de.code

de.code, a group exhibition on the Upper Gallery Level featuring Lulama Wolf, Lerato Motaung, and Talut Kareem opens parallel to Thomas Wachholz's solo exhibition Square Dance. In dialogue with Wachholz, de.code looks at artists exploring symbolic abstraction and coded meanings in their practice. Building on a key gallery tenet to create global conversations, we bring Lagos and Johannesburg into dialogue with Cologne, a snapshot of contemporary painting today.  

Talut Kareem's practice is rooted in drawing and painting, with painting being his primary form of expression. Kareem creates richly detailed portraits by combining realistically rendered charcoal figures overlaid with bright colours and abstract patterns.

 

By juxtaposing the monochrome of the charcoal with the colourful spherical shapes in the picture plane, he has developed a unique visual language, allowing him the freedom to explore figure composition, and further develop his narrative.

His practice centres around the transitory nature of our awareness, depicting the individual’s emotional and mental states – as well as larger patterns of social behaviour – while attempting to capture his own state of mind.

For his primary means of expression, