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2024

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September 2024 

First exhibition in the new venue in Spinnerei in Leipzig

Blistering Barnacles
Jake Aikman
14.09.2024 – 29.10.2024

Surfaces and depths
By Sean O’Toole

For more than a decade now, Cape Town painter Jake Aikman has been producing works in a variety of styles and formats that depict the world’s seas, that vast liquid expanse covering more than two thirds of the earth. Rendered in exquisite gradations of green and blue, Aikman’s austere yet entrancing paintings typically show rippled bodies of water without a shoreline in the foreground or horizon. Despite the tenuous certainties that define our terrestrial understanding of the deep, that it will provide food and passage, constancy and tidal recurrence, the sea remains an ungovernable wild place.

A surfer since his teens, Aikman’s direct encounters with the sea, its varying moods and living creatures, have broadened his appreciation for the sea as an unpredictable marine geology and inhabited ecosystem. These experiences also modulated his academic research into repetition, appropriation, copying and the breakdown thereof in painting, research that saw him copy sea paintings by Gerhard Richter and Peter Doig in formative early works. It is no exaggeration to say that the actual and tangible sea always replenishes Aikman’s disciplined studio practice.

A 2013 surfing trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador, for instance, culminated in a breakthrough series showing densely thicketed coastal shorelines and volcanic clouds. Presented in his exhibition At the Quiet Limit, the littorals were noticeably unpeopled. Aikman’s early sea painting often referenced human subjects, but he came to regard the figure as a source of narrative distraction and identitarian complexities. His subsequent work completely abandoned human subjects. Forsaking people and littorals has enabled Aikman to concentrate on rendering – repeatedly, like the endless tidal movements recorded in his works – the mutable character of the sea.

Using a limited palette of French ultramarine, burnt sienna, sap green and very occasionally Prussian blue, Aikman’s output falls into two general categories. The first comprises flatly painted photorealist works depicting either tightly framed water bodies or marine horizons, sometimes with dense cloud formations. Thick impasto works abstractly depicting the sea now complements his loosely photorealist output. Rendered in familiar Aikman tones, the abstract works record ephemeral sensory experiences, of light and haze and the insubstantiality of vision, as well as register Aikman’s longstanding interest in painting as the subject of his work. This is important: his paintings are not simply or only about the sea.

A tireless experimenter, Aikman has iterated his work in various ways. In recent years he has increasingly allowed the colours of his underpainting – chiefly pink, red and yellow – to become visible in his compositions, whether mimetic or abstract. Aikman has also developed strategies that challenge the limitations of a single frame. An on-going series of hinged diptychs presented on plinths introduced a sculptural element into his practice. The binary format of these “book paintings” also gently echoes his earlier Janus series, large diptychs in which the adjoining seascapes mirror each other.

The Janus series, an example of which appears in his exhibition Blistering Barnacles, originated from a month-long stay at Lake Bracciano, a freshwater reservoir northwest of Rome, in 2014. Named after the Roman god of thresholds and transitions, Aikman recognised in this two-faced deity a duality that enabled him to think more expansively about the sea and its many possible meanings. Those meanings exceed the sea’s vast materialist reality. The author Jonathan Raban once described the sea as “the last great romantic wilderness on the planet.” Aikman’s paintings describe the visible surfaces of this vast wilderness, not its deep interior.

If there is a limitation in his point of view, in purposefully lingering at the edge of the deep, it needs to be said that this restraint is also logical: painting, after all, is about surfaces; depth is an illusion. Despite being mapped and surveilled by various technologies, despite its many utilities and on-going debasement as a resource, the sea resists domestication. The deep sea of Aikman’s work remains a place of projection, of mystery and myth, a place of abyssal depths of water. “The sea is so visible and yet so utterly invisible,” says Aikman, pointing to the gentle paradox that animates his mesmerising paintings of the sea.

Sean O’Toole is an art critic and writer living in Cape Town

September 2024 

Thrilled to announce the opening of our new gallery space at Spinnerei Leipzig.  Being part of the Spinnerei Galerien community, in such a beautiful art complex with its rich history and creative energy, is an incredible privilege. We can’t wait to bring exciting exhibitions to this inspiring space and connect with the local and international art scenes.

