2012 The knife eats @ home (1) ,2012.0
Notes : South Africa’s Rising Art Star”, as heralded in the headline of a New York Times solo exhibition review, Cape Town born Kemang Wa Lehulere has exhibited his evocative drawings, paintings, collages and installations across the world. Earning critical acclaim, Wa Lehulere has won a host of local and international awards - from the first International Tiberius Art Award, Dresden in 2014 to his Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts in 2015. Most recently, Wa Lehulere was announced as the 2017 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year, with a solo exhibition opening at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin, this year. The knife eats @ home (1) points to the title of Wa Lehulere’s third solo exhibition with Stevenson Gallery. In the exhibition and in both of these artworks, the artist explores the ability of objects to escape their very definitions, meanings and shape. The familiar is questioned and unsettled – forms become fluid as grey tones bleed beyond their bold outlines. Within the context of Wa Lehulere’s concerns with personal and collective storytelling, the traces of the artist’s gestures and the wash of ink can be seen a poignant play on memory and forgetting.As history is seen to repeat itself, the title of Never ending dead-end is reminiscent of the viewer’s inability to fix or secure one meaning to the work. As the Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Victoria Noorthoorn (2017: online), states, Wa Lehulere “revisits his own history and the pain of his society by creating poignant images that are never literal or explanatory, but are instead a territory to be traversed, understood, and revealed”.
Josephine Higgins
