Hermann Niebuhr

Video of the Lilian Road Studio Show

2010-11-22T14:06:00.000+02:00

Have a look at the studio show video we made on 20 November. There was a fantastic turnout, and the weather was warm and sunny so we hung out on the balcony, where the kids drew with sidewalk chalk.

Cityscape with Memories

2010-07-06T13:35:00.000+02:00

This commission is going to live in Australia. The people wanted an amalgam view of Johannesburg so I combined three perspectives and then overlaid local figures.

Inside Joburg, the book

2010-06-15T13:35:00.000+02:00

Nechama Brodie's new book Inside Joburg: 101 things to see and do has a feature on my work in the "What to Buy" section -- thanks, Nechama!

Her text reads:

There is also a handful of established artists working outside the conventional gallery/curator structure. One of Joburg's most interesting (and affordable) emerging talents is painter Hermann Niebuhr (www.niebuhr.co.za), who has exhibited several series exploring Joburg's city spaces -- from empty lobbies in Hillbrow apartment blocks to a recent show inspired by the city's disappearing mine dumps, exhibited at the AngloGold Ashanti gallery in Newtown.

Exhibition 14 August Casa Labia, Muizenberg

2010-06-07T17:00:00.000+02:00

I'm happy to announce we've set the date for the exhibition opening at Casa Labia: 14 August 2010.

It will be a solo show. I'm working on the paintings now.

From the Casa Labia website, about the venue:

Built in 1929 to reflect the spirit of 18th century Venice, Casa Labia is the former Muizenberg residence of Count and Countess Natale Labia.

Following a complete two-year restoration by the family, this much-loved national monument was re-opened to the public on 5 May 2010 as South Africa’s most exquisite multi-functional cultural centre and up-market venue; complete with modern art gallery, Africanova boutique and an Italian café.

Time Magazine Asks Me for Joburg Tips

2010-06-05T10:32:00.000+02:00

How to Kick Back in the World Cup Cities is a feature Time Magazine is currently running. They asked for suggestions from "prominent South Africans" and somehow I qualified.

Here's my text. Go to the site to see what the other people suggested one does in Cape Town, Durban, and Joburg when the games are not on.

HERMANN NIEBUHR
38, artist

A brisk walk through the Wilds, one of our oldest parks, would be followed by quiche, cappuccino and the Mail & Guardian at the Service Station café, tel: (27-11) 726 1701, in Melville. After perusing the galleries on Jan Smuts Avenue, I'd head to my studio in Fordsburg for some painting and eat lunch at Shayona, tel: (27-11) 837 2407 — the best vegetarian Indian food in town. I'd work for a few more hours, then call up some friends and go for calamari and prawns at the Troyeville Hotel, tel: (27-11) 402 7709, my scruffy, friendly local, specializing in Mozambican cuisine (there are always takers for this outing). Last, I'd take the M2 highway — the scenic route — circling the city with its lit-up skyscrapers and mine dumps back home to my apartment in Killarney.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Five - FInished!

2010-05-18T10:24:00.000+02:00

After a two week hiatus in the Karoo, I came back home and finished this painting. It's hanging on the wall in our flat and my wife said she wished we could keep it! It's 1m x 1.5m, nice and big.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Four

2010-04-28T19:29:00.000+02:00

I've worked on the buildings a lot and now I've also laid in the sky. The painting takes on much more of a 3-D look.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Three continued

2010-04-26T11:45:00.000+02:00

In these blog entries, I'm documenting the process of painting a complex cityscape, step by step.

Plugging away, still on stage three, in which the buildings in the foreground come to life one by one. Next I'll work on the sky.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Three

2010-04-24T17:33:00.000+02:00

In Stage Three, I pick out surfaces of different buildings and paint them in their right shades. This stage takes a long time, as you can imagine.

Inspirational Film

2010-04-22T15:50:00.001+02:00

Last night I attended this pre-screening. I know the director, Tim Greene, and he is using some of my paintings in a later episode of this series.

The showing was held atop the arts building in Braamfontein, the one shaped like a flying saucer. There was a great turnout, and I loved the film. The team (it's produced by Curious Pictures) put together a wonderful combination of images and sound in this first episode, on the Karoo. They used paintings by my old colleague Ben Coutavidis, as well, which evoked the landscape beautifully.

I enjoyed meeting Johnny Clegg and didn't hesitate to ask him, based on the inspiration of the programme we'd just seen, "What work are you doing to take this country forward?" He responded positively to my question, as did Ivan Vladislavic who was attending. I was fired up by the film and ready to commit to making South Africa what it can be.

New Joburg painting, stage two

2010-04-21T15:32:00.000+02:00

I'm in stage two of this Joburg skyline painting. Stage one was drawing in the black and white outlines of all the buildings, and now I'm working on the shading and contouring.

This is a commission for an executive who is moving to New York and will miss his Joburg.

I took the shot from the Carlton Centre, our tallest building (usually cited as the tallest building in Africa). In the far distance, on the horizon, you can see the Brixton Tower.

Painting in The Joburg Guidebook

2010-04-10T09:25:00.000+02:00

My friend Nechama Brodie is the author/editor of The Joburg Book, published in 2009. It's an informative and well-written collection of history and geography, and I've enjoyed reading it.

Now she has been tasked to transform The Joburg Book into a handy guide for visitors. She tells me it's nearly finished.

In turn, she asked me to provide an image for the new guidebook. I sent her one painting, and we'll see what happens next.

Joburg with Bridge and Figures

2010-03-30T11:43:00.000+02:00

I must say I really like this recent commission. It has a "fun" feel but also a sense of dignity.

Tin Ned

2010-03-27T13:52:00.000+02:00

This is my dog, Ned. He has starred in many previous artworks, mostly paintings. Now he has been immortalized in metal. I took a drawing of Ned and had it made up in laser-cut metal as a commission for a veterinarian's office. This is a miniature version of the one the vet used.

Panorama Tondos

2010-03-18T13:54:00.000+02:00

These two tondos are the long-distance views of Joburg's central business district.

The four pieces (with the two close-ups from yesterday's post) will hang in the entrance foyer of a corporate headquarters.

Downtown Tondos

2010-03-17T11:34:00.000+02:00

This is what I've been working on, in between my new parenting duties.

Gallo House

2010-02-19T14:49:00.000+02:00

Sometimes it's a single building that catches my eye. This beauty, called Gallo House, sits in the centre of Joburg near the Fashion District. I liked its Art Deco lines and the way it responds to the light.

Jeppe Overpass

2010-02-15T16:38:00.002+02:00

I'm always seeking out new ways to look at Joburg. It's a city that can be viewed from many directions. Lately I've concentrated on the "bird's eye view": not straight down, but at a flattering angle. Joburg's geometry continues to fascinate me.

Langermann's Kop

2010-02-11T17:50:00.000+02:00

I used to live near Langermann's Kop, a rocky ridge in "the heartbreak East" of Joburg. The view of the skyline is fantastic, particularly at sunset.

Metropolis

2010-02-09T13:40:00.002+02:00

I loved visitng New York in September, and then a few days ago I found this painting of Joburg I made a while ago that reminds me of New York. Our metropolis Joburg is the Gotham of Africa.

Dekat Article by Carina van Heerden

2010-02-08T10:42:00.004+02:00

I was featured in an article in the most recent Dekat magazine. While the reporters interviewed me, I took them up onto the mine dumps and helped them choose vantage points from which to take photographs. They also published a number of my paintings from the mine series.

Here is an excerpt from the article, and you can read the full text after the jump:

“Without the gold mines Johannesburg would not have
been here, and the mine dumps are what’s left of that
era,” says Hermann. “That’s why the mine dumps are so
specifically ‘Johannesburg’: they are handmade and iconic
and they represent the reasons why we’re here.”

For the past 10 years, Hermann has been portraying
Johannesburg’s growth, decline and flow in his paintings
– from lights flashing past on the highway to picture-perfect
panoramas at sunset. His latest exhibition titled Mine is a
documentary of the mine dumps, from Randfontein on the
West Rand to Boksburg on the East Rand. In the middle
is the Top Star drive-in, also portrayed in Hermann’s
paintings, and so we set out to visit this legend out there on
the Johannesburg horizon.

The well-known, sky-high Ster-Kinekor screen still sits on
top of the mine dump next to Simmonds Street South, while
Johannesburg in all its glory buzzes in the background. “To
open a drive-in here was an absolute stroke of genius,”
Hermann tells us, squinting slightly against the bright sunlight.

From the beginning of the article:

The death of a mine dump

Johannesburg has its own set of rules and rhythm that brings the
city to life – one where buildings are torn down and rebuilt, removed
completely or extended. But what does Johannesburg’s history mean
to its people?

It was a traffic jam like those on the highway to hell, with
a tumult of taxis forcing everyone in our car to keep quiet.
What a lovely, lovely mess it was, and surely one of my
favourite memories of Johannesburg.

That Sunday night, while the residents of the northern
suburbs were calmly sipping on their cappuccinos,
Johannesburg’s city centre was a pulsing source of energy.
We were thoroughly stuck: my middle-class suburban car
was boxed in by three taxis, a baby blue Toyota and a brand
new BMW – and for the first time I saw Johannesburg alive.
People with blankets in plastic carrier bags climbed in and
out of the multitude of minibuses. A sponge mattress, a
wooden buffet table and a black bag full of clothes were
carried out of an old Art Deco apartment block. Two
taxi drivers chatted while one of their taxis stood idling
upstream in a one-way street. Like any other global city,
Johannesburg flourishes on its own set of rules and rhythm
that brings the city to life. A rhythm that guarantees the city
will never stop growing.

Half an hour and 20 storeys later, Johannesburg’s urban
façade greeted us as we stood on the roof of the Lister
Building – Sandton’s towers flickered to the north, a little to
the east we could see the newly upgraded Ellis Park and to
the south-west was the endangered Top Star drive-in, at
home on an old mine dump. That unforgettable panorama
tells the story of Johannesburg’s ever-changing landscape:
one where buildings are torn down and rebuilt, removed
completely or extended. A process riddled with politics,
attempts to preserve the city’s heritage and, of course, the
pivot around which society turns: money and development.
But what does Joburg mean to its people, and how does
this 1 644km² city built on gold influence the everyday life
of its residents?