Find us in Halle 4B 

September 2024 

FNB Joburg 2024
Cheriese Dilrajh SOLO

The opposite of death is birth and creation. Drawing on personal narratives and histories, Cheriese uses the sari, a fabric worn by her mother and grandmothers, to bring these narratives into the present. She is fascinated by landscapes and contemplates how the women in her family are both bound and present within her. She reflects on how she has and has not inherited their struggles, burdens, resistance, and resilience.

The landscape is a geography that binds her to others. We embody places, and they embody us.

Women’s labour tasks like cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing are often invisibilised though it plays a vital role in the economy. Cheriese thinks about her own free will and its limits, her ability to create and construct her reality, whereas the women before her were constrained by many other duties. These constraints shaped them differently than they shaped her she stands on the shoulders of those who came before her. 

Cheriese envisions a world undefined by borders, characterised by hybridity and fluidity, and considers what non-rigidity births. It is a world where one space fertilises the next, a space in flux. These structures that violently bind us necessitate constant undoing and re-making.

There is an exploration of how these elements shape one’s sense of self, being and belonging. Often working at the present and past intersections of history, politics, architecture, and geography, she reflects on how these factors have and continue to shape her.

Through the sensory world of feeling, she finds solace in redefining her terrain, envisioning worlds anew.

June 2024 

Art Nou 2024

Patchouli
Jieyu Zheng
26.06.2024 – 26.07.2024

Her artistic career focuses on the interaction between memory and painting, exploring the dissolution of barriers between dreams and reality over time. Dominated by the color black, which symbolizes her existence, her work interrupts the darkness with points of light, representative of moments of returning to reality.

March 2024 

Amy Rusch’s Artwork in the Iziko Museums of South Africa Collection

That which has been marked by the Wind
comes with the Wind
and is moved by the Wind II

2023

Found plastic bags and thread
cm 107 x 72

February 2024 

IFESTILE 
Group Exhibition Curated by Kim Makin and Francesco Ozzola

Unbound City: Suburbia Contemporary hosts ifestile
Exhibition on the Investec Cape Town Art Fair

‘ifestile’ is Suburbia Contemporary’s first exhibition in the Bo-Kaap neighbourhood of Cape Town. Proposing a selection of artworks that manifest through different types of media, from emerging and established artists in the heart of Cape Town. By expanding beyond the four walls of the gallery, and similar institutional spaces; ‘ifestile’ offers a window into aspects of everyday life that uniquely inform the art world as we know it. Curated by Kim Makin and Francesco Ozzola in a salon-style, ‘ifestile’ seeks contact across alternative contexts. In this way, different paths have been chosen that, through the artists’ gaze offer new possibilities for discovery and adventure in and out of the city. Where ‘ifestile’ presents the isiXhosa translation for ‘window’ in English, through a play on language it is interesting to note the manner in which the word similarly translates across local languages with reference to the same root word; ’ifasitela’ in isiZulu, ‘venster’ in Afrikaans, ‘lefasetere’ in Sepedi, ‘fensethere’ in Setswana, to name but a few. Thus, the exhibition presents unique aspects of every day, that simultaneously speak to some shared experience across space, place and people.

KITSUNE
72 Rose Street, Schotsche Kloof, 8001, Cape Town, City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality, South Africa

January 2023

“If I Only liked You A Little  Bit More And you Liked Me A  Little Less”
14.12.23 – 14.2.24 

October 2023

“Architecture of Baking”
Shadi Yasrebi
5.10 – 5.11.2023

June 2023

“Personal history and histories that is heir to”
Tumelo Mtimkhulu
28.06 – 1.09.23

May 2023 

“Il ritratto di rosario de Luca”
Cured by Andrea de Luca

The Collector is present

A project by Barcellona  Gallery Weekend
19.05.23

February 2023

Investec Cape Town

Jake Aikman, Nambuso Dowelani, Jacob Van Schkalkwyk
17-19.02.2023

2022

December 2022

“Going up and under”
Humdingers
22.12.2022 – 21.01.2023

November 2022

Loop Festival Barcellona

“The Motherfucker”
Ed Young
10-30.11.2022

September 2022

“Guerre des Rêves”
Robert Pettena 
15-29.10.2022

Investec Cape Town Art Fair – Digital Event

Jacob Van Schalkvywk | Kamyar Bineshtarigh | Jake Aikman | Olamide Ogunade

April 2022 

Temporary generation
Olamide Ogunade
21.4.2022 – 21.6.2022

2021

Suburbia Contemporary abre sus puertas en el nuevo espacio de Barcelona el 15 de septiembre 2021. La galería llega con su proyecto y su compromiso con las artes visuales a la Eixample Dreta.

