The Female Gaze Takes Center Stage
Current Achievements of Contemporary South African Artists
05/07/2024 General News, Timed-Online Auctions
The month of July welcomes a new special collection of works for our Works on Paper Timed-Online auction. As a women-led auction house, the Aspire Art team is excited to present a collection of artworks by contemporary women artists shaping our artistic landscape locally and abroad.
The following artists have showcased their resilience and brilliance in the contemporary creative spheres. With a special feature of a work on paper by three artists in our current auction, we delve into their most recent achievements:
Gabrielle Goliath
A multidisciplinary artist, known for her sensitive negotiations and conceptually distilled understandings of complex social discourses, specifically in relation to gendered and sexualised violence, Gabrielle Goliath boasts an extraordinary career. Participating in numerous, prominent local and international exhibitions, she has also won multiple awards, notably the Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).
Currently undertaking a PhD at the Institute for Creative Arts (UCT), Goliath has recently featured at two prestigious Biennales. The first being in 2023 at the Sharjah Biennial 15, which took place in the United Arab Emirates from 7 February to 11 June. The 30th-anniversary edition of the Biennial was titled Thinking Historically in the Present and was conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.
Secondly, Goliath’s multi-channel video & sound cycles installation, Personal Accounts (2024), features at this year’s 60th International Art Exhibition for the Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and open to the public until the 24th of November.
Installation view of Personal Accounts, 2024-, multi-cycle video & sound installation, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, La Biennale di Venezia (2024), photos by Luc Meneghel, courtesy of the artist’s website.
Lady Skollie
Lot 42: Lady Skollie, Ikwe |, 2019. Estimate: R 35 000 - 45 000
Laura Windvogel, known as the artist and activist Lady Skollie, creates otherworldly images as her work delves into themes of gender, sex and the politics of lust and identity. A young, exciting artist, Skollie is taking the South African art world by storm, both within and outside of the gallery/museum space. Notable achievements include being part of the 2018 edition of OkayAfrica's 100 Women, an annual list which honours women across ten different fields for their achievements; commissioned to design the new R5 coin to commemorate 25 years of constitutional democracy in South Africa (2019); announced as the 10th recipient of the prestigious FNB Art Prize (2020) and receiving the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2022. Currently, Lady Skollie is showing at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Titled Groot Gat, the exhibition looks into the intersections of fantasy, history and indigenousness and takes place until the 15th of September this year.
Installation view of the Groot Gat at Norval Foundation, courtesy of their website.
Penny Siopis
Lot 91: Penny Siopis, Chambre Cinquante-six | Estimate: R 15 000 - 20 000
With a career spanning more than four decades, the cherished South African artist Penny Siopis, has been channelling what she refers to as the ‘poetics of vulnerability’ through engaging with topics such as migration, memory, body politics and the relations between the human and non-human through the mediums of painting, film/video, photography and installation.
Marking her first museum retrospective in Europe, Siopis participated in Part III of What If Women Ruled the World? at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece until November of this year.
What if Women Ruled the World? is a unique program that has exclusively featured works by women artists. This unprecedented initiative to dedicate a year of multiple exhibitions by artists who identify as female, both for their permanent and temporary exhibitions, marks a first for a major public museum.
Views of the exhibition courtesy of the artist’s Instagram page
Other exciting contemporary female artists in our Works on Paper Timed-Online auction include Ruby Swinney, Diane Victor, Katharien de Villiers, Mia Chaplin, Grace Cross and many more!
LEFT: Lot 35: Ruby Swinney, Seeker | Estimate: R 30 000 - 40 000
RIGHT: Lot 27: Diane Victor, Portrait 1 (from the Smoke Drawings: Missing Children Series (Sacmec))
LEFT: Lot 30: Katharien de Villiers, Pet the Python | Estimate: R 7 000 - 10 000
RIGHT: Lot 43: Grace Cross, Childhood Blanket | Estimate: R 12 000 - 16 000
Auction
Works on Paper
4 - 16 July 2024
Discover more from Works on Paper
SALE ENQUIRIES
Cape Town: +27 21 422 5100 | amy@aspireart.net
Johannesburg: +27 10 109 7989 | carina@aspireart.net