing of material gain and visibility, but rather a virtual rebalancing of the scales.
Immaterial Matters takes up from there referring to works that range from the irreverent to the transcendent. The title and the work proffer two ideas: one, that the immaterial is what matters and two it asks a question about relevancy.

The medium matters only as a transient messenger of meaning whether it be oil paint, bronze, found objects, games, video or scraps of paper. The work explicitly defies categorisation and sites itself neither on the page nor in the margins but rather questions the materiality of the paper itself. That which is material, the visual plane, is proportionately relevant to that which resonates from it. Thoughts and responses that in their own diverse trajectory move from the political, to tongue in cheek play and repartee with art history to places of quietness and contemplation.

The show features works that address the current economic meltdown and sideswipe at the contemporary art world and it’s stock market mentality. In their respective oil paintings and bronzes rosenclaire re-present canons of figurative and abstract modernist work in the context of providing a lintel over the Posts and a lookout point to the great beyond. Art addresses and undresses itself in both form and substance. Matter shifts, changes, mutates as time, desire and fashion dictate.

Antimatter is a dualistic hypothesis as is Anti-art that struggles to maintain a position of dissensus in the face of the rampant commodification of art. rosenclaire’s work presents an intimate interlocution between themselves and a viewer where stereotypes are challenged and new perspectives offered.

Artistic duo Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky – collectively know as rosenclaire – were both born in South Africa and now live and work between Florence, Johannesburg and Cape Town. They left South Africa in 1985 for Italy, where they established a prestigious art residency programme in Tuscany. They have exhibited extensively both locally and internationally, and their work has featured at major events such as the Dakar Biennale and Spheres in France. Prominent public sculpture commissions include their Soap Boxes at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. As well as conducting artist workshops in Italy and the United States, rosenclaire have returned regularly to South Africa to conduct workshops in Venda and Cape Town.

Goodman Gallery Cape proudly presents the first solo exhibition by rosenclaire in South Africa for over twenty years. Working under the name rosenclaire, Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky present a conversation between their respective and collective practices and identities in re.collections.

The show’s title refers to a collection of arbitrary objects and thoughts waiting to be re-ordered, renamed and remembered: a heterogeneous gathering. Across-pollination between the flea-market, the studio, art history and personal experience, the show is a juxtaposition of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. rosenclaire refer to their work as context-specific, governed by implicit signification where the subject matter defines the choice of media and stylistic convention.

re.collections, implies a reference to collections, collecting, correcting, naming, renaming and reframing cultural constructs of art and artifice. Here Gavronsky’s remake of Goya’s caprices, complimented by her large paintings and bronze sculptures tease and taunt our notions of art and marketing the mark. Shakinovsky’s museum sleuthing and Brechtian interruptions dissolve the boundaries and transgress the borders between art and non-art. A video by Shakinovsky from an ongoing series of illicitly filmed museum walks, and a sound piece by rosenclaire complete this intervention.
re.collections and its implications with regard to history and memory, both personal and political, are explored by Gavronsky, in a collapsing and enfolding of history, in which she presents Dante’s hell, side by side with the Beslan massacre of the innocents, in a series of large oil paintings.

Shakinovsky intervenes with discarded and decontextualized found objects, now re.collected and reconnected into a new syntax. Magnifying glasses scrutinize, focus, enlarge and force the viewer to recollect and reflect. Many works ask the viewer to engage in joining the dots, to become creative participants in the visual and conceptual games presented by the artists.
rosenclaire’s neon sign on the outside of the gallery asking the public to “invest in the immaterial” echoes other contemplative works situated in a quiet space in the gallery. Shakinovsky pays homage to both Rancière and Derrida. Among other works we find discarded protective cardboard corners from Gavronsky’s paintings, bronzed and repainted, and erasers carefully arranged and placed directly on the wall. The play between art and non-art, sense and non-sense is ultimately subverted again by the beauty and stillness of the works that is echoed in the pathos and empathy of Gavronsky’s elegy to her father.

Public Walkabout Saturday 20 February 2010 at 11am

Lisa Brice | Kudzanai Chiurai | Soly Cissé | Tom Cullberg | Claire Gavronsky | Robert Hodgins | David Koloane | Moshekwa Langa | Minnette Vári

There is an element of uncertainty inherent in the medium of paint – it is a fluid material that allows for various modes of expression, and as such is an ideal starting point for an examination of notions of nebulousness and accident.

Goodman Gallery Cape presents Open End, a group exhibition of paintings by both emerging and established artists that speaks to the element of uncertainty in artistic production and expression, and illustrates a process that seeks to arrive at meaning through search.

In an environment where so much emphasis is placed on work that is conceptually pre-determined, where the work is crafted around and invested with a deliberate and established message or meaning, the show aims to create a space for paintings produced without a clear conceptual starting point, focusing on the wrestle or the hunt for meaning rather than the expression of a packaged and determined project.

It is a simultaneously dangerous and powerful position to work from, unstable and vulnerable on the one hand, but filled with the potential of new and unexplored ideas, of work that is discursive and receptive to chance on the other. The title Open End refers not only to the absence of resolution, but to the very manner in which the work is approached: an embracing of uncertainty – or, to paraphrase Francis Bacon, a courting of accidents – in the search for meaning.

The exhibition will feature new works by Lisa Brice and David Koloane, and a painting created in situ by Kudzanai Chiurai. Tom Cullberg will show a series of abstract, perhaps metaphysical paintings dealing with the tensions that exist between the rational and the chaotic. Two anamorphic landscape-like paintings by Minnette Vári – first seen earlier this year as part of her solo show Parallax at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg – as well as several typically humorous and confrontational works by Moshekwa Langa will be included. Dakar-based artist Soly Cissé will show nine small monochrome paintings deftly straddling the figurative and the abstract, Claire Gavronsky will show an oil painting addressing notions of memory and loss, and several works by the incomparable Robert Hodgins illustrate the flex and the power of the medium.

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.

Sphères 2009 Galleria Continua / Le Moulin

Joel Andrianomearisoa / Kader Attia / Willem Boshoff / Chris Burden / Angela de la Cruz / Carlos Garaicoa / Claire Gavronsky / Kendell Geers / Liam Gillick / Frances Goodman / Mark Handforth / Camille Henrot / Carsten Höller / Ann Veronica Janssens / Christoph Keller / Joseph Kosuth / Ange Leccia / Claude Lévêque / Pierre Malphettes / Thomas Mulcaire / Hans Op de Beeck / Nathaniel Rackowe Anselm Reyle / Ugo Rondinone / Bruno Serralongue / Rose Shakinovsky / Sudarshan Shetty / Nedko Solakov / Katja Strunz / Mikhael Subotzky / Sun Yuan & Peng Yu / Gavin Turk / Minnette Vari

Opening during the FIAC, Saturday, 24th of October 2009.
Preview from 12h00 – 14h30, brunch on the river bank.

For the second edition, the Spheres project re-involves the participation of several contemporary art galleries of international dimensions prompted by one desire: to join their diverse forces and energies to develop a shared exhibition – a new kind of exhibition experience – with no submission to any restricting theme. The Galleries will present artists from the five continents, whose works will be installed in and will relate to various parts of the exceptional complex. In doing so, they will engage with the rich history of the site.

24 October 2009 – 30 May 2010

Participating galleries:

AIR DE PARIS
GALLERIA CONTINUA
GALERIE KRINZINGER
KAMEL MENNOUR
ALMINE RECH GALLERY
ESTHER SCHIPPER
GOODMAN GALLERY