Must We Wait Forever ,1972
Provenance :
Exhibited : Durban Art Museum, Durban, Andrew Verster Retrospective Exhibition, 1987, catalogue number 56.
Literature :
Notes : Andrew Verster had his first solo exhibition at the Lidchi Gallery in Johannesburg in 1967. However, two years before, in 1965, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town decided to purchase a painting by the 28-year old artist from Durban. This painting, Old Woman, a portrait of a figure in which the mere visual appearance is subordinate to other pertinent insights about the individual, highlights “those two extremes of psychological condition – intimacy and isolation” (Berman 1983:476).Verster studied at the Camberwell School of Art in London and the Reading University in the UK. He returned to South Africa in 1963, settled in Durban and lectured at the University of Durban-Westville (then University College, Durban) and Natal Technikon (now DUT). In 1976 he gave up teaching to become a full-time artist. To coincide with his 50th birthday in 1987 the Durban Art Gallery organised a retrospective exhibition of his work. Must We Wait Forever was part of this collection of work that visited various museums throughout the country as a touring exhibition.The intimacy and isolation, the aspects Berman identified in Verster’s early work, become even more pronounced in this large-scale canvas, made up of collage-like compositions and painted in sepia colours: the colours of beach sand but also of memory; of immediate surroundings but also of distant experiences, the snapshot qualities of nostalgia. “Verster has devoted much attention to that mystique,” writes Berman (1983:477), “communicating it in images both of the participants and of their beach environment, the lonely setting sometimes symbolizing the mystical isolation of the persons who would normally inhabit it.” Like the enigmatic title, the figures portrayed evoke a range of responses. With some faces remaining and others reduced to fragments or figments of the imagination, we are led to wonder why they are waiting and what awaits them.
Johan Myburg
Condition_report :
