Photo: Last day at the Everard Read gallery

A panorama shot of the Everard Read Gallery show.  Click on it to see the whole thing.

The last day was today.  I went in and greeted everyone who was visiting (but didn't take their picture) and thanked the gallery for their hard work.

Graeme Shackleford's article about City Chromatic

Everybody reads our little local newspaper, known in my neighborhood as the Rosebank Killarney Gazette and in others as the Chronicle, the Herald, etc.

Graeme Shackleford wrote a nice article about City Chromatic.  You can read it here in a piece called "Niebuhr Paints the City".

Laurice Taitz's article about City Chromatic

Laurice Taitz wrote a smashing article about the Everard Read show for the Sunday Times.  It's at:

http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/2012/03/04/secrets-of-a-city

and she published a different version with her own photos at her blog "Nothing to Do in Joburg Besides...", which is a great blog about Johannesburg:
To Do In Joburg Niebuhr article

Thanks, Laurice!

Exhibition 14 August Casa Labia, Muizenberg

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.

Oxford Road Overpass

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

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

"mine" exhibition opening

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

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.

Nechama Brodie's intro to the "mine" catalogue

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.

Invitation to "mine" exhibition

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.

Review of Night Shift exhibition

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

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.

Amichai Tahor's intro to Night Ride Home catalogue

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.