Photographer Minette de Villiers and I meet the artist
Hermann Niebuhr at his Leslie [Lilian] Road Studios in Fordsburg
to take a closer look at the remains of Johannesburg’s
foundations – the mine dumps. The origins of these heaps
of toxic dust go back more than a hundred years. As more
and more holes and tunnels were dug out of the Highveld
earth, so the city started growing. At first, in the early
1880s, tents decorated the horizon, but as the number of
inhabitants increased (about 3 000 people at that point), a
boom kicked off in the wood and iron industry. The original
single-storey structure of the Corner House was built on
the corner of Simmonds and Commissioner Streets in 1886
and the first government building, the post office, saw the
light on Market Square in Rissik Street in 1888. Shops,
banks, offices and Johannesburg’s first stock exchange
followed, and the original Carlton Hotel opened its chic
doors in 1906.

“Without the gold mines Johannesburg would not have
been here, and the mine dumps are what’s left of that
era,” says Hermann. “That’s why the mine dumps are so
specifically ‘Johannesburg’: they are handmade and iconic
and they represent the reasons why we’re here.”
For the past 10 years, Hermann has been portraying
Johannesburg’s growth, decline and flow in his paintings
– from lights flashing past on the highway to picture-perfect
panoramas at sunset. His latest exhibition titled Mine is a
documentary of the mine dumps, from Randfontein on the
West Rand to Boksburg on the East Rand. In the middle
is the Top Star drive-in, also portrayed in Hermann’s
paintings, and so we set out to visit this legend out there on
the Johannesburg horizon.

A raw wound

The well-known, sky-high Ster-Kinekor screen still sits on
top of the mine dump next to Simmonds Street South, while
Johannesburg in all its glory buzzes in the background. “To
open a drive-in here was an absolute stroke of genius,”
Hermann tells us, squinting slightly against the bright sunlight.
Just imagine hundreds of couples, with sandwiches and
flasks of coffee, coming to see the latest releases under a
starry sky. But the picture evaporates instantly at the distant
hum of a bulldozer. Just a few metres from the cafeteria and
the usual jungle gyms, there’s nothing. One big hole and a
raw wound where bulldozers and workers with hard hats
eat into the Top Star mine dump from the back.

On one side is the Provincial Heritage Resources Agency
of Gauteng (PHRAG). They are trying to protect the mine
dump – which is more than a hundred years old – because
of its iconic status and historical relevance to Johannesburg.
On the other side is Crown Gold Recoveries, an affiliate of
DRDGOLD. They, in turn, are re-mining the dump, which
contains an estimated 128 000oz of gold at an approximate
grade of 0,775g/t. The mine dump, after all, posed a threat
to the environment, and the movie projector stopped
rolling ages ago. And then, of course, there’s the world of
possibilities this patch of land offers to developers.
It is this sudden change in the landscape that affects
Hermann profoundly, and he addresses it in his works.
“The mine dumps form part of our psyche as citizens of
Johannesburg; they are our pyramids! I consider it a
personal loss that the Top Star no longer exists.”

But how will the change affect Johannesburg’s people?
“I think the city’s mine dumps have a big influence and
also no influence at all on the city and its people,” says Hugh
Fraser, general manager of architectural design services at
the PG Group.

“I don’t think people take much notice of them [the mine
dumps]. They’re on the south side of the city centre and not
many people from the north travel in that direction, so it’s
mostly the people from the south and Soweto that see them.
The mine dumps are like ‘an elephant in the bathroom’:
they’re so big, you can’t miss them, and yet people don’t
see them. People don’t realise how beautiful they actually
are, but you need to walk on them to really see this.”
Unfortunately the Top Star’s unique design, influenced by
the Brazilian architecture of the 1950s, will disappear along
with the toxic mine dust. But surely a city has to grow? So,
what do you preserve and what do you knock down? The
preservation of Johannesburg’s heritage has become a
sore point.

The great big heritage fight

Section 28.1 of the National Heritage Resources Act
specifically refers to the protection of mine dumps,
but five of them are currently being re-mined. And
despite protest and the fact that the Rand Steam
Laundries in Napier Street, Richmond was declared
a temporary provincial heritage site, Johannesburg’s
first steam laundry – which dated from 1895 – was
razed to the ground by the Imperial Group (Pty) Ltd
in January 2008. “In the case of the Laundries,
for example, there was brief dismay, then
everything continued as before. That
is the nature of our city. Just like
a leaf that floats downstream
without ever touching a rock,
so is our history. Our identity
simply flows away,” reckons
Hugh. When a heritage
site is torn down over a
weekend or in the middle
of the night, it deprives the
residents of their right to
claim ownership of their
city, and according to
Hermann, this makes
us feel less part of the
place where we live.

So what now?

“There is a need for the protection of our heritage and
heritage areas, and development must be balanced,” says
Mphethi Morojele of MMA Architects in Johannesburg. “Due
to our history, the city’s heritage means different things to
different people. I suspect most black people will have
conflicting emotions about the preservation of this history.”
The Constitutional Court in Braamfontein is an excellent
example of the preservation of Johannesburg’s heritage,
and at the same time it contributes to the much-needed
development of the city. Constitution Hill is built on the
terrain where the Old Fort prison used to be. The history
of the Old Fort lies in the days of the Republic, when Paul
Kruger built a massive fort around an existing part of the
structure to protect the mines, town and mine railways.
After the Anglo-Boer War, the prison grew piece by piece
as a “native” jail was added for black men, then one
for women and finally a cell for prisoners
awaiting trial. Great freedom fighters like
Mahatma Gandhi and
Nelson Mandela
were incarcerated
in these small
cells, and
after the prison was closed down in 1983, a gaping wound
remained uncomfortably in the centre of Johannesburg.
More than 20 years later, the Old Fort got a new lease on life
with the help of Andrew Makin, Janina Masojada and Erik
Orts Hansen of OMM Design Workshop (Durban) and Paul
Wygers of Urban Solutions Architects and Urban Designers
(Johannesburg). In March 2004, Constitution Hill’s doors
opened to the public as a space that is accessible to the
community without having the intimidating presence of a
typical court.

The walls of the court boast a collection of artworks from
South Africa’s top artists that tell the story of our country’s
history, including William Kentridge’s Sleeper and Judith
Mason’s The Blue Dress 3. The tower of light above the
court’s foyer is now a proud part of Johannesburg’s
landscape and two glass towers were also recently
erected above the original stairwell.

A beacon of light and a space accessible to the
surrounding communities sound good in theory, but is this
space in fact used and visited by the community? Hugh
says he likes to entertain the romantic notion that people
do visit the space and look at the art, but the reality is that
Constitution Hill is mainly a thoroughfare from Hillbrow
to Braamfontein. Those who visit it for the art or for its
cultural and historic significance are mostly tourists and
the occasional local visitor. “Sorry, but I’m quite cynical and
our population is generally conservative and uninspired,”
he says.

As citizens of Johannesburg we have an important
responsibility towards the city. Things happen, buildings
are developed and demolished, and it’s our duty to enjoy,
explore and support the city.

“Our responsibility is also towards the environment:
reducing our physical and carbon footprint, conserving
our natural environment and reusing existing buildings,”
Mphethi urges. MMA Architects is currently involved in the
Ellis Park Urban Development Framework, which forms
part of the Inner City Revitalisation of Johannesburg.
“Ellis Park is situated in a fairly dilapidated part of the
city and next to some of the most densely populated
areas in the city centre. The work that was done in the
greater Ellis Park district was part of an urban framework
that benefited from FIFA’s requirements for sports events
to provide a lasting heritage for this part of the city.” FIFA’s
requirements included safety and security, commercial
display spaces and, most importantly, the improvement of
the city’s aesthetic.

“These requirements formed the basis of the developments
in Ellis Park – the upgrading of the streets, the
integration of BRT routes and stations, the upgrading of
public spaces and the development of community parks
and sports fields.”

Johannesburg today

The city centre is also home to some of South Africa’s
biggest players, like Absa, Standard Bank, Transnet and
Anglo Ashanti, all of which have their head offices here.
The city generates about 16 percent of South Africa’s
GDP. According to Mphethi, the city has also started
implementing resources in the management of public
spaces, sometimes in cooperation with the private sector,
for example in the improvement of business districts. “But
it all depends on our vision for the city – who owns what
and who should.

"There are perceptions – and realities – of the city centre
that make people wary. The general perception does not
categorise which parts of the city are susceptible to which
types of crime.” Like Mphethi, I hope that our spaces
will change these perceptions during the 2010 Soccer
World Cup, and that we will be able to see our cities (and
ourselves) through the eyes of the world.

Look at the city!

Hugh Fraser, Mphethi Morojele and Hermann Niebuhr
have an inextinguishable passion for Johannesburg.
“I experience diverse emotions when I drive through
and around the city,” says Hugh. “At times it’s despair, and
sometimes genuine pride.

“As you drive on the M1 over Saxonwold, there’s the
smugness of the northern suburbs: beautiful, but remote.
You have a good view of the trees. The name Saxonwold
comes from the German word Sachsenwald, which means
‘the forests of Sachsen’ (or Saxony). It’s fantastic to move
over the forest at a high speed.”

Look at the city, see how it grows. We dare you to
experience Africa’s New York first-hand.

Oxford Road Overpass

2010-02-05T11:51:00.002+02:00

This is the piece I contributed to the 'on the rhodes' show opening tonight at These Four Walls fine art gallery in Observatory, Cape Town.

I painted it in homage to Edward Hopper's 1946 work Approaching a City:

Rhodes Group Show opening 5 Feb 2010

2010-02-04T15:25:00.002+02:00

The fine art gallery These Four Walls at 169 Lower Main Road in Observatory, Cape Town, opens a show tomorrow night of work by Rhodes University art graduates. I contributed one piece depicting a highway overpass (I'll try to post a photo).

From the gallery's website:

on the rhodes

05 Feb 10 - 27 Feb 10

Some two decades on, this exhibition gathers together a generation of artists schooled in the Department of Fine Art at Grahamstown's Rhode's University in the late 1980's and early 1990's. From that common ground in the small frontier city at the end of apartheid have led various roads followed by these diverse artists, some very well known, others less so.

'on the rhodes' provides an opportunity for reflection and retrospect, a celebration of shared skills and outlooks, but most of all it suggests the exciting destinations still promised by those early trajectories. It is a timely show and ironically fitting that these once-Grahamstown artists now living all over the world should reconvene momentarily in Cape Town.

