The retrospective exhibition (1965-2022) by octogenarian South African artist Elizabeth Vels is on at the Spin Street Gallery (6 Spin Street) until 30 July 2022.
The retrospective is a mammoth body of work and a massive undertaking. It is structured in three distinct phases, each lasting a week and exhibiting some relevant, different works. Each phase contains many sections. Each week has a different theme – “Return”, “Replant” and “Restore” – which references the cycle in theThe exhibition kicks off with “Return” comprising three large paintings, the first titled. The painting itself uses the archaeological process of digging through the Tel or midden.
While belief may be the driver it is not the exhibition’s immediate feel. Belief can involve the desire to transcend mundane matter for a more rarefied atmosphere of spirituality – one associated with the masculine and the addict. However, Vels’s work suggests a far more grounded, earthed relationship, one more closely associated with the feminine.
Vels’s artworks push back against the immediate gratification and addiction to perfection fostered by technology. Instead, their process is like a slow-cooking movement of the psyche which cannot and will not be rushed. All hand in the slowness of real time. While Vels has a master’s in the arts, her work is wrought from the place of intuition, giving it a wonderful feel of unschooled and unbounded.
The overarching palette of the retrospective is one of heat, vivid reds, a range of yellow ochres, kaolin whites and sooty blacks associated with the pigments found in humankind’s prehistory and the fruit-cake richness of Baroque painting – and the occasional inclusion of indigo shades. Painting surfaces are sticky and tarry, clotted and crusty, often embedded with semi-masticated cloth and objects excavated from some internal archaeological dig. There’s the sense that just below their nubby keloid skins are embers that lie waiting for just the right volume of breath to suddenly burst into flame.There is a prolific scattering of curious ceramic vessels in many shapes and sizes which are meant to be used in daily life rather than vessels of spiritual nourishment.
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