Suburbia nació en 2018 en Granada, con el imperativo de reunir artistas de variados orígenes culturales y ubicaciones geográficas dentro de un solo grupo, presentando puntos radicales de similitud entre diferentes materiales culturales, obras y tradiciones artísticas de todo el mundo.

Reflejando esta filosofía, la galería lanzó Satellite, proyecto que ha tenido sede en Ciudad del Cabo (2019) y Florencia (2020), estructurando el contacto entre Oriente, Occidente, Norte y Sur. Su programa de exposiciones está en constante evolución y comprometido con la crítica, abierto a sistemas de conocimientos tradicionales, lenguajes secretos y ocultos, así como definiciones futuras de arte y práctica artística.

Con su llegada a Barcelona, Suburbia comenzará con un nuevo programa comisariado por la artista visual Mabel Palacín , para la construcción de un contexto local, apoyando jóvenes artistas y nuevas prácticas artísticas contemporáneas con encuentros y exposiciones.

Suburbia inaugura con la exposición grupal “Urban environments and imaginary spaces”, con presencia de obras de:

Eliel David Pérez Marínez
Jake Aikman
Anna Marzuttini
Jacob van Schalkwyk
Ako Atikossie
Sepideh Mehraban
Grip Face
Lucy Jane Turpin
Jaime Poblete
Han Bin

PRESS
Artes visuales y gestión del talento
Estrategias para la promoción y difusión de artistas emergentes en Andalucía (España) y otros contextos iberoamericanos
ISBN: 978-84-09-27912-8
2021, Sevilla, España

2020

September 2020

Surroundings 
Satellite project space 

Exhibiting Artists:
Jake Aikman | Michelangelo Consani | Bonolo Kavula | Sepideh Mehraban | Mabel Palacín | Laura Paoletti | Robert Pettena | Jaime Poblete | Jacob Van Schalkwyk | Shakil Solanki

Read article
meer – Surroundings 
10 Sep – 18 Dec 2020 at Satellite in Florence Italy

March 2020

El pasajero – Mabel Palacin 

Aware that an image is rarely just an image anymore, for about two years I have taken pictures of passengers on public transport in many cities. Cities I live in, have temporarily lived in, or been passing through.

The fleeting encounters with people of all kinds, characters for me, trace human geography of movement that stimulates fantasy. I have wondered many times if I could come across any of the travelers again but in this period of time it has never happened. I have instead come across the gestures of some carried by others and from station to station I have observed the beauty of repetition and I have imagined patterns in which to read messages and look for snapshots made of data.

Data like snapshots capture moments of existence and viewing it has become a way to communicate complexity. We generate data that generates us and that circle extends a quality of photography: seeing what otherwise could not have been seen, discovering hidden perspectives on the world.

The passenger is a set of almost 4,000 photographs that generate shapes, drawings, stories. The passenger is all the passengers or the one that each one decides to find among all. An image is rarely an image anymore, we move in an interdependence where it is difficult to recognize our own limits and our contour becomes blurred.

The passenger appears for the first time in Suburbia where the images generate circles that order gestures and resonances forming an eye that looks at us while 77 passengers consult the mobile, 15 read, 16 sleep, 22 looks at us but only one hug somecloaves of bread.

FULL PROJECT

February 2020

Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2020 – Tomorrows/Today
Bonolo Kavula has been invited to participate at the Tomorrows/Today section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2020.

Article
ARTHROB – Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2020: ArtHrob chats to Nkule Mabaso and Luigi Fassi

Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2020 
Jake Aikman, Michelangelo Consani, Jaime Poblete

2019

ARP – Art Residence Project 7th Edition is designed and promoted by Centro Luigi Di Sarro, Rome, Italy and with the partnership of Suburbia Contemporary in Granada, Spain, and Satellite project space in Cape Town, South Africa.
ARP 7th Edition is realized with a contribution of MAECI – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and of Media Aid Onlus.
This call is an opportunity to encourage the artistic production by emerging artists in the countries involved, Italy, Spain and South Africa.

August 2019

Satellites
Exhibition curated by Alexandra Karakashian and Khanya Mashabela.