Artists exhibiting are Cathy Layzell, Anthony Strack, Benjamin Coutouvidis, Hermann Niebuhr, Diana Page, Jane Henderson, Jeremy Franklin, Larissa Hollis, Bretan Ann Moolman, Cindy Britz, Mary Visser, Janet Anderson, Tom Gubb, Ian Garrett, Carl Becker, Kerri Evans, Richard Mather- Pike, Carl Schonland, John Hodgkiss, Mary Slater.

169 Lower Main Rd
Observatory

tel: +27 (0)21 447 7393
cell: +27 (0)79 302 8073
janet@thesefourwalls.co.za

London Cityscape in 4 Easy Steps

2010-02-02T12:21:00.000+02:00

Interview on Radio Today by Joburg heritage maven Flo Bird

2010-01-28T19:34:00.002+02:00

I was interviewed on 1 December 2009 by Flo Bird, whose programme Heritage Today runs on the station Radio Today. Here is the transcript:

Flo: Now today I'm speaking to someone who has great and colourful meaning for us all, for all Joburg people, and that's Hermann Niebuhr, who has just opened an exhibition at the Anglo Gold Ashanti Gallery in Turbine Hall. It's called "mine." It has a double meaning, but it's about the mine dumps. Welcome!

Hermann: Good morning! Thank you, Flo, and good morning to all your listeners. It's a great pleasure to be here. Just as you were talking about the Rissik Street Post Office [in the previous segment, about the historic building that burned down in the city centre and whether it would be restored or not], I sort of took my cue with the work I do, which is documenting Johannesburg, I took my cue from a line, and I can't remember exactly where it comes from, that "Johannesburg is a city that doesn't remember itself."

And it sort of struck me, like, "What's going on here?" that there's no books on Joburg, you know, you go to Cape Town and there are a gajillion coffee table books available in every bookstore.

Until Nechama [Brodie]'s The Joburg Book came along, there was to me a real lack of memorialising the city, celebrating the city, and documenting the city, in fact. I know there were people doing stuff, there was stuff going on, but generally in the mainstream there just seemed to me to be a lack of it, and I was struck by that, you know -- the greatest city in Africa, effectively. And we're not remembering it.

The work you're doing, and the work The Joburg Book is doing, and hopefully some of the work I'm doing and other people are doing is to elevate the city. I mean, we're going to have several visitors here next year [for the 2010 World Cup]...

Flo: We do hope for a little more than that!

Hermann: Exactly! And we've got a great city here. Anyway, so my journey of documenting the city, of looking at it -- this is the third part of an exhibition trilogy of work I've done around Joburg, this one being the mine dumps.

The first thing I did was the inner city, and especially the inner city at night as this sort of no-go, scary, noone can go here zone, but exploring that, within the psyche of South Africans and Joburgers.

Then the second exhibition was entering the city. So it was the streets, and then it was going into the buildings, and I did a whole series of lobbies in buildings in the inner city, in Hillbrow and also in Berea and Yeoville. So that was kind of entering the city.

And then this is the third part which is the mine dumps. It's basically: "this is what the city's about." It's a mining town.What helped me so much to understand this city, in all its glory and in all its cruelty and all its meanness and all its generosity as a city of paradoxes, is: it's a boomtown.

It's a mining town.

Built on a gold rush.

And reinventing itself as many other things. But if you think of it as a gold mining town, a lot of stuff makes sense.

Flo: You mean that's why we haven't quite grown up yet. And although we're a hundred years old, we still keep knocking everything down.

Hermann: Exactly! I think that is set to change as soon as we can get this into people's consciousnesses and minds, that this is our city.

You know the thing about heritage, it works very well in retrospect: "Oh, remember when..." And that's such a flaw in the formula. Heritage is: "Look, this is what we have." Not, "Oh, remember that was there."

A lot of the work I did especially on these mines, speaking to people in my father's generation, they'd say, "Oh, remember that mine dump, and remember that mine dump." And they're disappearing, fast and furiously. And that was a lot of the impetus that I took to make this work, was that these things are disappearing.

The reasons they are disappearing is one thing, but the fact remains, we are losing something that I consider intrinsic to the identity of Johannesburg.

I've got this fabulous quote from Herman Charles Bosman [South Africa's famous writer], which I want to read, to do with the mine dumps. Let me paraphrase; he said:

"The mine dumps are no less an expression of the majesty of the African continent than are the Pyramids. And the mine dumps are more mysterious. The mine dumps have no entrances." [laughs] It's a beautiful --

Flo: Yes, look, I would agree with you, I think that's a wonderful one, and perhaps it's one that we should be using a lot more frequently in the battle to try and save what's left now, such as the Top Star [a drive-in cinema, built high on a mine dump, overlooking downtown Joburg]. Because to me, they are so very much part of me, and part of my home, that I get quite bitter at the loss of them.

And I know I was quite touched when I read, I think it was [finance minister] Trevor Manuel, on returning to South Africa, looking down, coming into the airport looking down, seeing the mine dumps, and [saying] "When we see the mine dumps, we know we're home."

Now if you associate mine dumps and home, then how awful the attack on your home is, when they just bulldoze it away because they can get some money out of it. Now there are a few things in our lives that we wouldn't sell, if we were going to make money, but we don't sell our homes lightly.

I think anything that has that kind of meaning -- you just can't imagine New Yorkers saying, "OK, well, Dubai would like to buy the Statue of Liberty." I mean, would they sell? Regardless of the price, no, they wouldn't. We know that they wouldn't, and I really do agree with Bosman on the mine dumps.

And the exhibition -- I loved the exhibition!

Hermann: Thank you! Great! Can I just add something: what really kicked me into motion was the Top Star, was seeing the Top Star starting to go, and I was like, "You know what, recycle the mine dumps, I get it, there's gold in there, there's money to be made -- leave us the Top Star. This is the most wonderful monument to industry. This is a worker's monument. Let's call it that.

I'm afraid I was there recently, and there's very little left of it. The screen is pretty much what's left of it. So it's a sad day. You know what struck me, and I would like to lobby for a more activist approach among the listeners, maybe, I'm not sure what form it would take, but when I said to a lot of people, "You know, the Top Star is going," they went, "Oh, really. Oh, that's a pity." And I thought, "No, hang on, it's a crying shame!"

Flo: It's much more than a pity. Look, I agree on your point on being much more active about the Top Star, and you know that the Provincial Heritage Resources Authority of Gauteng did declare the dump, provisionally, and I believe there was something wrong with the declaration, and so the [mining] company went ahead [with its destruction]. You know this is one of the things I find really offensive, and as far as I know, DRD, Durban Roodeport Deep Gold, so for all the listeners, if you've got shares in the company, dump them!

Hermann: [laughs]

Flo: Because they [DRD] dumped you! This is the part I want to make clear. They started taking the dump away from behind. People phoned me up and said, "Do you realise they're taking the dump?" And I'd drive past there, and no, you couldn't see anything, until you came up from the south, you didn't see it. So, in other words, the insult was that they were doing it by stealth, they were doing it from the back, they don't care.

Now the irony of Durban Roodeport Deep Gold is that in Berlin they are building a hill. Nothing quite on the scale of the Top Star, but it's trying to get there. Here we are removing a hill. And their hill is going to be an entirely artificial hill that has no intrinsic meaning. They just want to improve the landscape of Berlin. We've got this wonderful place, it has many fantastic memories, and not just in terms of its mining heritage, but also in fact as the only movie house in the world situated on top of a mine dump.

That wonderful view! It's an incredible view from up there.

And the colours. I know that these dumps are wicked and evil and there's lots of awful stuff in them, but for beauty, the dumps really are outstanding. And that's why I loved, I really loved, your exhibition. I loved going through and seeing those wonderful colours coming through -- and in a way, knowing they're poisonous -- in Joburg we live dangerously!

We're not a bunch of wimps here!

You know, we'll clean the rivers with reed beds. But the idea that we should lose our identity because DRD is going to make a fortune out of it, I find really offensive. And I find most of the mining companies have always been very offensive. They have no interest whatsoever, and they always tell us their loyalty is to their shareholders. Well, OK, if their loyalty is to their shareholders, then let not one person who values mine dumps have a share in Durban Roodeport Deep. Sell today! That's my advice.

Hermann: Strong views from Flo today! [laughs]

Flo: No, I'm absolutely serious. We should have principles as well. We can't pretend that we want to keep the dump if we also want to keep the profit.

Hermann: Can I just highlight another thing, which you just mentioned in passing, which is a fabulous thing about the mine dumps, is that paradox of reclamation, like at the old Turbine Hall. It's a great opportunity.

Flo: Anglo Gold Ashanti Gallery in Turbine Hall.

Hermann: Thank you very much, Flo!

Interview by Fred de Vries

2010-01-27T15:48:00.006+02:00

Fred de Vries is a well-known journalist who lives in Johannesburg. He writes for South African and Dutch publications.

This interview comes from his book The Fred de Vries Interviews: From Abdullah to Zille (2008, Wits University Press), a collection of 39 interviews with South African artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers.

Hermann Niebuhr
Fordsburg, Johannesburg, April 2007

Neon lights, dodgy characters, gunshots, the smell of junk food, traces of piss and vomit. Hillbrow doesn't seem the most alluring part of town to explore at night. And certainly not the place to get out of your car and take photographs of lobbies of dilapidated apartment buildings. But that's exactly what Joburg artist Hermann Niebuhr has been doing for the last two months. Those lobbies, devoid of physical human presence, form the basis of a new set of paintings.

"There are parts of Hillbrow where you keep the camera down, because they shoot back, ha ha," says Niebuhr in his studio in Fordsburg. On a more serious note he adds, "When I first started driving around Hillbrow, it was like yeeakgrrrrrr. Then, phase two, I stopped the car and took a picture. By phase ten you get out of the car and you're fine. And you realise you're unpacking a whole lot of your own crap. I'm not saying: wear a Rolex and walk around Hillbrow. Don't be stupid. But you can get out of your car. Nothing has ever happened to me. I walk into those lobbies and say: 'Hi, I'm here to take pictures.' Sometimes they chase me away, sometimes they say it's fine."

