A line beyond

Group show

Curated by Olga Speakes

02.12.2021 - 13.01.2022

Main gallery and New Media room

Paul Klee is famously quoted as saying that ‘a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’. This exhibition explores, using Klee’s expression, on what kind of a walk, or perhaps a flight or even a transformative journey, contemporary artists take drawing or line, as a particular way of mark-making, today. Their engagement may involve any number of moves, surprising, precocious, subversive, and unbounded by drawing’s history but strengthened by its heritage.

Historically, the skill and the art of drawing have been seen and practiced as the core of art education and practice. But like many other traditions, the practice of drawing has been transformed in the way it is perceived, theorised, understood, and applied. Although drawing has long enjoyed appreciation and status as something more than the precursor of painting, or internal studio process, many contemporary artists take it even further, pushing at the traditional boundaries of drawing with the use of often unexpected, new media, going beyond the two-dimensional surface into spaces and forms that are as unpredictable as they are subversive.

This group exhibition aims to go beyond drawing and to trace, where the line, so intrinsic to drawing historically, is taking contemporary artists today. It highlights different media that are used by artists extending the application of the line in unexpected and transgressive ways. Like in a line of poetry, we follow and we may be guided by its form, but the beauty and wisdom of a poem cannot be reduced to its structure, however intricate; the whole is so much more than its parts. Similarly, works of art included in this exhibition are not reducible to their underlying structures or media, but the selection is meant to invite the viewer to recognise the role that the line, taken for a walk and then allowed to veer off the beaten track, plays in opening up new possibilities in contemporary art practice.

Shamilla Aasha

Pierre Fouché

Donna Kukama

Cathy Abraham

Jared Ginsburg

Amanda Mushate

Igshaan Adams

Bronwyn Katz

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Zyma Amien

Bonolo Kavula

Download the catalogue here