Visit the Iziko South African National Gallery for your #LastChanceToSee Hidden Treasures, Friends50, and Irma Stern’s ‘Arab Priest: Image and Context. These exhibitions come down on Sunday, 19 January 2020 to make way for the upcoming exhibition, Matereality.
Hidden Treasures comes as a rich display of many outstanding and rare objects from Iziko’s Permanent Collection of African Art. At the forefront of this exhibition is the innovative visual production of women artists who, across space and time, have produced exquisite and complex creations – from symbolic and sacred materials – to both protect and adorn their loved ones; and to earn an income.
The Friends of the South African National Gallery have supported the National Gallery for over fifty years; and in doing so have acquired over 300 hundred artworks for the National Gallery’s permanent collection. A selection of these works are on exhibition in Friends50 – which comes as a celebration of the Friends and their continual support. Highlights of the exhibition include major sculptural works by the acclaimed Mary Sibande, Gerald Machona and Maurice Mbikayi. The Friends have also consistently supported the National Gallery’s policy of addressing the under-representation of young, black artists in its collections.
Irma Stern’s ‘Arab Priest’: Image and Context highlights and debates the assumed Orientalist subtexts that are evident in Stern’s work, as well as in the works by her contemporaries in the dominant colonial culture of South Africa of the 1940s. To highlight this precise point, Stern’s Arab Priest – which has been replaced by a replica; the original is at the Javett Art Centre in Pretoria – is positioned in the exhibition as a pendant and contrast to James Eddie’s realist Portrait of Hadjee Izik Fatah (1945). This exhibition also marked the return of the Arab Priest to South Africa – on loan for a year from the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA).
Be sure not to miss these engaging, exciting and extraordinary exhibitions – visit the Iziko South African National Gallery before Sunday, 19 January 2020!
