I ♥ Rose Korber's Salons

On visiting Rose Korber's annual Camps Bay Art Salon, what most struck the Chance Muse was the shock of recognition. So many iconic SA works seem to be telling a familiar story - about growing up in white Southern Africa, the perils and memories of childhood, resistance politics, exile and the terrible beauty of the landscape....

For more than 20 years, Rose Korber has played a significant role in introducing South African artists to a local as well as an international art market. Every year she holds an amazing Art Salon of paintings, mixed media, prints, photography, sculpture, ceramics and contemporary beadwork which this year, has been extended until the end of February 2012

Korber believes the past two decades have seen an enormous shift in South African art - local artworks becoming more internationalised, and SA artists taking their place on a world stage. Among the renowned artists exhibiting at the Salon  are William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas, Sam Nhlengethwa, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Claudette Schreuders - examples below

It's always a fun opening with great wine and colour co ordinated culinary treats

Here is my beautiful friend Sue C at last year's show

And Mr P in his "I love Africa" t-shirt from 20 years ago with his wife of even greater vintage

More delicious eats at last years opening night

Super special Sue in stunning specs

Last year's er - interesting - performance in the swimming pool - lots of seaweed and Ophelia-like,  water nymph stuff. About Ingrid Yonker, I think?

Collage with captions. Yes, everything in this country is political

Even the most beautiful things. The Chance Muse loves the fact that metaphor is embedded in everything, that everything stands for something else but here there is a familiarity with the codes

Chatted to these 2 young women - students at Michaelis - they thought the food was most delicious

Loved this theatrical red sofa like part of a stage set

And this gorgeous gilded Marilyn figure

And this year's Robert Slingsby's nihilistic "Just Injustice" - where death stalks the plains

And photographer Stephen Inggs, whose iconic landscapes are internationally recognised

This one called "Anysberg, Klein Karoo" but really it could be anywhere - or nowhere

And this one with its strong vanishing point also by Stephen Inngs

There were some great paintings - like "Autumn 3"  by Penelope Stutterheime

And brilliant prints like Sam Nhlengethwa's Lithograph  - "Tribute to Zwelethu Mthethewa"

Ands one by both Sam Nhlengethwa and Zwelethu Mthethewa entitled "Untitled" of 1999

Lots of cryptic political stuff like John Murray's diptych - "Yesterday Tomorrow"

And more lovely painting - here Simon Stone's oil "Woman in a Tree" 2001

   And the brilliant breezy bright bad-boy, Beezy Bailey's 1998 screenprint - spaced out "Space Cat"

And some serious stuff about body dysmorphia - is that how you spell it? - by Pamela Stretton, This one called "Pin-Up" and created by tiny digital inkjet fragments mounted on board

And the giant of the SA art world - the big man himself - William Kentridge's 2010 "Take off Your Hat"

Hanneke Benade's chine colle litho - "Step 2" reminiscent of a restrained Paula Rego

Simon Stone's mysterious "Hairdo and Beach" 2010, evoking an atmosphere of loss, perhaps a memory of an unfortunate 1960's beach holiday

Norman Catherine's bold screenprint is a great comic moment - Monkey Croc wielding his power like a lasso doesn't know he's about to go up in flames - but grinning Snakey is looking over his shoulder and sees what's coming

Claudette Schreuder's "The Free Girl" - 2009 - is sooo sad - this kid doesn't know what to do with her freedom - and what's that crushed beneath her schoolgirl footware? An arrested scuttling sideways psyche?

Richard Smith's "Julia with Code", charcoal and mixed media 2011 - is an alarming proud beauty who looks you straight in the eye - are these op-arty popsicles or the nasty shame of the plague buboe? Aids, love or art?

Richard Smith again - "Raymond with DH spots" - a charcoal and mixed media representation

Kate Gottgen's "The Backyard Kids" - oil on paper - has the quality of a discarded sketch, a lost partially remembered yesterday which resonates well with my own half memory of things past. Is it the black and white photo we recall or the actual event itself?

Deborah Bell's 2008 "Oracle" suggests the wiggly worm of the future, the secret runes of doom that gather in this obscure room. What terrible pronouncements is this Cassandra - foreboding pupa-prophetess, on her red and white striped psycho-analyst's couch - about to disclose?

