WAYNE BARKER

Postcards and Unwritten Letters

and

ALEXANDRA ROSS

Twenty Thousand Apparitions

4 MAY – 31 MAY 2017

Wayne Barker and Alexandra Ross exhibit together for the first time.

Barker’s Postcards and Unwritten Letters, and Ross’ Twenty Thousand Apparitions, open at the Everard Read Gallery on Thursday 4 May.

Although Barker and Ross deal with different themes there are common threads linking their work and they share a similar playful-yet-profound approach to painting. Their new work is partly the result of a decades long association, of creative cross-pollination, exchange, and dialogue since the mid-80s but is also a continuation of their individual trajectories.

Produced side by side from their shared studio in Ellis House, the two separate bodies of work each in their unique manner, embrace an optimistic, spontaneous approach to art and life, welcoming the happy ‘accident’, employing expressive, gestural mark-making and a love for the tactile sensuality of paint.

While Barker provokes and Ross evokes, they share the optimism that art can change the world.

WAYNE BARKER’S series of postcard paintings deal with “the vernacular images of my youth” - the cliché, iconic postcards from South Africa’s troubled Colonial and Apartheid-era history. The sepia toned postcards of downtown Joburg come from the 1936 Empire Exhibition, held in in South Africa to promote the British presence. Sunny Durban beachfront scenes from the 1960s promote the Apartheid government’s narrative and so Barker’s postcards confront the viewer with the paradox of a bittersweet nostalgia.

In the same way that Barker rewrites history in his previous Pierneef landscapes, he again transforms history through interruption and intervention.

The work calls up the ghosts of our collective history.

ALEXANDRA ROSS’ Twenty Thousand Apparitions also deals with ghosts though in a less specific and more ambiguous way. Her multi-media painting collages are abstract and suggestive, evoking “twenty thousand apparitions”, or the presence of countless ethereal yet archetypal images. Employing digital photography, oil paint and silkscreen, the collage paintings leave themselves open to “twenty thousand” interpretations.

Erotic, sensual, mysterious and elusive, they allude to the ephemerality of being and the transience of life.