Open End: An Exhibition of Paintings

David Koloane

David Koloane (1938 – 2019) was born in Alexandra, Johannesburg, South Africa. Koloane spent his career making the world a more hospitable place for black artists during and after apartheid. Koloane achieved this through his pioneering work as an artist, writer, curator, teacher and mentor to young and established artists at a time when such vocations were restricted to white people in South Africa. A large part of this effort involved the initiatives Koloane helped establish, from the first Black Art Gallery in 1977, the Thupelo experimental workshop in 1985 and the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in 1991, where he served as director for many years. Koloane also tutored at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in 1979 and became the head of the fine art section and gallery from 1985 to 1990.
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Through his expressive, evocative and poetic artwork, Koloane interrogated the socio-political and existential human condition, using Johannesburg as his primary subject matter. Koloane’s representations of Johannesburg are populated with images of cityscapes, townships, street life, jazz musicians, traffic jams, migration, refugees, dogs, and birds among others. Imaginatively treated, through the medium of painting, drawing, assemblage, printmaking and mixed media, Koloane’s scenes are a blend of exuberant and sombre, discernible and opaque pictorial narratives.
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Koloane’s work has been widely exhibited locally and internationally. In 1999 he was part of the group exhibition _Liberated Voices_ at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC. In 2013, Koloane’s work was shown on the South African pavilion at the 55th la Biennale di Venezia and on the group exhibition _My Joburg_ at La Maison Rouge in Paris. In 1998, the government of the Netherlands honoured Koloane with the Prince Claus Fund Award for his contributions to South African art. Koloane was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate twice, once from Wits University in 2012, and again from Rhodes University in 2015. In 2019 Koloane was the subject of a travelling career survey exhibition, _A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane_, which opened at IZIKO SANG and later travelled to Standard Bank Gallery and Wits Art Museum in October.

Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice (b.1968, Cape Town, South Africa) negotiates the precarious terrain of artistic production, as she moves between practices of spontaneous drawing and figure painting. She makes use of unexpected painting and printing techniques on a variety of surfaces, which include canvas and tracing paper. For Brice, the act of tracing often leads her to a repetition of similar motifs or figures in her work, sometimes biographical, and at other times art historical: ‘I am attracted to the idea of repetition,’ Brice remarks. ‘Chasing that high, stories told and retold.’

In 2006 Brice had her first solo exhibition of paintings at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, titled Night Vision, in which she reflected on the uncertainties of childhood. In 2009, a solo show, More Wood for the Fire, was presented at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg; the exhibition detailed Brice’s relationship with the island of Trinidad. In 2011, Brice’s work was included in the Vitamin P2 publication, Phaidon’s major anthology of international painting. In 2012, Brice presented a solo exhibition titled Throwing the Floor at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. She has had subsequent shows at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2015 titled Well Worn, and in June 2016 she was included on a show at Camden Art’s Centre in London Making & Unmaking curated by Duro Olowu. Brice had her first solo museum exhibition in the UK at the Tate Britain in 2018, where she exhibited large scale paintings which addressed the longstanding art-historical tradition of the female nude.

The artist lives and works in London, UK.

Robert Hodgins

Robert Hodgins (b. 1920, Dulwich, England) became a Lecturer in 1954 at the School of Art, Pretoria Technical College, where he remained until 1962. Then he took up a position as Journalist and Critic for Newscheck magazine. Between 1966 and 1983 he was a Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand Fine Art Department. At the end of 1983 he retired to take up painting full-time.

Some Hodgins’ paintings convey a feeling of deep seriousness and sadness; the paintings depict a sense of confusion that many people experience. However Hodgins believed that being an artist is about creating something new, an artist perfects the art of ingeniously reinventing content within society.

“Being an artist is about putting something into your subject matter that isn’t inherently there,” wrote Hodgins in 2000. “You are not at the mercy of your subject matter, it’s the content, and what you put into it, what you do with it, what extract from it, and what you put it with, that is so exciting. If you are aware of this, then you begin to build on the content of your whole life. Before you know where you are, you’re already thinking about the next work, and you could live to be 300. Paintings can be one-night stands or lifetime love-affairs – you never know until you get cracking”

Kudzanai Chiurai

Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Harare, Zimbabwe) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring notions and cycles of political, economic, and social strife present in post-colonial societies. His work interrogates urgent social issues, such as xenophobia, exile, displacement, the psychological experiences of urban spaces, as well as the Western imprint on Africa.

In 2024, Chiurai’s film We Live in Silence (Chapters 1 – 7) was on view as part of the main exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In 2023, photographs from the artist’s We Live in Silence series were part of A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, at TATE Modern curated by Osei Bonsu.

In 2013, Chiurai’s Conflict Resolution series was exhibited at DOCUMENTA (13) (2012) in Kassel and the film Iyeza was one of the few African films to be included in the New Frontier shorts programme at the Sundance Film Festival.

Chiurai’s project, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, is built around his collecting practice which focuses on preserving archives and memorialising social and cultural history from southern Africa. The project exists in the form of an archive of materials situated in Johannesburg including vinyls, posters, paintings and more, drawn from private African collections. Each time this archive is exhibited, Chiurai invites a different librarian to interrogate the archive and curate an exhibition.

Solo exhibitions include: Genesis [Je n’isi isi], We Live in Silence, IFA, Stuttgart (2019); Madness and Civilization, Kalmar Konsmuseum, Sweden (2018); Now and Then: Guercino and Kudzanai Chiurai, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2018); and Regarding the Ease of Others, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2017).

Group shows include: FLIGHT, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2023); Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Art/Afrique, Le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014) and travelled to the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2015); Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); and Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011).

Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Walther Collection, New York; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.

Chiurai lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Claire Gavronsky

(b. 1957, Johannesburg)

Claire Gavronsky works in a variety of mediums, most notably in painting and sculpture. Her work often uses visual reference’s to historical paintings, and cues are sometimes taken from events from everyday life. Memory, racism, violence against women and children are some of the theme’s which run through her oeuvre. Her work also bridge’s sometimes complex narratives through overlaid images, and stories which link the past to the present.

In 1981 Gavronsky received a Master of Fine Art in painting, and she moved to Italy in 1985 and has since lived between Cape Town and Tuscany.

In Florence, Gavronsky established, with fellow artist Rosemarie Shakinovsky, an international artist’s residency workshop in Tuscany. After the success of these workshops they founded workshops in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Venda and Botswana. Gavronsky and Shakinovsky often collaborate under the name Rosenclaire. They also collaborate on occasion with William Kentridge. She has exhibited extensively in South Africa, Europe and the United States of America.