Lallitha Jawairilal's 2011 mixed media composition - "Today a Beautiful White Light Floods the Beloved Country"- is a colourful homage to women - perhaps her own Indian South African family and perhaps also to Alan Paton's classic "Cry the Beloved Country"

My cousin - we have yet to meet - Kim Lieberman's delicate but purposeful work on female identity, transience, time and beauty - "Roaming Information - Jerusalem moment in a timeless city" from 2007 - is a frozen moment conceived in oil paint and silk thread on postage stamp paper. A stylised red silhouetted figure in a fringed dress, kneels in some strange ritual. Can we post her to foreign lands, dismember her on the dotted lines, embroider her, turn her into lace?

And Kev Atkinson's powerful litho, "Untitled (Table Mountain)" - of that iconic year of 1976 where to even name the mountain was taboo and a strange yellow triangle with its little springy coil of hope - isosceles, I think, a stylised echo of the mountain - hovers like an abandoned space-craft on the barren shore

The fabulous and very famous Marlene Dumas' beautiful "Praying" 1984 - I think an image of her pretty Dutch daughter, in Madonna-mode, in a year when praying was a very necessary thing - though this young Virgin - prefiguring the artist's work on innocence perverted - may also cock a snook at Dumas' Dutch Reform upbringing which did not exactly encourage the making of images for religious purposes. We knew her in the wacky art school years of the 70's and in Amsterdam in the 80's, and made a strange visit to her family home in Gordon's Bay in January 2007, where we had lunch together - she looked for all the world like the house-help in a long apron and smock


In a fine tradition of political art, Conrad Bote's beautifully drawn Sad Sack dystopian comic strip tells us all we don't want to know about Safrika

Landscape artist, John Kramer's "Harbour Cafe, Mossel Bay, oil on canvas 2008 - like a South African Hopper, his 'realistic' paintings are emblematic of the SA environment and landscape, conjuring up images of dusty semi-abandoned Karoo towns from my own childhood

Here his iconic "Belmont Supermarket, Hermanus" from 2007, with its super-sexy ice-cream cone, red and white coke sign and de Chirico shadow on the adjacent wall, has the strange familiarity of a recurring dream

John Kramer again  - a Shop along the Orange River - nearest town Uppington - Who, one wonders would buy anything from this forlorn place in the middle of nowhere? And who would build his house in such a barren place?

And the fabulous Willie Bester's mixed media sculpture - "Khayelisha" - oil on board with graffiti

In this evocative "Still Life with Tank" a tank looms on the horizon about to smash life to smithereens. A piece which speaks of the banality of evil, of the violence hidden in every every day South African scene and like those Dutch 17th century masters of fulsome fruity still-lives, spotted with hovering flies - of the shortness of our stay on this earth

Willie Bester's "Spade with Yellow Shoes" - like those bronzed baby mementos on a suburban mantelpiece - powerful iconic metaphors for the cost of migrant and cheap labour - the children left behind, the infant corpse labelled on a mortuary shelf,  the reference to shoes at Sharpeville and Auschwitz....

The Salon has also become known for its annual selection of South African ceramists

Showing the work of Ian Garrett, Louise Gelderblom, Hennie Meyer, Clementina van der Walt, Carolyn Heydenrych, Wiebke von Bismarck, Ralph Johnson, Helen Vaughan, Rae Goosens, Melanie Hillebrand, Sarah Walters, Patsy Groll, Yvonne Martin and Laura du Toit 

Here a Ralph Johnson bowl

And an Ardmore Zebra tea-cup by the renowned Ardmore Studio Ceramics in Natal

New friend ceramicist Patsy Groll's lovely portrait vase

More Ardmore

The terrace at Rose Korber's with that view

Beware of Greeks. Kevin Brand's "Tethered" - a sutured Trojan horse with surgical clamps?

Jaco Sieberhagen's "The Journey" - a saga of Departure and Return - airport family en route to exile and canooing Africans wielding oars that look suspiciously like spears - seems to ask questions about family ties, being an artist in Africa, being a Jew amidst the nations, being a pale person in a Black Continent, being in exile and coming home

A nice one to end on - Claudia Gurwitz's powerful "Coral Tree" - positive, iconic, feminine, feminist - The Chance Muse would like this one in her living room....