Niebuhr's latest project is the logical follow-up to his 2005 exhibition Night Ride Home, which encapsulated the nightly journeys from his studio to his house in Kensignton. It resulted in a beautiful, almost dreamlike overview at the Absa Gallery, full of blurred visions and shattered lights, a kind of Edward Hopper for the twenty-first century.

The new paintings seem to go even deeper. "As your language develops, you're able to describe more authentically the things that you can see," says Niebuhr. "That's what I'm doing now. I go into the buildings. And once you're inside them, they still carry the knowledge from when you first saw them and thought: oh my God."

Both projects form part of his exploration of the state of the city. They lead us to pertinent questions about our aims, ideals and sense of belonging. Is Joburg a failed project or a success? Why are we so scared? Is this fear justified?
"Those issues are very much resonant with me," says Niebuhr. "I'm not going in there to see if black people like me. They don't give a fuck, and neither do I. I go in because I've identified these lobbies as beautiful metaphors for a lot of other stuff. They are the in-between thing. What I'm interested in, and maybe I put it a bit simplistically, is signs of decay, things just starting to be dirty and grubby, but not yet failed. It's the post-colonial dream that's starting to get shabby."

He shows me around his studio, where the first products of his nightly Hillbrow adventure decorate the walls. Stark, beautifully executed paintings, full of small but significant details that hint at the melancholy, the yearning and rootless lives behind those doors.

Niebuhr's trips around Joburg's underbelly are quite a dramatic departure from the austerity of his previous life, which took shape when he went to study theology at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1990. "I was a confused youngster. I was: 'I'm a Christian, I'm praying for everyone.' I had this fiery Baptist thing. Then I went down there (to Rhodes), did a few courses and quickly changed to art. I realised theology wasn't for me. It was really just part of being a youngster, working through the stuff that had been imposed on you."

At Rhodes he specialised in landscapes. And when he left Grahamstown he didn't go to Joburg or Cape Town, but opted to live like a virtual hermit in De Rust, a dorpie (little town) in the Karoo. There he epitomised the old notion of the romantic artist, singularly painting and communicating with nature. "I build an empire there. I was untouchable in many ways, lost in this going into my own world. I wasn't even affected by my exhibitions. It would be the work going out and cash would come in. I often wasn't there for the openings. It was very bohemian in a sense: this wild man communicating with nature. Very romantic, a kind of modernist Rousseau. I loved it."

He pauses to reminisce about those nine years of rural bliss. "I survived by painting, sending my work to galleries. It was survival on a shoestring. But what it gave me was a lot of time and space to paint. My work was always around the landscape. There was a metaphysical thing going on with the landscapes."

All this came to an end when he separated from the artist girlfriend with whom he had shared this isolated life. "One morning, after she had left, I woke up and realised: I can't do this on my own. It wasn't a solitary pursuit. I sat there on my stoep (veranda), looking out over my empire, my olive groves, and thought: either you retire now or you go back into the world and roll up your sleeves. That was five years ago."

So, instead of whiling away in the Karoo, he started traveling. He went to Europe for the first time, saw all the great museums. He went to Ireland, had an exhibition there. He stayed in Berlin, hearing the language of his great-grandfather who came to South Africa as a missionary. "I do speak German. I went to a Lutheran church. I did my catechism. At home we still speak German. But it's a strange German, like from another era. When I was in Germany people said: 'Ah, please ask me what the time is again.' They laughed and laughed."

Three years ago he settled back in the city of his birth, Joburg. Through the years he has developed a love/hate relationship with the creepy metropolis. "I grew up in the suburbs, Bryanston. My father was an accountant. I got out as soon as I could. Then, almost fifteen years later, I returned to this Joburg that had always been, in a way, forbidden to me. Because you didn't go to town, it was considered dangerous. And then I totally embraced it."

Joburg pulls at him, teases him, inspires him, confuses, him, tears him apart. His new girlfriend, who is American, found it impossible to understand his fascination. "She said she didn't want to live here. I told her it was a great city. So she asked me to show what's so great about it. And we drove around. I took her to the muti (traditional medicine) market and all those little discoveries you make. But in the end I realised it's a very dysfunctional city. It doesn't actually work. You can't show it to people. You have this relationship with it, you bond with it. That's what you have, and then you embellish and romanticise that a bit. We live in hope. But it's a tough, rough, city with an underlying violence to it."

He gets up and makes some coffee, which we drink on the balcony, looking out over the Asian hustle and bustle of Main Street. "We have a strangely dysfunctional relationship to the city, which may be based on history," continues Niebuhr. "But also, as you let it wash over you, you have beautiful, terrific encounters. Like these homeless guys who sleep outside and are my security. We've never been ripped off. Here you establish easy relationships with your community. I know the shopkeepers there, the tailor from across the road, the travel agency. It's a complete community. They ask me how business is. It's really sweet. You don't have that in the suburbs."

And indeed, as we sit there, watching the traders, smelling the food, seeing the traffic, we experience one of those magic, inexplicable Joburg moments. Surely his girlfriend must have felt the same way? Hermann shakes his head. "She's left, gone back to the US. I'll get her back. But not here, she doesn't want to live here. She doesn't feel safe. She feels she can't get around. She liked Cape Town. I hate Cape Town for all the reasons that I like this place. It's the African gateway. Cape Town's problems don't interest me, whereas Joburg's problems are ... You know, here you're grappling. And I'm not talking about some fucker with a gun at your head. That's a national problem."

Second Hands

2010-01-24T10:29:00.005+02:00

I was looking through art books I had picked up at second hand shops, and it occurred to me to focus on the hands from classical works. I selected 25 of the most beautiful hands from Titian and other masters, and painted them onto one canvas.

Corot's mine

2010-01-23T14:08:00.001+02:00

This painting from my recent exhibition mine is called "Corot's mine."

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter (1796-1875). He is the leading figure of the Barbizon School of painting and became as well known for his portrayals of human figures as for his plein-air (working outside the studio) landscape paintings.

The woman in my painting is a direct reference to Corot's reclining nude, but I have placed her in front of a Johannesburg mine dump. The dark brown "roots" of paint trickle from the landscape over the human figure.

"Corot's mine" is both homage to this master and a merging of the current-day man-made, toxic scenery with the tradition of 19th century landscape painting.

Artist's Residency in Brazil

2010-01-19T16:57:00.003+02:00

I've just been accepted to an Artist's Residency programme in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We'll be there from 15 August until 15 November 2010.

The programme is run by the Foundation Armando Alvares Penteado, or FAAP. It's attached to a university with an art department, and I'll be giving lectures as well as having dedicated studio time in a beautiful 1920s building in the center of the megalopolis.

Collateral

2010-01-12T13:15:00.009+02:00

"Collateral" - oil on canvas, by Hermann Niebuhr.

For the story behind the painting ...

"Collateral" is a cityscape portraying Joburg's skyline as seen from a Hillbrow rooftop.

The main shift from reality is that all corporate branding has been stripped from the buildings, returning the structures to their original forms. Rather than merely romanticising the architecture, however, the removal of branding re-claims the scene as a cultural space.

Taking that re-claiming one step further, a new label has been assigned: "collateral".

This financial transaction term invites the viewer to ask, What is being traded? What is being offered, and in exchange for what?

The introduction of text opens up a mental zone which operates alongside and within the visual zone of the image. A kind of poetry re-brands the view.

And while the nearly monochromatic, depopulated cityscape suggests an apocalyptic moment, the burgeoning clouds and the late-afternoon sunlight offer some visual relief as well as a reminder of balancing, cycles, and continuity.

Book Launch: The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers, SA version

2009-11-25T17:43:00.002+02:00

Last night we saw my friend Dougie get interviewed by Rian Malan at the South African launch of The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.

We attended the New York launch party of this book, also, as I mentioned earlier. Here at the Boekehuis, Joburg's best independent bookstore, the dedicated crowd hung on every word. The bookshop was not only crowded, it was intent -- probably because the Zimbabwe story is only a stone's throw away.

The SA book cover is different from the US cover (wish I'd painted either of them, but we ran out of time -- the publisher was in a rush). The SA one is more literal, an actual photo of the empty swimming pool at Douglas' parents' resort, whereas the albino frog on the US cover refers to an anecdote in the story as well as the "white outsiders" that the Rogers family sometimes is and sometimes is not in Zimbabwe.

For more info on Douglas and his book, see www.douglasrogers.org

"mine" exhibition opening

2009-11-12T13:03:00.002+02:00

My exhibition "mine" opened last night at the AshantiGold gallery in the Turbine Hall, Johannesburg. Thanks to all who came -- there was a great turnout. The show will be up until the end of January 2010.

Ricky Burnett's intro to the "mine" catalogue

2009-11-09T11:04:00.006+02:00

A Slant of Light
by Ricky Burnett

A poem by Emily Dickinson begins: "There's a certain slant of light, winter afternoons / that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes." Lines ripe with portent. But the lines that follow, "…when it comes the landscape listens / shadows hold their breath…" make me, well, hold my breath.

When a certain light comes the landscape listens, is alert, is attentive, it is, perhaps, waiting and anticipating: a landscape bristling with intimations of awareness. The world is not dead but sensate. The world has a look, variable and intense, that speaks of mood and attitude. What an intrinsically painterly thought – the search for aliveness in the look of things, the world attentive to itself and listening. And, listening by light! Or, should it be listening to the light, or even, perhaps, listening through the light? What a delicious, but essentially painterly, paradox, this is: listening to, or by, or through light.

How much more gripping then to a painter's sensibility than the line that follows, "…shadows hold their breath…" And shadows, of course, breathe light. (Remember what Picasso said about Matisse? It was something to the effect that Matisse was a great painter because he had such great lungs.) To think of breathing shadows is to think again in terms of the living organism: 'shadow' not so much as blot but as entity. Shadows breathing in the world, is a great thought but it is, I think, a shift to a whole other level of greatness to think of shadows holding their breath. We hold our breath so as either not to drown, or not to disturb, not to disturb, perhaps, some fine and delicate condition – a condition of things so fine as to be vulnerable to respiration.

This evocation by Dickinson of the potent alchemy of an angle of light, the listening landscape and the suspenseful dark provides a useful backdrop to a few general remarks that I wish to make on Hermann's new work.

