Women From South Africa

"“Ndebele painting comes from a context of architecture. It is the painting of the house.""

"Her figures of traditional ceremonies, women with babies, and those that capture daily life around her reflect profound expressiveness and mastering of her craft. She conveys the experience of apartheid from a Venda women’s perspective focusing in the exploration of her origins, displacement, race, and sex."

"Her work contemplates the feeling of social rejection, censure, and disapproval that comes with diverging from the established guidelines of accepted and expected behaviour."

"Her skill made her the first black woman, and the only Venda woman in South Africa, to become a famous wood carver. She also began to create works which followed more contemporary themes."

"I believe that artwork should not be hidden, but the manner in which we have been robbed, it keeps one worried that it's better to keep one's work on the shelves,"

"These days, people are killing each other and killing children as well. It is very disturbing. We are living in a society that needs leadership."

"This is the picture of a woman who, after some differences with her husband, embarks on a lonely journey with food over her head for her child,"

"Some youths are lazy and addicted to alcohol and drug abuse. That is also killing our country,"

"If nothing happens, our children will die suffering, like their grandparents. We sacrifice, but we are not seeing the changes."

""I started because of a dream. It took a very long time, because I didn't understand it well. This was in 1965 and in 1974, I started the work"."

"The resilience and stoicism of the Mandingo kingdom, along with the vibrant markets of Bamako and Timbuktu, shifted her focus to capturing daily life with urgency and authenticity. The spiritual life of the Malians, marked by acceptance of fate, inspired her to appreciate the harmony of living with circumstances."

"The spiritual life of the Malians, marked by acceptance of fate, inspired her to appreciate the harmony of living with circumstances."

"Aileen's exploration into steel led to kinetic sculptures, introducing movement and dynamic elements to her art."

"She was one of seven artists representing contemporary South African art in Lisbon. Simultaneously, she was commissioned to create four abstract mural panels, titled The Discovery of Gold in the Witwatersrand, for the President Hotel in Johannesburg."

"Her work, inspired by European rural life and nuns from the Sisters of Mercy order, achieved international recognition, with her Walking Nuns painting selling thousands of copies worldwide."

"Maggie Laubser was often influenced by exotic beauty and her various travels within South Africa. Her portraits of young Indian and African women, in which flower motifs are employed as decorative surrounds, are some of her finest. Comparable works include Young girl with head scarf holding a protea, Pondo woman and Indian girl with poinsettias."

"She singled out Franz Marc of Der Blaue Reiter and Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and Pechstein of Die Brücke as significant to her personality, although she would claim not to have been influenced by them."

"Her brushwork and color choice became more expressive and less consistent with her earlier works, using angular features and colored shapes to both her landscape paintings and portraits."

"I still delight in it when people find pleasure in my work. To paint is to reach out, hoping that one will touch. One wants to be understood."

"The past is part of our identity and eve as i sit in Europe thousands miles away from my country, my mind is focused on my ancestors, my past and my culture."

"Artistic practices of performance in contemporary art and theater, through reenactments, involve the public in activities that question the status quo, mobilize, and render visible that, which has been obscured by the official gaze."

"The physical, conceptual, mental or temporal flexibility that the three projects propose de-construct the sacredness of national memory narratives (shaped strongly by collective traumas and their political exploitation)."

"In the context of South Africa, these questions inevitably touch upon the political and historical disposition of the space, as the historical surroundings inform us on a traumatic past of apartheid."

""Sopis's Will is the ultimate time piece...We are able to glance back on a life-in-formation and recognize the subject as discursively produced, 'as project, something to be built"

"Many of these prosthetics are "traditionally" flesh colour, a kind of dirty pink. There is irony here, as flesh colour is not just a category of colour, but nothing less than a western conceit in which whiteness (pink) becomes the universal colour for flesh"

"From the outset, her attitude to painting has been simultaneously modernist and counter-modernist in its complex irreverence to the purity of both creative act and the physical medium."

""Penny Siopis is one of the few artists in the world today who can weave a material web of marks, gestures, voices, words, found things and painted surfaces to entangle the brute forces of history with the delicate threads of human vulnerability"."