Exhibiting Artists:
Isabel Fuentes
Thuli and Asher Gamedze
Jared Ginsburg
Khanya Mashabela
Mitchell Gilbert Messina
Mmabatho Grace Mokalapa
Alexandra Karakashian
Bonolo Kavula
Max Thesen Law
Kyu Sang Lee
Jaime Poblete
Brett Seiler

Cape Town, 8.7.2019
Khanya Mashabela


Suburbia Granada, Satellite Cape Town

By definition, ‘suburb’ refers to an outlying district of an urban area. Connotations of the word vary wildly based on context, hinging largely upon the economic conditions of a particular area’s city centre. Where the city centre is also the centre of wealth, suburbs are associated with the low-income population of that area.

Les banlieues in the French, 90’s cult classic film La Haine are home to the protagonists, a group of young, working-class, second generation immigrants who journey through the urban space on a mission to avenge a friend who has been attacked by riot police. In comparison to the sleek but alienating portrayal of the Parisian commercial district, their suburb is rough but decidedly intimate. In the context of Johannesburg, for example, ‘suburb’ is far more likely to evoke images of expansive, green lawns and aggressively uniform, three metre-high walls. This, in opposition to the poverty and crime associated with Johannesburg’s city centre. Suburbia – suburban utopia, conceptualised as guarded islands or disguised prisons. But they are also vessels, empty and waiting, judged from the outside, but ultimately characterised by their content, the people who inhabit them.

Suburbia Contemporary, set in the outskirts of the city of Granada, was conceived as space operating outside of the centre, with all the opportunities for experimentation which that entails. Art spaces are often, on some level, utopic spaces. They are idealistic and may not always withstand the weight of the world as it is. They are largely defined by the people who have the capital, both financial and cultural, to inhabit them. As spaces that can exist within and battle against privilege and disadvantage, the role of the art gallery can be uncomfortable to evaluate. In La Haine, the protagonists are rejected from such a space.

Satellite, Suburbia Contemporary’s satellite project space, is new to Cape Town but is also one of many art spaces in the suburb of Woodstock, placed within the context of an ongoing, embattled, economic and political history. The height of an artistic space, like any other community, is characterised by a strong sense of self-awareness and reflection, and permeability and flexibility of form. Satellite functions as a link from one ‘margin’ to another, an assertion that worthy dialogue is not restricted to major centres. Still loosely defined, Satellite seeks to be a space for varied artistic visions. Playing within the freedom of the margins, in Cape Town and in Granada, Suburbia Contemporary and Satellite aim to amplify the voices of the artists present in both spaces.

 

May 2019

Jaime Poblete
Nigredo

Alquimista visual

Las obras de arte que el artista Jaime Poblete exhibe en Suburbia Contemporary, galería en Granada, España, denotan una subversión en el manejo bosquejado de las técnicas tradicionales del arte, hoy modalidades artísticas contemporáneas. Así el conjunto de piezas en Nigredo, título de la exposición, designan sensorialmente una pluralidad de estados de construcción visual, sensorial y estética. Esta última como categoría filosófica asociada al arte como proceso (s). Así aparecen estos procesos que el artista propone para solucionar sus aptitudes plásticas: descompone normas rígidas de clasificación técnica para desdoblamientos particulares de elevada potencia resolutiva, purifica los estados de asimilación e interpretación espacial para despertar e iluminar, desde esta ocupación espacial  y cromática, la maleabilidad en la contemporaneidad de la estructuración arquitectónica de las composiciones visuales. Una estructuración que transita entre conceptos y metáforas reverberando en la formación del pensamiento critico, de convicciones y de vivencias a partir de la acción y articulación de todos los agentes artísticos contemporáneos, como el artista, la obra de arte y el público, entre otros.

Las cadenas asociativas que el  artista articula, entre todas las posibilidades inquiridas y atingidas, para hacer fulgurar conceptualmente sus obras de arte y el espacio arquitectónico, denotan la proyección de una propulsiva sintaxis estructural que disuelve la presencia totémica en la piezas tridimensionales y garantiza una proyección ilimitada de posibilidades asimilativas e interpretativas en las que no poseen esta realidad espacial.

Los misterios desde lo cromático, las articulaciones de las tramas, las duplicidades antagónicas y las flexibilidades compositivas de los diversos materiales y sus superficies, los argumentos de las composiciones plásticas, las maleabilidades impositivas de las sombras que se presentan en matices de autenticidad y capacidad proyectivas únicas, colocan  al artista  en la categoría de alquimista visual.