The work strikes me as moody. It is a moodiness conjured by the slants of light, it's occasional almost syrupy lividity, its glower and weight: by the bristling animation of the painted surface, a kind of listening: and, by those suspenseful darks. A moodiness conjured also by a pervasive sense of the "low-slung," - I can find no better way to say this. There is a kind of hip-level pivot to the compositions. Even if only by implication rather than by design, what is above is larger than what is below and what is below seems to either slink or stretch and in either pose, bake in the enormous light. This hip-like, low slung quality is true even when he stacks two or three strips atop on another, perhaps even more so actually.

I think a case could be made that despite an allusion to history, cultural and industrial, despite the occasional injection of 'foreign" symbolic elements, a camera, a nude, a rabbit, despite a lone figure or an illusive tableau, that the narrative in these paintings, and I suspect that there is one, lies not in these almost literary elements, but lies, rather, in the mood.

This body of work is also, by and large, the most overtly painterly that I have seen from Hermann's studio. Brushiness aside, in this new work he has, conceptually, frequently ruffled the picture surface to seek out an egregiously painted event. Some of the conscious decisions were a) to counterpoint image with strips of random paint daubs, a sort of palette confession; b) to leave the stretched rectangle or circle of the canvas incomplete, the image left hanging within it or swathed across it: c) to allow lots of drips, a kind of process confession: d) to hang a washing line of colour over a dark and skeletal scene, itself bleached of colour.

And this brings me to my favourite group in this new body of work, those bleached of natural light and steeped in an almost spectral dark. There is, for me, evident in these five paintings a quite unique vision. In each case the 'scene' is transformed by the painters eye and hand into large a complex metaphor. By further eradicating elements of the pictorial he has released a potent painterly image. The vision is authoritative, the range of paint handling is exquisite, the blacks keenly drawn, the whites creamily real, the tableau of figures with a donkey fluid enough to hover in the realm of imminence, the city is dark enough to be Gotham, yet recognizable as home. And why would one of them be a rondo - round like the eye piece of a microscope, round like the lid of a Petri-dish?

Another question comes to mind, when looking at Hermann's work are we sharing in a glance or a gaze?

We may see and describe Hermann's works as landscapes, on the other hand listening to Dickinson and looking at his work we may go a little further and not merely see the paintings as landscapes but, more excitingly, we may see the landscape as painting.

Ricky Burnett, despite lengthy sojourns in Britain and the United States, has been active in the art world in South Africa for many years, as a teacher, writer, curator (Tributaries, the Jackson Hlungwani retrospective and Newtown Galleries) and now as a practicing artist. He has a private teaching studio in Johannesburg.

Nechama Brodie's intro to the "mine" catalogue

2009-11-07T10:54:00.009+02:00

As below, so above

By Nechama Brodie

Before there were gold mines, there was grassland. Russet grass and red grass and giant spear grass, and occasional trees in sheltered outcrops and kloofs. This is Rocky Highveld Grassland, transitional vegetation that occurs between the true grasslands of the inland plateau and the bushveld; grasses that grow in rocky mountains, hills, ridges and plains of quartzite, conglomerate, shale, dolomite and andesitic lava.

Johannesburg sits on the edge of a 3,2 billion-year-old granite dome, formed at the same time as the earth's continental crust and extending 70 kilometres north to Tshwane. This is the oldest rock formation in Gauteng, and is the basement on which bands of younger sedimentary and volcanic rocks were later deposited.

The Boers named this place the Witwatersrand, white waters ridge, apparently because of the waterfalls running off the area's stony outcrops. In reality, there was no water, not in any great quantities; it is possible that quartz and iron pyrite deposits in the stone may have reflected light, giving the appearance of water. The city is, however, divided by a continental watershed. Streams to the north of Johannesburg flow into the Crocodile River then into the Limpopo, making its way to the warm Indian Ocean on the east cost. Water flowing on the southern side of the city ends up in the Vaal, joining the Orange River before travelling a thousand kilometres to reach the icy Atlantic Ocean on the west coast.

South of the city's centre lies the Witwatersrand Supergroup, a column of sedimentary deposits created between 2,7 billion and 3 billion years ago, then buried deep underground by the force of the impact of a giant meteor. The Witwatersrand Supergroup slopes away from the city in sequences of shale, quartzite and conglomerate. In Afrikaans the conglomerate was known as banket, named after a Dutch nougat-like confection studded with almonds. The conglomerate was studded with quartz, and in the surrounding rock there was gold.

Although there were several earlier gold finds on the Rand the first outcrop of the main reef was discovered by George Harrison in 1886, who received claim No.19 on the farm of Langlaagte as his zoekers or discoverer's claim. Harrison later sold his portion for just £10 and disappeared, rumoured to have been eaten by lions.

The reef horizons run several kilometres underground, extending from 65 kilometres east of Johannesburg to 145 kilometres west of the city, forming a crescent around the Witwatersrand basin. The gold-bearing rock bands are, in places, only centimetres thick – ranging from less than 20 centimetres up to 100 centimetres. This is a landscape of economic geography, defined in feet, metres, troy ounces and grams.

Early goldmines used large-scale versions of what was essentially a 400-year-old mining technique: the ore would be mined, crushed to a coarse powder (in this case by large battery stampers) then panned through water or solution to reveal the gold. The outcrops of surface conglomerate, weathered and oxidised from centuries of exposure, were extracted at such a rapid rate that within a few years miners had reached depths of 30 metres below the surface – where they found the gold ore was 'locked' inside sulphur-containing pyrites. This required a much more complex treatment, and the recovery rate from the ore dropped too low for mining operations to yield a profit. Modern science provided a timely intervention in the form of a newly patented process developed by three Glaswegians – the brothers RW and W Forrest, and JS MacArthur. The MacArthur-Forrest process updated an older method of treating crushed ore with a weak solution of cyanide; this dissolved the gold, very effectively, into the solution. The remaining rock particles would then be filtered off leaving the gold-heavy cyanide solution, to which zinc dust was added, causing fine specks of gold to precipitate. This gold could then be separated and refined, and the highly poisonous cyanide disposed of.

The reef that runs under Johannesburg contains relatively low-grade ore – it can take a ton of rock to yield just four grams of gold. The extent of the reef deposits and the high price of gold made continued mining operations viable, but required greater capital investment, specialised machinery and the work of thousands of labourers.

In the early surface and trench mines, black miners would throw ore up from level to level; as the depth of mines increased, the ore was hoisted by means of bullocks, and whips, then mechanical winches. As the mines got deeper, labourers were employed in the construction of supports – timber, concrete pillars or sand filling used to secure the workings against earth tremors and rockbursts. Miners drilled underground shafts and stopes using large jackhammers that could be operated by one person, drilling on average 24 metres a shift.

In this way, the mining companies operating along the Rand removed millions of tons of hard rock – Crown Mines alone removed 160 million tons of rock, from a depth of several thousand metres; by comparison, the excavation of the Suez Canal entailed the removal of just 130 million tons of soft material, from comparatively shallow depths.

On the Witwatersrand, some 5 000 million tons of waste material – rock milled to powder fineness and, after treatment, disposed of – was deposited on 247 slimes dams (consisting of finer sand) and 95 sand dumps. For years, these dumps caused severe air pollution problems particularly during the city's dry winter months. The mining industry tried various means of stabilising the surfaces of the dumps, including experimenting with resin, plastic, cement and bitumen. Attempts to establish natural plant growth on the dumps were initially unsuccessful; interestingly, it was not the presence of cyanide in the sand that created a problem, as the cyanide would naturally break down after being exposed to sunlight and air. Rather, the low pH levels and very fine quality of the sand, together with the high rate of erosion, discouraged vegetation. To encourage plant growth, lime was added to the sand to increase the pH, and reed windbreaks were planted to control the movement of the sand.

Mining operations in Johannesburg ceased in the 1970s, not because the gold reserves were depleted but because of a drop in gold prices combined with old mining technology, and growing political unrest. The names of the mines are largely forgotten: Langlaagte Estate, Crown Mines, Robinson Deep, Village Main Reef, City Deep, Geldenhuis Deep, Ferreira Deep. Left behind were the silhouettes of mining headgears; the Crown Mines village; a labyrinth of abandoned mineshafts criss-crossing the city centre; and the mine dumps, some of them 50 metres high. The most iconic of these is the Top Star, built in the early 1960s as a European drive-in movie theatre on top of the old Ferreira's Dump. Despite attempts by heritage agencies to protect the site, the Top Star is rapidly being demolished by reclamation company DRDGold, its bulldozers eviscerating the landmark like the farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean in Roald Dahl's childhood classic Fantastic Mr Fox.

Advances in modern extraction processes mean that mine dumps are considered viable for reclamation when 0,4 grams of gold can be obtained per ton – some have yielded as high as 0,65 grams per ton. As long as the gold price remains above R80 000 a kilogram, the city's mine dumps will continue to be reclaimed; and with them, the face of Johannesburg will forever be altered.

Nechama Brodie is editor and co-author of The Joburg Book (Pan Macmillan and Sharp Sharp Media)

Book Launch: Resident Alien by Rian Malan

2009-11-04T13:24:00.001+02:00

We went to Rian Malan's book launch at The Radium Beerhall last night. Resident Alien is a collection of his magazine articles from the past 20 years.

I loved the speeches -- by Rian himself, by his friend Steven "Boytjie" Sidley who harbored Rian when he fled to Los Angeles, and by the publisher.

Each illuminated what an outcast Rian has made himself by espousing difficult beliefs -- for example, that AIDS is an exaggerated crisis, with numbers inflated in order to garner more international funding. I can't wait to read the book.

The Radium is one of my favorite places in Joburg. The oldest pub still open in the city, it's cozy and real, with wood-clad walls and Guinness on tap.

For more on the launch and a book summary:
http://jonathanball.book.co.za/blog/2009/11/12/rian-malans-resident-alien-launched-at-the-radium-beer-hall/

Invitation to "mine" exhibition

2009-11-01T14:51:00.001+02:00

In his new series of oil paintings, "mine", Niebuhr documents Joburg's mine dumps and finds three major themes: a landscape that refuses to remember itself; a city built on fate and the forces of a gold rush; and the paradox of poisonous beauty -- the mine dumps may look like mountains of gold dust but their bleached appearance is actually the result of the toxic process of gold extraction.

The mine dumps are disappearing, cleared to recycle their minerals and to open new spaces for development. Landmarks that people have known for years will be gone --but since mine dumps have no names, they will not be commemorated.

Niebuhr finds a certain pathos in their disappearance.

