06a / Roelof Rossouw: at The Cape Gallery

Roelof Rossouw openend his eleventh solo exhibition at The Cape Gallery January 2012. He has exhibited throughout South Africa, Glasgow, London, Cheltenham, UK, Canada, Ireland, San Francisco and Miami.

"As an artist I find beauty in a rustic environment, I like painting an old thatch cottage with flaking walls, a shack made of rusted sheets of corrugated iron and all the colourful bits and pieces patched together. I find the character and soul present in these dwellings attractive.

I see these buildings as interesting patterns and shapes. One or two works in this exhibition focus on shantytowns. Painting these was a new direction, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I've added more figures and they tell a story. Old General Dealer buildings also have a certain charm for me, with their signboards and colourful walls. Most of my work in 2011 has been of intimate spaces, rather than vast landscapes." - Roelof Rossouw

Roelof was born in 1957, and grew up in Benoni, near Johannesburg. A painter of figures, city and landscapes, street scenes, boats and harbours, architecture, parks and gardens. Works mainly in oils, but also collage, acrylic and mixed medium.

Rossouw has travelled widely and has visited Europe, The British Isles, Middle East, USA, Singapore, Australia, Canada, Zanzibar and The Caribbean (Painting vacations in Italy, France, Ukraine and USA)

PROFILE
1979-1981 Studied at the Johannesburg School of Art gaining a National Diploma in Art and Design
1982-1990 Employed by the Medical University of Southern Africa as graphic artist and medical illustrator
1992 Started painting seriously on a daily basis
2001 Moved to Robertson, Western Cape Province

EXHIBITIONS
1988-2010 A total of 34 solo exhibitions at top galleries in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Cheltenham UK and
Montreal, Canada
1999 Three-man exhibition at the Gatehouse Gallery, Glasgow
1991-2007 Numerous group exhibitions in South Africa, London, Cheltenham, Glasgow, Jersey, Galway, Armagh (N. Ireland)
San Francisco and Miami

REPRESENTED
The Sage Group; Anglo-Vaal; Mount Grace Hotel, Magaliesburg; The Woodburn Mann Art Collection; Rupert International; The Pretoria Art Museum; Clint Eastwood and many private collections in South Africa and throughout the world

AWARDS
First prize - Front Cover Competition for Eric Bolsmann's book on Pretoria.
www.capegallery.co.za

06b / Tom Cullberg: Periphery

01 FEBRUARY – 14 MARCH 2012

A new solo exhibition of paintings by Tom Cullberg. Periphery finds Cullberg navigating the border between the tangible and intangible and is the first time that his abstracts have come to the fore alongside his signature cover portraits. Despite the seemingly separate elements it is undoubtedly a homogenous body of work; the combination of abstract paint-scapes and representational cover portraits never feels disparate. The two dissimilar styles work in unison towards fleshing out Cullberg’s painterly objectives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Throughout the exhibition, Cullberg’s unifying thread is the creation of a space comprised of subjective and personal free-association. This applies both to the artist himself during the creation process and to the viewer, who is observing the paintings. With little or no sense of a planned outcome or destination, the artist intuitively peruses the annals of his record and book collections and viscerally responds to his medium.

Subsequently, the logic behind Cullberg’s diverse arrangements of covers from his collections of pop, jazz and classical records, art theory texts, novels, children’s books and exhibition catalogues, is often opaque. Resembling a garage sale, the works play directly into the viewer’s tendency to formulate associations and bestow narratives based on what is familiar or intrigues. It is unlikely that the viewer will recognise every cover (especially considering Cullberg’s tendency to sporadically inject a fabricated red herring), but this is far from essential to appreciate the work. An open field of interpretation is key.

The abstracts take this to a more visceral realm. In a similar vein to Kandinsky’s Composition works (sans grandiose modernist pretentions), Cullberg’s paintings exhibit a strong musical sensibility as brushwork, gestural lines and colour move into unconstrained intuitive territory. As a foil to the associative nature of the cover portraits, the abstracts mark a space of reflection. Exhibited alongside one another, the viewer is perpetually tugged between objective recognition and cognitive free-association, a space define as periphery.

Born in 1972 in Stockholm, Sweden, Tom Cullberg currently lives and works in Cape Town. He graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 1997. Cullberg has exhibited both locally and internationally including presentations at Joburg Art Fair, Johannesburg (2011); Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2009); Magrorocca Galleria d’arte, Milan (2007) and Galleri Svenska Bilder, Stockholm (2003).

www.brundyngonsalves.com