Repo Art: Once more with feeling
Standing in front of Albert Adams's Deposition - three haunting figures against an apocalyptic backdrop of purples and blues - it is difficult to believe the work was painted in the late 1950s: nearly 60 years later it still exerts a fiercely relevant emotional power.
The triptych sits at the heart of Perspectives 1, a new show at Stevenson's space in Cape Town that brings together contemporary South African pieces with older works.
This is the gallery's first official foray into the secondary market, art that has been sold at least once before. It is familiar territory to founder Michael Stevenson, who dealt predominantly in works from the 19th and 20th centuries before opening the contemporary art gallery 11 years ago.
Perspectives 1 includes another Deposition - a wooden sculpture by Wim Botha which is at once jarringly abstract and messily human. Botha's Leda and the Swan - a bird disintegrating in mid-air - is also featured in the show. While Seeking Refuge, a video work by Berni Searle, is part of the exhibition, paintings, including those by Natasja Kensmil, Helen Sibidi and Alexis Preller, make up its bulk.
Perspectives 1 is curated by Darren Levy, who joined the gallery earlier this year to head its secondary market business.
His curatorial approach to the exhibition is embodied in its deliberately vague title. Instead of imposing a rigid theme, he has loosely woven together works that he feels are connected by "a quiet sensibility". This fluidity casts the curator in the role of facilitator, not as the source of predetermined meaning.
Instead of Levy imposing his own interpretations of what the works mean - both by themselves and in relation to each other - he rather encourages viewers to engage actively with them, allowing them to develop their own subjective perspectives. And so Perspectives 1 is not simply a showcase of important, emotive and enduring work: it also asks vital and open-ended questions about the ways we see, interpret and appreciate artworks and the ways in which they are curated.
There are intriguing hints at the resonances between pieces that Levy has observed. While not always harrowing, the cumulative effect is sombre: in so many of them there is a sense of loss, of limbo. Here are the shades of uncertainty, the profoundly unsettling. Death is not far off, or is it inertia, or simply a pause?
In viewing the slumped figure in Guy Tillim's photograph Shepherd, Queen's Mercy, Transkei, 1988, or the eerily still woman in the painting Blush: Scarlet by Penny Siopis, it is up to the viewer to decode and decide.
Stevenson plans to exhibit future iterations of Perspectives three to four times a year. As in the first show, each will be anchored by a major piece, and will showcase recent works alongside post-war South African and African ones.
- Perspectives 1 runs at Stevenson Cape Town until August 23. stevenson.info