Johannesburg would not exist but for the gold mines, and the dumps are their remnants. Niebuhr says, "That's why the mine dumps are so specifically Joburg: they are man-made, iconic, and represent the reasons we are here."

Last, Niebuhr says he has been drawn to the mine dumps despite their toxicity. "I've climbed them at dawn and at sunset," and he keeps coming back for more. Using the Top Star drive-in cinema as a central point, he has been documenting the mine dumps from Randfontein on the West Rand to Boksburg on the East.

Born here, Niebuhr has been painting Johannesburg for nearly a decade. Working from his studio in Fordsburg, he makes cityscapes and urban portraits to capture the flux of decay and growth which so characterise Joburg, and "mine" is his latest statement on a city he considers truly his.

Book Launch: The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers, US version

2009-09-30T16:50:00.002+02:00

In a luxurious apartment in SoHo filled with art, we attended the US launch of Douglas Rogers' book "The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe."

Douglas went to university with me, and we have kept in touch since then, traveling through post-Katrina Louisiana on a photo-journalistic mission and getting up to other mischief. This time we had a terrific visit with Douglas and his wife Gracie at their home in Brooklyn.

Douglas will be coming to South Africa to promote his book in about two months. For more information on The Last Resort, which is getting great reviews, see www.douglasrogers.org

"Portrait with Keys" released in the U.S.

2009-06-14T09:52:00.002+02:00

The excellent book "Portrait with Keys" has just been published in the United States by Norton. The author, Ivan Vladislavic, asked me to contribute a painting for the cover. I'm very pleased by the way it turned out.

Wedding Day video slideshow

2009-04-26T12:59:00.003+02:00

Here's the slideshow Dutchy made of our wedding day.

Rooftop of the Troyeville Hotel, Johannesburg. 25 April 2009.

Two Glass Block Nudes

2009-03-13T09:44:00.001+02:00

Just completed these paintings. They're about 3 metres high. The distortion comes from looking at the subjects through glass blocks.

Bram Fischer Public Art Commission

2009-02-23T17:11:00.003+02:00

"If in my fight I can encourage even some people to understand and to abandon policies they now so blindly follow, I shall not regret any punishment I may incur." - Bram Fischer, 1965

The Johannesburg Development Agency asked me to make work for a community hall in Bram Fischerville, a neighborhood in Soweto named after human rights activist Bram Fischer. He was the defense attorney for Nelson Mandela and saved Mandela from the death penalty. Later, Fischer himself was sentenced to a long imprisonment and died because of poor medical treatment he received in jail.

I designed a five-circle mural series and a large tondo (round painting) because the windows in the hall are circular. Each circle represents one aspect of his personality, and I chose five and the bright red background to echo the 5-pointed star of the Communist Party, of which he was a founding and prominent member, back when it was a powerful force in anti-apartheid activism.

Then, on the display wall at ground level, I wrote a bio of Bram Fischer and had it letter-stencilled onto a big sheet of Plexiglass, and hung that on the wall. Next to it, I cut out a thick piece of chipboard Supawood and painted a head and shoulders portrait of Fischer there.

Friends and Strangers

2009-02-18T17:36:00.000+02:00

Each of these portraits was done by having the subject sit behind a wall I built of glass blocks, the kind you find in a shower.

I know some of these people; others I pulled in from the streets of Fordsburg.

Whether they are friends or strangers, however, each one reveals aspects of their hidden personalities, via the distortions of the glass.

This project was something different for me and I enjoyed the challenge of painting people rather than cityscapes or landscapes. It struck me that one can possibly get to know a place through the faces that populate it.

Anyway, these are now framed and could be arranged in a long line or in this cube formation; they look good either way.

Anima Animus

2009-01-24T10:39:00.001+02:00

I painted the "Anima Animus" series in response to things I had read and seen about totem animals -- the idea that each one of us has a certain animal archetype that governs our behaviour.

Wim Wenders goes to Hillbrow

2009-01-19T15:00:00.001+02:00

I just finished this painting and named it after Wim Wenders, for the high perspective on the city.

The backstory is that to get this perspective, I accompanied a guy who is laying in cables to give HIllbrow a wireless phone network. So he had access to rooftops, etc, that are usually difficult to get to.

Why the Karoo is the Place to Be

2008-10-20T09:39:00.001+02:00

by Douglas Rogers

Telegraph.co.uk

I hate Hermann Niebuhr. It's late afternoon – magic hour – in the Klein Karoo, a fertile valley in South Africa's Groot Karoo desert, and I'm sipping a sweet muscatel on the veranda of Boesmanskop farm guesthouse cursing my old university friend.

In front of me, vineyards of plump merlot and gardens of agapanthus stretch to the fertile foothills of the Swartberg Mountains, while in the southern distance the giant Outeniqua peaks that barricade the desert from the ocean are a kaleidoscope of red and purple in the fading brilliance of the sun.

It was Niebuhr who suggested I visit Boesmanskop. "The Gardens of Versailles in the Desert," he called it. And he was right. It's also Niebuhr who, over the years, has introduced me to the wine farms and pretty towns on the Klein Karoo's R62 road. "Like Route 66 – but with better characters," he raved. And he had a point there, too.

But, most annoying of all, it was Niebuhr who, a decade ago – when the rest of us thought the Karoo was a desolate backwater of conservative Afrikaners best driven through at high speed on the way to the Cape coast – bought a tin-roof Karoo shack in which to live and paint the region's desert landscapes and rusty windmills. Today his property is worth 50 times what he paid for it, his paintings fetch five-figure sums, and the R62 is the coolest alternative to the famous coastal Garden Route.

A sprawling semi-desert covering 150,000 sq miles of the Cape province, the Karoo has long been thought good for three things: sheep, ostriches and tumbleweed. Boer farmers first settled the desert in the mid‑1700s, but for the next two centuries little changed. Until now. Artist pioneers like Hermann led the way, but recently hoteliers, restaurateurs and creative urbanites tired of South Africa's cities have been moving in to open galleries and guesthouses, or turning those sheep farms into safari lodges. The ostrich business is booming again, thanks to the current taste for leaner meats. The Karoo is South Africa's hip new tourism frontier.

My latest visit involved a week-long drive from Cape Town. I would spend three days in the Klein Karoo exploring the towns and mountain passes on the R62, a former ox‑wagon trail running 300 miles through the valley basin; and then move to a new safari lodge in the vast expanse of the Groot Karoo. Niebuhr wasn't with me, but he suggested places to see and people to meet.

Barrydale, a serene hamlet 100 miles east of Cape Town, is the gateway to the Klein Karoo, and I spent my first night there, recharging for the drive ahead. Once a typically conservative Karoo dorp, or small town, it's now a stylish destination for weekending Capetonians, best experienced at The Barrydale, the formerly decrepit Victorian hotel on its main street, now reincarnated as a 14-room, art-filled gem by a flamboyant Afrikaner antiques dealer.

For me though, the real Karoo starts east of here. The R62 flattens out, sand and scrub roll to the horizon, and the sky becomes big and glassy. It's hard to believe that the lush forests and crashing waves of the Garden Route are only 50 miles to the south.

And yet, hemmed in by mountains and replenished by spring water, the Klein Karoo is a ribbon of fruit farms, and in less than two hours I'm decanted in Calitzdorp – the Port Wine Capital of South Africa – a dusty village of gabled Cape Dutch houses rimmed by vineyards. There are five port wine cellars in town and I joined a tasting at Boplaas, established in 1880. The Karoo's climate makes for sweeter grapes than Stellenbosch, and the Cape Juby and Tawny ports here are as good as any I've had from Portugal.

Keeping with a theme, I spent the night at the Port Wine Guesthouse, a handsome thatched 1830s Cape Dutch farmstead in town, and motored on to Oudsthoorn, 30 miles east, the following morning.

The largest town in the Klein Karoo, Oudtshoorn is famous for the Cango Caves (miles of natural limestone tunnels) and its ostrich farms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, local merchants grew wildly rich exporting ostrich plumes to the great fashion houses of Europe. They then built huge Edwardian mansions with the proceeds – the so-called "feather palaces". Most fell into decline when the bubble burst, but many are being restored by the new pioneers.

Montague House, a handsome 1908-built sandstone palace with a polished oak‑panelled interior, is now a bistro and ostrich leather boutique; and The Feather Palace, a red-roof mansion on a dairy farm a little farther down the R62, has been turned into a stylish working guest ranch.

In the lush foothills of the Swartberg, barely 15 miles outside Oudtshoorn, I tracked down Boesmanskop, a two-room inn unveiled in 2006 by local farmer, Tienie Bekker. A soft-spoken Boer whose ancestors were among the first to settle the Karoo in the 1750s, Tienie inherited a struggling grape, tobacco and ostrich farm in 1982. He has transformed it, planting gardens on the front lawn and furnishing the family farmhouse with Victorian and Cape Dutch antiques, and designing two guest rooms in "Cape Country Afrikaner" style. My room had yellow wood floors, a claw-foot bathtub, and stunning views of the vineyards.

After cursing Niebuhr over that sunset muscatel, I shelved my envy in favour of a dinner of lamb chops and fig pie, whisked up using ingredients from the farm. Next morning came the bill: the equivalent of £15 for the night, food included. I offered to pay more. "Agh, no," Tinie protested. "It's really just a side‑business to my farm."

Oudtshoorn is the Klein Karoo capital, but Prince Albert, which lies the other side of the Swartberg, is the gateway to the Great Karoo and its aesthetic heart. To get to it I left the R62 and took the Swartberg Pass, one of the world's most majestic mountain passes: a 17‑mile-long, heart-in-mouth miracle of cliff-edge engineering built in the 1860s. At the top you're 3,280ft above sea level, the desert stretches away below, and all around are giant slabs of red sandstone that seem to colour the sky. And then, as if to soothe your frayed nerves, the road twists gently down the other side, leaving you in the most serene flower-filled town in the Karoo.

Named after Queen Victoria's consort in 1854, Prince Albert was the biggest fruit-producing district in the Cape during the 19th century. But, like many Karoo towns, its remote location meant it later slipped into obscurity, sheep and ostriches replacing grapes and apricots. Today, though, that isolation has served it well. Its streets are lined with beautifully preserved Victorian houses, many of them National Monuments owned and restored by artists and designers who have escaped the city.

