In Search of a New King is Christiaan Diedericks' 50th solo show and his second at The Melrose Gallery in Johannesburg. His latest work - which includes everything from huge monotypes to delicate ceramic plates - explores themes that sit uncomfortably in post-apartheid SA such as racism, white privilege, colonialism and corruption.
One can be forgiven for initially thinking that Diedericks is simply giving a hat tip to the prerequisite -isms of 2019. In Search of a New King is - to use millennial parlance - decidedly "woke", but, spend a little time with the works and layers upon layers of meaning start to emerge.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the song Without Blame, a duet by Ismael Lo and Marianne Faithfull. "I am gone, gone with the wind, I am gone in search of a new king," they sing; not only did these lyrics spark the idea for Diedericks' latest body of work, but they also capture his political homelessness in SA today.
For many years Diedericks, a gay, white Afrikaner, voted for the ANC, but he did not vote in this election. "There's not one party who I believe will make a difference," he says. "I'm completely in search of a new king - or queen."
Diedericks is one of the country's pre-eminent printmakers, and the work on display is testament to that. The exhibition, which is curated by Melissa Goba, includes a number of large-scale, single-edition monotypes.
Essentially unique printed paintings, Diedericks uses a plexiglass plate as his canvas, and after painting and drawing on the plate, the image is transferred onto dampened paper via the pressure of a printing press. It's a process that requires precision as well as speed: there's a one-day window in which to print the image, because as soon as the paint dries on the plate the image can't be transferred.
The centrepiece of In Search of a New King is a monstrous 2.5m-wide monotype entitled These Bones will Rise Again. It's Diedericks' most technically challenging work to date: it took weeks of planning and had to be printed in three panels over three days, as his press was not big enough to accommodate its size...