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!

Time Magazine Asks Me for Joburg Tips

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.

Dekat Article by Carina van Heerden

 
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.

Interview on Radio Today by Joburg heritage maven Flo Bird

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. 

Interview by Fred de Vries

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?

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.

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.