It's not only the houses that are being bought up. Fruit farming has returned to the valley. I did a tasting at Bergwater Vineyards where a former airline pilot makes a sublime Shiraz Reserve; sampled meaty manzanilla olives at Swartrivier, a thriving olive farm; and bought dried fruit, olive oil, almonds and cheeses at various farm stalls in town.

You can take the Montague Pass over the Outeniquas from here and be on the Garden Route in 90 minutes, but I had one more stop, and it lay five hours east in the sweltering eastern expanse of the Groot Karoo. And here was the real desert: an arrow-straight road stretched to the horizon, tumbleweed rolled past, vultures picked at roadside carrion.

But an extraordinary thing is happening: investors are buying up its struggling sheep farms and restocking the land with wild game; there are now dozens of tourist safari lodges in the Karoo.

I arrived at the most exclusive at sunset: Samara Private Game Reserve, set in 70,000 acres beneath scrub-covered mountains, 30 miles south of the historic colonial town of Graaff-Reinet. It accommodates just 12 people and its centrepiece is not a typical wood-and-thatch safari lodge, but a gorgeous 1800s Karoo farmhouse with veranda and corrugated-iron roof. Its interiors have been beautifully restored, and zebra print rugs and cowhide sofas furnish the living room.

The area's true highlight, though, was a game drive into the mountains on my last morning. It took us an hour to get to the top in the Jeep, and I expected to find more scrub and sand. Instead, the Karoo revealed another face, an entirely different habitat from the desert below: the top was a lush green plateau stretching for miles, so similar to the Serengeti that for a minute I thought I was hallucinating. Herds of mountain zebra, eland, gazelle – and even some cheetah – roamed the pastures.

We drove to the edge of the escarpment and walked to a cliff-edge promontory with a breathtaking view of the plains below. Somewhere beyond the horizon, not visible through the haze, were the Indian Ocean and the Garden Route. As I sat there I tried to picture what lay ahead: the gorgeous beaches of Plettenberg Bay; the oysters, lagoon, and evergreen forests of Knysna. But it was no use. Instead, lulled by the dreamy silence and the heat of the sun baking the rocks, I fell fast asleep. The Karoo does that to you. It clears the clutter in your head.

School Mural Project

2008-10-19T14:52:00.001+02:00

Crown Mines Primary is a school near my studio. I helped them paint a mural on their wall, getting the children to chalk outlines of each other and then paint them in. The project took about three days and really changed the character of the building's facade.

Review of Night Shift exhibition

2008-03-08T09:59:00.001+02:00

Night Shift, an exhibition by Hermann Niebuhr

Voyeur in the foyer

By Desné Masie

Financial Mail

Hermann Niebuhr's latest paintings seduce and intrigue. Like the city of Johannesburg that inspired them, his Nightshift series, on show from March 5-29 at The Canopy, shows the Hillbrow that has transformed from Manhattan-like aspirations of the 1970s, when it reached a pinnacle of cosmopolitan chic, to the chaos and decay of today.

The exhibition marks the launch of a new complex at 81 De Korte Street, Braamfontein, an appropriate setting for Niebuhr's themes. The building is owned by American art historian Carlyn Zehner and consists of The Canopy, a dramatic multipurpose space with floor-to-ceiling windows, and the Narina Trogon restaurant (it's named after a colourful tropical bird), which opens on March 10.

"There is so much talent in this country and I was determined to reflect that in every aspect of this restaurant," says Zehner.

Niebuhr (35), a landscape painter, was based in the Karoo before moving back to Jo'burg in 2002. These new works, priced from R25 000, start off where his previous series, Night Ride Home, left off. He still creates landscapes but now they are of the city.

The paintings depict the foyers of Hillbrow flats. Stark and provocative, they encourage you to look a little deeper and even make you want to venture inside. But a strange silence resonates from them. They show the quiet mystery of the city's witching hour - 3 am - when security guards (though neither they nor other people feature) pass the hours watching over sleeping flat-dwellers.

"I painted them from photographs I took of the concierges late at night," says Niebuhr. "They are seductive, they resonate and glow, but they also make you apprehensive because the subject is bleak."

All the symbolic props of a security guard's world are in these paintings, evoking loneliness and austerity. It is tempting to call them "photorealist", but that wouldn't be quite appropriate. Instead, says Niebuhr, "I'm having a conversation with Guy Tillim. It's a painter's discourse with a photographer." (Tillim's book, Jo'burg, shows the city from many angles.)

"The city is transforming and I'm trying to document that transformation," he adds. "Hillbrow was intended to be something else, but now that project is failing. However, I'm not looking at it as if to say: What a stuff up!' I'm examining its changing face."

Niebuhr's own transformation, as a South African and artist, also informs these works. He grew up in Sandton and says: "It was a typical suburban existence, largely oblivious to the political realities of the country."

Alexandra Dodd's intro to the Night Shift catalogue

2008-03-02T16:06:00.010+02:00

Shifting the Edges of the Night

by Alexandra Dodd

No booze.

No whores.

No cabaret shows.

No smoky jazz, gangsters or slow dancing.

No relief to be taken from the possibilities of the street.

This night is a working night in an enclosed interior, a capsule of enforced solitariness.

The odd late-night trawler stumbles home. Half falls asleep while waiting for the lift. Shiftworkers come and go. Momentary distractions in this long, drawn-out stretch of bald, blank reality.

This night is devoid of romantic depictions of the nocturnal city as playground for hidden desires. It is a night unadorned with fancy, naked only in a forlorn kind of a way.

Cheap, red warmth from the thin wires of a plug-in heater and a hand-me-down tartan blanket. Awake and alive and still awake, while others slumber through this interminable dead-end night. Radio talk shows, a ticking clock, and police sirens in the distant darkness.

This is the long wait til dawn.

Entering Fear

"That was a huge thing for me -- the fear," he says. "It was that childhood thing of growing up in the northern suburbs and having this idea of the city as forbidden -- a no-go zone. Every time I went into the city, other than for a few shopping trips with my parents on Saturday mornings, it was a transgression."

"It was always thrilling to come into the city -- to sneak out and hitchhike to the nightclubs. There was a wildness to it -- a thrill to those encounters you were not in control of. And I was smoking a lot of dagga too, getting off my face in respone to the disorientation. There was nothing to reference the experience. The danger, the otherness. I wasn't supposed to be there. I was to young to be going to nightclubs and drinking. I wasn't supposed to be in some flat downtown. Those were the early memories. The associations were of this other world ... "

The Metropolitan Lure

Hanif Kureishi writes in My Ear at His Heart

In the suburbs, conversation was not encouraged. There was a lot that shouldn't be said.
Suburban regularity was sustained by keeping disruptive people out, so the house became a refuge. The constant talk, in the suburbs, about "the standard of living" had made me think about who your friends were and what they talked about.
The 'standard of living' wasn't, in fact, just furniture, carpets, gardens. It was the atmosphere in which you lived. ... I came to dislike returning to the suburbs. It was occurring to me that I could leave; indeed, that I would have to leave home and the suburbs in order to have more of these city pleasures. But I was afraid. What was the relation between pleasure and safety?

Post the Postcard

There is this known and owned view of Johannesburg. A distant, iconic view of the city from the north, Hillbrow Tower jutting its unmissable form into the big, blank sky. We see this outline of the city on t-shirts, logos and postcards. There she is: Jozi, Joburg, City of Gold. That's our girl. Timeless, harmless, dazzling from a distance.

Meanwhile slowly, steadily, the distance and vantage point of this glorious, expansive view insists itself into our hearts and minds, quietly entrenching difference. Nothing but a carefree kiss goodbye to the views that are canceled out by its simple prominence. Strange to think that even something as innocent as a view can be the product of the spatial history of apartheid.

When Hermann Niebuhr first moved back to the city of his childhood after spending more than a decade away -- first in the Eastern Cape, then in the Karoo -- he chose to rent a shared studio on the western edge of the city amid the curry houses, discount chrome furniture salesmen and sweetmeat stores of Fordsburg.

His first Johannesburg show, a two-hander with Carl Becker, was based on views from the relentless urban passageway that is Main Reef Road. "I was trying to get my eye into the city, trying to find my way in," he says. Both painters seemed intent on coming at Joburg from an oblique angle that contradicted the classic gaze outwards over the metropolis from the north. But still there were lingering traces of the Romantic landscape tradition -- that distant abstraction of the painter dispassionately observing life at a safe remove...

Then came Night Ride Home. For this second Johannesburg show, Niebuhr decided to abanon that distant, safe take on the city, choosing to photographically document his night-time journeys to and from his Fordsburg studio, transforming these images into paintings. "I was living in Kensington and, when I worked nights, I would drive through the city -- moving in this little capsule of safety from one zone to another ... Then I twigged onto this thing of the streets -- this trip to and fro," he says.

In this series, the city lights took on a life of their own, at times resembling the groovy neon abstractions of electric be-bop album covers.

"The thing that got me about the nightscapes was that they were almost in total antithesis to traditional landscapes," says Niebuhr. "Everything you see is lit by artificial light, which seems to emphasise the man-madeness of the city's shapes and forms. It's a complete opposite to traditional landscape painting, which takes place during the day with the sun as a light source. Landscape is not lit by neon light or floodlights. That was part of the thinking with Night Ride Home."

And with this exhibition, he entered into the city at night. And in entering it, he began to soberly navigate his fear of it. Poring over the thing for hours on end, filling in its dark unknowable gaps with oily dabs of ebony pigment...

"Night Shift seemed like the next obvious step -- to enter the buildings and start going inside..."

'Go Look at Titian, Fuck Damien Hirst.'

Niebuhr studied painting at Rhodes University's fine art department in the early 1990s under the fiery tutelage of Robert Brookes, Noel Hodnett and George Coutouvidis.

At the time it was very much a school of traditional landscape painting, where you learned your craft before you started experimenting. "They had a link to the London school of painters at the time and were forever plugging [Lucien] Freud and [Frank] Auerbach, emphasising the importance of painterliness an going doggedly against current trends," says Niebuhr. 'It was a real little insular bush college in many ways. We were taught to look at the greats. "Go look at Titian. Fuck Damien Hirst. They're all charlatans."' There is a definite note of acidity in his voice as he recalls those days.

Yet Niebuhr confesses that, at the time, he bought into the defining myth of the school -- the heady myth of the Great Romantic Landscape Painters. He even admits to finding it deeply compelling -- nothing short of a raison d'etre in his early 20s. And, by his own admission, he left Rhodes University feeling like a bit of a bombastic cowboy.

