Lizza Littlewort, How the Trouble Started, 2008, Watercolour on Fabriano
How the Troubles Started
An exhibition by Wilhelm Saayman and Lizza Littlewort
Opening: Wednesday, 05 November 18h00
The exhibition How the troubles started shows the work of Wilhelm Saayman and Lizza Littlewort, two artists whose renown in the contemporary art scene is based in dark humourous commentary conveyed through annotated drawings which stretch and wrench graphic language. Here, the two are brought together into one show for the first time, and from the outset the intense contrasts and similarites in their work set up a strong debate. The setting is the context of South Africa, around which they weave a dark shadowy mesh of tales.
Saayman’s work heads into the underbelly of the human condition, and is peopled with a rich population of sharply observed characters: the dodgy, the dangerous, as well as the guttingly human and despairingly personal. His highly evolved anti-art style places his work neck-and-neck with the bleak and brilliant humour of British contemporaries like David Shrigley, and brings to his work the urgency and power usually only found in the drawings of children or the criminally insane. It is exciting, relentless stuff, charged with a gleeful energy that makes for compulsive viewing.
Wilhelm Saayman, The Future is Better with Pills, Watercolour on Fabriano
Littlewort’s work for this show forms a hilariously bleak comment on the predicament of contemporary art in South African society. To ‘get’ much of the content of contemporary art, its audience needs a level of knowledge about art that is simply not the norm in South Africa, leaving the “art world” cut adrift, in an absurd conversation with itself. The show centres around a picture book, 'Let’s buy some art for Christmas,' in which Littlewort weaves a droll storyline from common platitudes about art. She interprets themes from the book through cartoonish paintings and painterly cartoons, providing a send-up of romanticized genius and a very concise crash course in Art Criticism 101.
Limited edition publications by each artist will accompany the exhibition, and will be available for purchase through the gallery. Click here for more info.
SOURCE: WHATIFTHEWORLD
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