View from Mauna Kea ,2007
Provenance : Private collection, Johannesburg.
Graham's Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg.
Exhibited : Graham's Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 'The Modern Palimpsest: Envisioning South African Modernity', 2008.
Literature : Freschi, F. (ed.). (2008). 'The Modern Palimpsest: Envisioning South African Modernity. Catalogue No. 5'. Johannesburg: Graham’s Fine Art Gallery, illustrated in colour on p.185
Notes : This large scale exquisitely beaded panel is based on Karel Nel’s original drawing also titled View from Mauna Kea from 2004. The drawing is part of a conceptual series of images produced by Nel based on his research and work as the artist-in-residence for the COSMOS project; an international team of astronomers and scientists working on comprehensively mapping two square degrees of the universe. The original drawing formed part of the artist’s exhibition Lost Light: Fugitive Images from Deep Space at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, in 2007.
An impressive beadwork interpretation of the original drawing, View from Mauna Kea is a continuation of Nel’s deep and long-standing interest in the “interface between the seen and unseen world, the mapping and recording of systems of knowledge and their projections into the future”.
Fellow artist Joni Brenner states that “Nel pays specific attention to medium. His choice of medium is always significant, and this galactic image of stars and flickering light haloes lends itself beautifully to this beaded, pixelated interpretation. The meticulous stitching of each glass bead forms an organised grid structure, recalling the mathematical structures used to process the stellar data retrieved by the COSMOS project”[2]
A well-recognised and respected academic, writer and curator, Karel Nel’s work forms part of numerous collections throughout South Africa including the IZIKO South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Durban Art Gallery and the Pretoria Art Museum. Internationally, his work is represented in the collections of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In the UK, his work was acquired by the British Museum and presented in the exhibition, South Africa: The Art of a Nation in 2017.
Marelize van Zyl
[1] Brenner, J. in Freschi, F. (ed.). (2008). The Modern Palimpsest: Envisioning South African Modernity. Catalogue No. 5. Johannesburg: Graham’s Fine Art Gallery.
[2] Ibid.
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