"You came away with a sense that you could draw, you could paint, you were part of the proud lineage of Poussin and Turner ..."

So why the tone of unapologetic cynicism? "It was the total disregard and suspicion for the avant garde. Anything contemporary was viewed as tomfoolery and trickery. Sometimes even unconsciously, by implication, they kept drumming in the fact that these guys can't draw, and fuck, if you can't draw you certainly can't paint.

"That's what I reacted against. They were always discounting the avant garde. But my point is that painting is part of the contemporary avant garde. Paintings can be every bit as good, every bit as powerful, every bit as strong as anything being done in any other medium.'

It all hangs on the conceptual scaffolding of the work -- a certain
subversive intent on behalf of the artist. Thankfully, Niebuhr has
never lost his sheer joy in the beauty and power of paint. But now
that joy is coupled with other complex intentions, not least the aim
to toy with the very lineage into which he was born as a painter.

Stealing Stillness

"I don't profess to be a photographer," he says. "But I work in a studio, so photographs are my reference material. But when I take my photographs, I take them as a painter. It's the painterliness of the image that attracts me when I'm looking through the lens. It's a painter's eye that I'm looking with."

When he returns to the studio with the images, Niebuhr downloads them onto his computer and tweaks them a bit. A second mediation occurs. The images are already twice removed from reality before he has even laid a brushstroke to canvas.

"I then start painting from the image. Initially I need the
information, but at some point, I'll put the photograph away an
resolve the work as a painting, which is a different process. It
takes on its own life."

The final painting, triply mediated, is a departure not only from the photograph, but from the original space and scene.

There is something in this departure, this loosening and walking away from the city's rapture that intrigue ... In the sense that Niebuhr is recording lived life in the city right now, he is a documentarist, but his practice as a painter militates against the objectivity and immediacy of social realist endeavours.

He isn't painting hawkers with their bowls of tomatoes and bright
orange naartjies or capturing the vibrancy of the taxi rank on Bree
Street at midday. These Night Shift paintings are removed from the
heat of the immediate. It's the nocturnal flipside to which he is
drawn.

"The experiences I have in the city are very different to the
paintings I make. Hillbrow is not a quiet, restful, melancholy place.
It's not that zone. It's hectic."

Niebuhr's paintings are spaces designed for contemplation. And the
quietness of these works is not unrelated to the solitariness of his
practice. Obedient to the reflective, solipsistic impulse of the
painter, Niebuhr paints in the isolation of his studio. It is the
chaotic, noisy, highly populated energy of the city to which he turns,
but from all that motion and activity it is the nightscapes he
chooses. A time when the city is emptied out -- deserted.

There is an intriguing set of paradoxes at play here, which leads me back to Niebuhr's baptismal moment as a painter -- and perhaps even to an oblique fidelity to the Romance of painting.

In many ways the 20th century project in modernist and postmodernist art practice centred on the death of the author -- dethroning the bourgeois individual. Hence the rise in styles and modes of contemporary art that eschewed the centrality of the artist as originator.

In painting it's hard to get around that centrality. It's how the painter plays with his own presence in the work that becomes so central to contemporary painting. In Niebuhr's case, as a painter engaging with the noisy postmodernism of an African metropolis, he enters into it, claims something from it, in order to reimpose a kin of authority on his subject.

Once in the studio, the city becomes his to play with and reinvent.
He has retrieved a kind of control over it, but in absentia. A lost
sense of agency reclaimed. Not a bad tactic for a white boy from the
North. And he kind of sticks it to Roland Barthes, too. The author
-- dead? I don't think so.

Solitariness can be a Romantic Conceit

In their bleakly illuminated colours and flat surfaces, these images cannot but recall the work of Edward Hopper, painter of bankrupt New York night scenes, of lonely late night diners, train rides home and etiolated lives. Hopper's paintings focus on the subtle interaction of human beings with their emptied-out environment and with each other. Niebuhr's Night Shift paintings are similarly based on the exploitation of empty spaces, withholding the figurative so the images are apparently depopulated.

Yet the human presences are surprisingly there -- hovering somewhere outside the frame of the painting. "What happens when you introduce the figures is just too much for me," says Niebuhr. "The closest I've come to the figurative -- the portrait -- is the chairs."

These are haunted canvases evidencing phantom lives -- the long,
late-night lives of the security guards who occupy the lobbies of
Johannesburg's residential buildings, protecting them from nocturnal
threat. There are presences in these images, but only by proxy. We
feel the presence of these men in their worn blankets and overused
chairs. the bar heater, the transistor radio and the broken postbox
with all the letters waiting to be delivered...

In this sense, there is something akin to the poetry of objects at play in the work of fellow South African painter Andries Gouws and the late Adriaan van Zyl, who painted the hauntingly depopulated scenes in Memorandum (Human & Rousseau, 2006), a collaboration with Marlene van Niekerk, award-winning author of Triomf and Agaat. It's a unique book in which text and visual images offer parallel narratives that resonate poignantly with one another. Van Zyl's paintings quietly reflect the alienating experience of hospitalisation.

In Night Shift, the viewer enters the security guard's consciousness. Gone is the risk of the ethnographic gaze. You are not looking at these men. You're looking at the world through their eyes.

Collapsed Arcadian Visions

There is a danger of nostalgia in viewing these paintings. The ey
lingers over the classic solidity of a well-made elevator a polished
staircase railing or a handsome, wood-paneled wall, taking you back to a time when ambitions for the city were high ...

The names of the buildings in Niebuhr's paintings reflect a naive social optimism: Sunny Ridge, St John's View, Remlow Court, Wolbane Mansions, Mount Joy. 'Mansions' ... 'Courts'... Words that uncover the distinctly European notions of grandeur that once informed people's ideas of Johannesburg's future... Fantasies of elite sophistication founded on the replication of urban models that never ended up fitting.

Early- and mid-century ambitions for the city proved to be seriously flawed and hopelessly misguided. For several decades Johannesburg has been dogged by problems and dysfunctions. As early as the 1970s, the city lost the cohesion and tightnews that made it functionally strong.

Post 1976, its geography was fashioned anew as commercial activity flew northward over the Witwatersrand ridge not only in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising but particularly from the 1990s onwards. Up until the scrapping of the notorious Group Areas Act, Johannesburg was a place where the bulk of the working population returned 'home' to dormitory areas, devoid of the facilities that they worked in during the day.

Over the past two decades, there's been a blurring of the sharp racial divides of the segregationist and apartheid eras. But as new
populations poured into Johannesburg from the late 1980s onwards, crime and grime spread through the inner city areas.

There was a collapse of landlord-teant relations and a general decline in the maintenance level of buildings. The lobbies depicted in Niebuhr's paintings are makeshift, down-at-heel spaces betraying the lofty ideals of the architects who designed them. Buildings that were intended to be glamorous have ended up being spaes of economic necessity and shelter servicing the needs of the urban poor.

So nostalgia turns out to be a sentiment full of folly. It's not really the response the painter wanted from you anyway.

It Is What It Is What It Is

Ian McEwan, from an interview in The New Republic:

The kind of fiction I like and the kind of fiction I most often want to write does have its feet on the ground of realism, certainly psychological realism. I have no interest in magical realism and the supernatural -- that is really a extension, I guess, of my atheism. I think that the world, as it is, is so difficult to capture that some kind of enactment of the plausibly shared reality that we ihabit is a very difficult tas. But it is one that fascinates me.

Despite its poignancy, this series is not intended as a lament or eulogy to a lost world, but rather as a kind of forensic recording -- a reminder to keep our eyes wide open in the present -- to engage with 'what it's like, how it is now.' Not disenchanted, but not fooled by enchantment either, the Night Shift paintings are weighted with the painter's personal effort to see and absorb what is really happening in the world around him. Implicit in this is a plea to open up our own eyes an take in that very part of the world that is right in front of us.

Artist's Statement

2007-02-03T09:56:00.008+02:00

This is the artist's statement I wrote in 2007 and had on my website for a long while:

Paintings take time. It's what has always attracted me to the act of making them - they won't be coaxed, cajoled or knocked out. The good ones take their own good time, the good ones thrill you every time.

I began my career as a landscape painter, mainly because I felt that landscape was the best vehicle to explore the full range of paint's effects and how it affects us. Translating landscapes into paintings; building up a personal lexicon to register the vastness of experiencing the landscape struck me as the ultimate ambition of a painter.

I lived in the arid region of South Africa known as the Karoo for several years after graduating from Rhodes University. I produced works ranging from colour fields to photo-real representations of carefully chosen scenes.

It was only when I started working with found objects (mostly old kitchen utensils found in the veld and often near deserted settlements) that I began to see the scope of introducing a third element directly into the paintings - reference to human habitation and its shaping of the landscape. These works became intimate archaeologies as well as traditional still lifes telling a typically South African story: the romanticization of poverty.

Emerging from the idyllic world of the Karoo, I moved to the real-life city of Johannesburg. Johannesburg has proved fertile ground indeed for a painter used to big sky and big silence.

Experiencing the city has been a far more passive process - more observer than participant - whereas the country demanded actively engaging the surrounding world, actively walking through it rather than watching it walk around you. My initial response was to tabulate things, culminating in the 2 larger grid paintings. Lists seemed a logical way to get my eye in. I then began a series of works about the inner city, night-charting my journey through the city to my studio. It culminated in a show called 'night ride home'.

Traveling and producing work in Germany, Ireland and the United States have added to the bank of images waiting to be released into paint - in their own good time.

Amichai Tahor's intro to Night Ride Home catalogue

2005-02-21T17:53:00.008+02:00

Hermann Niebuhr's work explores a personal angle onto the larger project of renewal of Johannesburg's inner city. It comes to question his relationship to the city through such sentiments as apprehension and abundance.

The work sways between the richness of its forms and colour, where the oil medium is played to its maximum capacity, whilst remaining true to the emptiness and distance of a contemporary Johannesburg nightscape.

Through a minimal treatment of such urban contrasts as architectural spaces and filtering neon lights, Niebuhr renews an interest in the potential of the Johannesburg experience, and promotes its re-reading. The city in his work possesses its own existence -- almost exclusively independent of human traffic -- yet it invokes a desired life dynamic.