Andrés I. M. Hernández
São Paulo, Mayo 2019

2018

2017 – No profit

Suburbia inaugura este sábado la exposición ‘Mirage’, de Giovanni Ozzola

El centro cultural Suburbia inaugura este sábado a las 20.00 horas la exposición ‘Mirage’, de Giovanni Ozzola (Florencia, 1982), que actualmente vive y trabaja en las Islas Canarias.

La obra de Giovanni Ozzola se centra en la conjunción de diferentes formatos artísticos como son la fotografía, la instalación y la vídeo-instalación…

Robert Pettena
Interview by Francesco Ozzola

Francesco Ozzola: Who are you and what do you do?
Robert Pettena: I spend all my time studying the dynamics of society and the powerful relationship it has with art and the art system, understanding the language of art and how this language changes and why it changes. Sometimes it changes faster than the cultural system in which it is embedded, and society struggles to follow.

FO: What’s your background?
RP: I had a very alternative childhood, spent between England and Italy. Society was changing radically in the 1970s. Individual independence was becoming more important than the idea of the family unit and compromise between family members was no longer considered important. Left wing intellectuals were not keen on sacrificing their independence for the greater good of society. Utopian ideas were strong at that time. People wanted to change things drastically without considering whether it might have been better to make compromises for in the 1970s compromise was frowned upon.
I had the opportunity to experience the squatting movement in Brixton with all the subculture that this entailed. I was also taken to the Albion Fayres, small, alternative festivals where young people had the chance to develop their creative potential. In Italy too I experienced an alternative culture in the country side. Our parents encouraged us to express ourselves creatively right from an early age.

FO: How has your practice changed over time?
RP: My practice has always combined my desire to understand society with memories of my childhood. I can take a theme such as libertarian education and work on it in depth, but whatever the theme it will always be connected to my childhood experiences in some way. Libertarian education was something my parents believed in passionately.
When I started working on Nobel Explosion I was fascinated by Alfred Nobel’s laboratory where he invented dynamite but where he also grew orchids. As a child I wanted to be an inventor – I loved inventing things – including explosives. Nobel was full of contradictions, a meta-example of corporate power.
Over time my art has changed outwardly from being apparently introverted to becoming apparently more extroverted, but how real is this change? Some of my later works, such as ‘The Torture of Meditation ‘ at the Venice Biennial could be seen as something inward looking, though on the surface it may be critiquing society.

FO:
What role does the artist have in society?
RP: I don’t think the artist should have a role. The artist should be sensitive and aware of changes in society before they occur, like the canary in the coal mine. Art doesn’t change society but the artist can draw people’s attention to things that are occurring, things they might otherwise be unaware of. Whenever an artist takes a position he is manipulated by the powers above.

FO: What research do you do?
RP: One project in particular: Nobel Explosion, involved clear philological research to understand the dynamics of corporate power and the way in which it always has to present a positive image of itself. The Nobel corporation wanted the pubic to remember Nobel for his prize, not for the many types of explosives he invented and sold, causing death and destruction in so many countries. This made me think about the positive image of myself that I would like to create for posterity.
I did quite a lot of research for libertarian education, which shed light on my own upbringing.
But in the end my research is always connected with my childhood and the development of society.

FO: What makes you angry?
RP: I’m angry when I think about the way that the best art is always sponsored by the richest elements within an exploitative system. Art sustains the system, even when artists are critical of it, because the system finances them. As artists, whether we achieve fame or not, we give our life blood to the system. The inevitability of this short circuit makes me angry and this anger stimulates my creative juices.

FO:
What’s your dream project?
RP: I dream of living off my art, being able to develop art projects for people without interference from a system that uses the artist as a fragment to embellish itself, within a small, alternative society.

FO: Name something you love and why.
RP: When I travel I lose the idea of a destination or an objective and I begin to discover something in the transient relationships I make along the way, the food I taste, things I see. I love losing myself in the flow of the journey.

FO: Name something you don’t love.
RP: I hate inhuman rules and restrictions that ignore the soul of the people. I detest authoritarian people who try to impose their ideas on others, manipulate people around them and engulf other people’s ideas. Charismatic people tend to annoy me after a while. So I hate McDonalds!