Maverick Life

Embracing abstraction as the geometry of imagination

Installation at the gallery

1 Oct 2024

Non-forms – the geometry of imagination provides a brief but essential reference point for abstraction in recent South African art history.

The composition is alive with colour and movement – abstract forms in blue, green, chartreuse and white jostle up against one another inside the frame. From the centre, a blood-red line emerges, arcs up and over the rest, and points to a restless black background, a scratched and scuffed-up surface upon which these many forms leap and tumble.

The painting, an abstract composition that might be a landscape, or the inverse of one, is by the late South African artist Erik Laubscher.

Titled Joie, it serves as a useful starting point for Keyes Art Mile’s latest exhibition at Gallery 1, Non-forms – the geometry of imagination.

The third exhibition drawn from the Tortilis Collection, an extensive private collection based in Johannesburg, Non-forms carries a focus on abstraction over the past few decades, specifically nonrepresentational forms and compositions.

Featuring a selection of modern and contemporary art produced predominantly in South Africa, the exhibition provides an incidental but informative view of experimental and impulse-driven art-making in the country.

Detail: Sandile Zulu, Shaft Street Runs Through Storm Hill (triptych) (1995). (Photo: Supplied)

abstraction Christo Coetzee, Untitled" (1962). (Photo: Supplied)

Among the artists on exhibition are Walter Battiss, Eugene Labuschagne, Louis Maqhubela, Dirk Meerkotter, Sandile Zulu, Trevor Coleman, Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, and Christo Coetzee.

Speaking about the curatorial process, curator and art consultant Ann Roberts explains that she started by drawing out a broader selection of abstract works from the collection, which quickly became geometric.

“Then we said, okay, well, what about non-forms? The concept started with the abstract landscape by Erik Laubscher, because he uses what look like squares, rectangles and other geometric forms, but they’re not, really. They are his own forms.”

This way of working is one of the central themes running through the works on exhibition.

Rather than portraying landscapes, human and animal forms, or representational objects, the works in Non-forms are driven by emotion, feeling and impulse, and comprise sections of colour, mercurial shapes, textures and speculative gesture.

Considering that many of these works were produced between the 1950s and 1970s – when experimental work of this nature was neither encouraged nor embraced by the art market – the exhibition serves as a rare opportunity to engage with a period of South African art history that’s come to influence so much of contemporary South African abstraction.

In the two works by Christo Coetzee, for example, there is a sense of the artist’s decision to allow himself to be led by process, rather than concept or theme.

In Untitled, the largest work on display, Coetzee demonstrates his free-spirited gesture on the canvas through thick, impasto-style yellows, blues and whites, but he’s also worked into the canvas itself, scratching into the paint and puncturing the canvas to create a cratered and three-dimensional surface with which to engage.

abstraction Hannatjie van der Wat, Vertical White – Summer Pastorale III (1967). (Photo: Supplied)

Eugene Labuschagne, Formal Synthesis (1959). (Photo: Supplied)

Erik Laubscher, Joie (date unknown). (Photo: Supplied)

“The safest place is really the knife’s edge,” said Coetzee in a 1979 interview about the role of the artist, only four years after he famously slashed his own paintings at a solo show in Cape Town.

Coetzee’s other, smaller work on exhibition, Yellow Abstract, is a gritty, tactile work replete with ink, sand and what looks to be slathers of silicon. Nothing is planned, though all of it is intentional. Here, it’s the influence of the Gutai Group, a radical post-war art collective with whom he spent much of his time in Japan, that can be seen in the free-spirited mark-making and playful use of materials.

In the works by Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Dirk Meerkotter and Louis Maqhubela there is a brief view of the evolution of experimental abstraction over the years.

While Cilliers-Barnard’s restless lines against a pale blue background in Abstract forms are a real departure from the rest of her work, and therefore a rare work of risk and experimentation, Meerkotter’s large-scale oil and spray-paint on canvas work, Structure black and white, is very clearly located within his oeuvre, but not without a level of playfulness in the way of both technique and form – the dusty, ethereal lines both shape the work and arch away from it, revealing an exploded view of his approach to composition.

Louis Maqhubela, Morphing VII (2012). (Photo: Supplied)

Joan Mirò, Le combat rituel (date unknown). (Photo: Supplied)

Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Abstract Forms (1960). (Photo: Supplied)

Maqhubela’s small painting, Morphing VII, is among the most contemporary works in the show and manages to embody so many of the qualities of abstraction that are in focus through this exhibition – emotive colour, spirited gesture and an almost embodied consideration of texture.

Sitting alongside the Maqhubela piece is Le Combat Rituel by Spanish painter Joan Miró, which is also an exercise in colour and form and, as the title suggests, alive with activity. The two were almost made to sit alongside one another.

Then there are the works that are representative of abstraction through their approach and concept. In Shaft Street Runs Through Storm Hill, a triptych by Sandile Zulu, the artist lists among his materials: “Fire, water, wind and dust on paper.”

Giuseppe Cattaneo, Thorned Conditions (1960). (Photo: Supplied)

Installation at the gallery. (Photo: Supplied)

In the Walter Battiss work Abstract with colour block, the artist references his great love for language and form by crowding the canvas with various non-forms that at times resemble hieroglyphics, lexicons or prehistoric rock art-style figures and shapes. He also includes, almost as a caveat, a vibrant abstract colour block at the bottom of the work as if reminding the viewer not to take any of it too seriously.

Today, as the global art market tends more towards abstraction, and artists and art lovers alike embrace it as an increasingly valid way of working, thinking and engaging with contemporary life, Non-forms – the geometry of imagination provides a brief but essential reference point for abstraction in recent South African art history.

As Roberts says: “It shows you that South African artists were working at an international standard at a time when the rest of the world was not yet paying attention.” DM

Non-forms – the geometry of imagination is on at Gallery 1, Keyes Art Mile until 2 November 2024.

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