The Goodman Gallery is pleased to host a new body of work by Walter Oltmann from 13 August – 3 November 2007. This exhibition of new sculpture and works on paper in various media opens at noon on Saturday 13th, on this day the gallery will have extended hours from 09h30 to 17h00 and closes on 3rd November at 16h00.
Using hand-craft techniques related to weaving, Walter Oltmann creates his often monumental wire sculptures for which he has become well known. Process is still very much at the centre of Oltmann’s wire sculptures as he continues to explore domestic craft techniques, together with material and imagery that seems incongruous or disparate to these activities. This opens up various associations and meanings, and creates allusions to Oltmann’s African roots.
Walter Oltmann has continued fabricating wire sculptures by hand to arrive at hybrid forms suggesting an interface between references to insects and human features. These wire sculptures are based on his previous “Larva Suits”, empty garments not unlike suits of armour. These suits allude to insect larvae/ caterpillars as well as features from early forms of dress associated with Europeans who first arrived on African soil. Oltmann’s sculptures (including a few wire net pieces) and drawings continue to articulate ideas relating to the monstrous and the vulnerable and the unsettling of boundaries between categories.
Artworks
About
Walter Oltmann
Walter Oltmann (b. 1960, Rustenburg, North-West Province, South Africa) 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. In his works, 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. 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.
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 – where he worked as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Fine Arts.
In 2001, Oltmann was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts. His solo exhibition which followed travelled throughout South Africa. In 2014, the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg hosted his solo show In the Weave which profiled three decades of the artist’s work.
Oltmann received the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s Extraordinary Award for Sculpture for 2022, enabling him to produce an extensive body of work, undertaken in the Villa-Legodi workshop at NIROX Sculpture Park where the works were also publicly shown. A book on his work titled In Time will be published shortly.
In his PhD thesis titled In The Weave: Textile-based Modes of Making and the Vocabulary of Handcraft in Selected Contemporary Artworks from South Africa, Oltmann examines how and to what ends contemporary artists working in South Africa have chosen to engage in practices that are common to textile-based handcraft traditions of weaving, stitching and tying. His focus is on how these artists have understood manual work and its philosophy, and how conceptualization in their creative practice is accessed through the physical act of repetitive making by hand, based particularly on those traditional textile craft practices associated with weaving.
Collections include: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Norval Foundation, Cape Town and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.
Oltmann lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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