"With global warming, what do we imagine? Burning? Drowning? Absolute alterity? And what forms – or formlessnesses – do we imagine this through?"

"The material process of the paintings is a fluid affair; the glue’s capacity to change its form and colour when it comes into contact with other forces – air, gravity, water, my gestures – imbues it with a presence that holds onto itself as ‘something other’, yet can simultaneously take on the guise of an image."

""The constant evolution of the installations and the meanings made from them functions as a generative force in Siopis's work. One thing nestled next to another or dropped over another, creating countless relationships. They're endless these bits of relationships between things and objects and spaces"."

""I was always interested in objects as carriers of meanings beyond themselves, they are physical traces of time, of people's lives and social histories, like an archive, which I use similarly to how I use film...its an ephemeral art really. The objects get taken down and become like paint tubes again"."

"I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency and reshape the self and its interests"

"As much as Pinky Pinky is a perpetrator of violence, it also seems a victim of, and scapegoat for, violent, uncivil actions – a constructed 'something' to blame for social problems."

"Her body of work is divided into colour-based themes, and after her ‘blue period’, Mary moved to purple, with the highly acclaimed The Purple Shall Govern.""

"Sibande's theatrical quotations of the language of dress and use of dramatic poses may be related to photographic representations of the Victorian female hysteric in various stages of a hysterical attack, in that they both evoke a sense of excess."

"Her work contains multiple types of mediums such as sculpture, photography, design, collage, and even theatrics. Sibande's painting and sculpture uses the human form to explore the construction of identity in a postcolonial South African context, but also attempts to critique stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women."

"Sibande has used her work to expose many different things, from postcolonial South Africa to stereotypes of women as well as stereotypes regarding black women in South Africa."

"This was more about how I see the world and how I look at myself as a black woman born in apartheid South Africa in 1982."

"The female visual artists before my generation worked extra hard and paved the way for me. Some of them are being recognised only now; they died poor. For me it was easy; these women were the stepping stones."

"The fabric used to produce uniforms for domestic workers is an instantly recognizable sight in domestic spaces in South Africa, and by applying it to Victorian dress she attempts to make a comment about history of servitude and colonization as it relates to the present in terms of domestic relationships."

"...I can now marry the two worlds – fashion and fine art aren't far off from each other."

"There were no museums and galleries in the town I grew up in; that was foreign to me."

"I had everything I needed, and I went to a good high school which was multiracial. Many families couldn't afford to send their kids there but I was fortunate that my mum was able to. I guess that also pushed me in a certain direction."

"Through her unique depiction of the human figure, we come to appreciate Sebidi’s representation of different forms of black being, and a search into the relationship between humanism, spiritualism and the contemporary black African condition."

"As a teenager, Sebidi became a domestic worker and estranged from her mother and step-father. Sebidi sewed and knitted and decided to pursue her art in her off-time with encouragement from the wife of her employer, who also pushed Sebidi towards formal training."

"The old people told us stories...about how people live and...about how to see. They "read" the clouds. We used to sit outside in the courtyard, and especially in the very bright moonlight when there were a lot of clouds they used to read the stories for us and tell us: look at that, look at the soldiers, look at this! And they would tell us: you're going to have to see other life that's coming."

"Sebidi's portraits often depict abstracted African subjects in bright colours and a rich palette. She is often associated with the realist and quasi-expressionist schools, with her vivid paintings of life in both rural and urban South Africa and similarly striking clay sculptures."

"Her work represents a mode of African modernist painting and sculpture, wherein she depicts her experience of having grown up and living in the South African countryside, and later her experiences as a black artist, living and working under an apartheid regime."

"We were denied the experience of knowing what Nelson Mandela looked like. We were denied the experience of each other's lives." Still, "one developed ways around the system that were illicit but expressive . . . we all learned, as it were, to wiggle and squiggle."

"Searle pays constant attention to the social issues and movements in South Africa, such as xenophobia, access to housing, land and political protests. Her work is not reducible to simple poignant condemning. Rather, through her visual language, ripe with symbolism and narrativity, she creates the entanglement of poetic and violent imagery which captures the contradictions and complexities of South Africa."