"New Paintings by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt: Like Nine Pin"
2005-09-21 until 2005-10-29
Joao Ferreira Fine Art
Cape Town, , ZA South Africa

Painting is bound to contradictions: on one hand there is the pleasure and romance of its own medium ˆ it fabricates, celebrates, it borrows from a wide arsenal of images and remixes; on the other is the need to examine psychic landscapes and enter, critically, that which lies outside its edges. Painting offers a necessary counterpart to the public, collaborative and conceptual work I am involved in ˆ primarily in inner city Johannesburg with the Joubert Park Project collective.

It allows a more distant, condensed processing of the complex dynamics that make up the city. That these dynamics speak of personal, individual and broader moral/social aspirations, crisis and practices is nothing new. They create specific visual languages, personal rules and spatial aesthetics that are both foreign, vulnerable and irresistible. They often seem explosive, unpredictable and surreal. In this, painting creates its own realities in the attempt to foretell, or capture, the intimate and public simultaneity of the city, as horizons seem to collapse and personal as well as public space is re-occupied and re-written through rapid urban development, technology and imagination - add sports.

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, 2005

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt was born in Namibia in 1970. She lives and works in Johannesburg where she recently completed her MA in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, working with sign-writers in the inner city. Her artistic practice includes painting as well as collaborative interventions with artists from different disciplines. Her interest lies in working within the socio-historical fabric of the contemporary city, its daily mobilities, global aspirations and cultural/generative dimensions. She co-founded an artists collective, the Joubert Park Project (JPP), which is based at the historical Drill Hall in inner city Johannesburg. Over the last five years JPP has mounted a series of public initiatives and is currently engaged in running the cultural and heritage programme at the Drill Hall. Collaborative projects include Sluice (Cape Town, 1996-1998), Johannesburg Map (Metro Mall, Johannesburg, 2001), From Six to Two (Joao Ferreira, 2005). Group shows include: Sleuth/Rix Dollar (CT Second Johannesburg Biennale, 1997/98), Young Blood (JHB, 2000), Painting of Tomorrow (London, 2000), Tremor (Charles Roi, Belgium, 2004). Solo shows: 26 Acts of Balance (CT, 2000) Things Left Unsaid (2002), In View of You (FRESH residency, CT, 2002), Tigers Don‚t Cry (CT 2004), A Jamais (Sierre, CRIC residency, Switzlerand, 2005).

IMAGES
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt
Do you want to meet the president?, 2005.
Mixed media on Canvas.
120 x 190cm

Trophy, 2005.
Acrylic on canvas.
100 x 170cm

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