"Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005"
2006-02-15 until 2006-03-19
Oliewenhuis Art Museum
Bloemfontein, , ZA

Wim Botha’s traveling exhibition began its year long tour at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and concludes its run at the Standard Bank Gallery in July 2006. Botha works in multiple media, with sculptures, etchings, paintings and drawings all forming part of his intricate installations. These reflect on and subvert the symbolic imagery of power, religion and art history. By visually interfering with venerated forms of art, artefact and decoration, the artist offers questions related to the underlying implications of systems and structures that attempt to define who we are. In several of his installations this subversion alludes to the systemic decay inherent in symbolic representations related to power. This is coupled with a reconstructive desire, simulating found imagery in an altered way that allows the possibility of a revision of our assumptions.

Wim Botha graduated from the University of Pretoria in 1996 and has since become one of the most prominent young contemporary artists in South Africa.

Included in Botha’s Standard Bank Young Artist exhibition is the Mieliepap Pietà, a life-size mirrored replica of Michelangelo’s original, modeled in maize meal and epoxy resin. The sculpture was first exhibited at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York in 2004, as part of the group exhibition Personal Affects: Power and poetics in contemporary South African art, where it alternately offered subtle comment on western traditions and was appropriated by worshippers as part of the fabric of the church. Botha is also well known for his Christ figure carved out of bibles, titled commune: suspension of disbelief, which hangs in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and commune: onomatopoeia, a complex installation of a suspended room, which is currently touring Europe on Africa Remix, a survey of the contemporary art of the continent.

Botha has held four solo shows, and his work has been included on group exhibitions nationally and internationally. He has also received other prestigious awards, including the prize for best artwork at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in 2001, being named festival artist at the KKNK in 2003, and sharing the first annual Tollman award with Churchill Madikida in 2003.

The travelling exhibition will open at Oliewenhuis Art Museum on Tuesday 14 February 2006 at 19:00. The exhibition closes on 19 March 2006. For further details, contact the curator of Oliewenhuis, Sharon Crampton at 051 4479609.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for South Africa

Other Important Exhibitions in South Africa

Call for Artists : 13th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival Explores Sustainability - Subtle Technologies, University of Toronto Art in Mind : Work by Natalia O'Neill - Brick Lane Gallery The Ione Citrin Collection - Poway Center for the Performing Arts Gallery Parallel Realities : Aishan Yu's First Solo Show in the UK - Peifen Fine Art Secrets and Confessions : Peter Sudar, John Stark, Leonard Vartic, Ioan Cristea - Ana Cristea Gallery Call for Artists : The Beast In Me, Johnny Cash - Art Influenced by the Struggle of a Man' - Nave Gallery Notations - Bruce Nauman: Days and Giorni - Philadelphia Museum of Art Beauitful Elsewhere : Fusion and Con-fusion - Migrating Cultures and the Dynamic of Exchange - Universita di Napoli - Partenope Animal Nature : Powerful Paintings, Drawings and Digital Prints by Hyacinthe Kuller-Baron - Computer Arts Gallery