Young artists turning heads

The world of art often tends to focus on the works of established artists who have proven to be valuable investments. Refreshingly, many young artists are determined to make a name for themselves. Mohau Modikaseng and Heidi Fourie, two young, diverse artists, both justifiably deserve attention.

Mohau Modisakeng

In 2011, two years after he obtained his degree in fine arts at the Michaelis Art School of the University of Cape Town, Mohau Modisakeng drew widespread attention as a 25-year-old when he won Sasol’s New Signatures Art Competition.

It was with a large photograph that this trained sculptor made his mark at the time. And at the same time, this photograph was also a documentation of a performance in which sculptural elements are clearly evident.

The easiest way to describe his practice is to call him a multimedia artist. He in fact refers to his work as “a marriage of mediums”.

His Sasol prize-winning piece, Qhatha, was inherently also typical of his approach to art: to use his own life with his experiences, physical as well as dream experiences, as a point of departure. In this way, his work has always been biographical in nature.

His childhood experiences – growing up under political tension in Soweto in the early 90s – contributed to a personal memory bank.

Later these events incentivised and stimulated his interest in the effect of violence on the black body and of these experiences on the collective psyche. >?It’s virtually impossible to separate Modisakeng’s work from the country’s troubled history, one of segregation and hardship, of a Zulu culture steeped in tradition, but also violence.

An example depicting this, is Inzilo 2013, a single channel video included in the exhibition What Remains Is Tomorrow, at the South African pavilion at the 56th Venetian Biennial.

“Inzilo” is an isiZulu word meaning “mourning” or “fixed”. In this video, Modisakeng, who is clothed in a black full-length skirt, is busy throwing something like ashes into the air in a mourning ritual. When the camera comes up close to him, it appears as if he is shedding skin and as if the ashes are also falling from his limbs.

On the one hand the ritual has all the characteristics of a public ceremony, yet one cannot but help to become conscious of a sincere personal and mysterious quality of the ritual.

And now Modisakeng has been selected as Standard Bank’s 2016 Young Artist for visual art. The same honour that befell his lecturer in sculpture and mentor at Michaelis, Jane Alexander, in 1995.

He must also prepare for an exhibition at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown later this year. After Grahamstown, the exhibition will tour all the main centres in the country.

Visit the website www.mohaumodisakeng.com.

Heidi Fourie

Heidi Fourie was still an undergraduate at the University of Pretoria in 2011, the year in which she was a finalist in Sasol’s New Signatures Competition. She only completed her degree, cum laude, the following year.

Although her submission for this competition was a work in film, photography, silicon and perspex titled Artifice, she has made a definite impression over the past number of years with her exceptional paintings and series of monotypes.

Two of her paintings were among the top 40 paintings in the countrywide 2015 Sanlam Portrait Competition: Allen having his mind blown by something on the internet, oil on plywood, and Studio Supervisor Sleeping, oil on canvas.

At a time when hyperrealism flourishes in the art of painting, Fourie’s interest is far more focused on the paint, its texture and the brush strokes than the mere representation of an object.

It is, in fact, her skilled and energetic application of the paint that has made her work so fascinating, as if she is testing the ultimate ability of the paint.

In her handling of impasto in small portraits, and often in smaller fragments of a larger whole, she converses with a painting tradition and makes a fresh and innovative contribution.

She recently exhibited paintings in Pretoria in which she gives her interpretation of a few Goya portraits. Her pixellated portrait version of the Duchess of Alba is typical of her attunement to the inherent language and signature of paint.

On the impact of paint she says: “I am convinced that paint can give meaning to the ostensibly meaningless and value to the ostensibly worthless. It needs an eye that it captivates longer and must abandon doubt: the viewer should be able to experience an alternative reality. For me, the marks I make with the paint do not create subjects, the paint itself is the subject.”

In addition to the fabulous paintings, she recently made a number of mono-prints with master printer, Tim Foulds, which probably have all the characteristics of oil paintings, but nevertheless have a unique allure. Compared to the intensity of the oil paintings, her monotypes have a softer, water-colour quality.

Last year she exhibited Islands, her first solo exhibition with a series of mono-prints at Lizamore & Associates in Johannesburg, after being mentored by Frikkie Eksteen.

And later this year, Fourie and her fellow artist, Allen Laing, will show their works in an exhibition Skerwe verbeeld at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn. Later in the year, it will be followed by a solo exhibition in Cape Town’s Salon 91.

Fourie is indeed an artist worthy of being noticed.

Also visit www.heidifourieart.blogspot.co.za.

This article originally appeared in the 11 February 2016 edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.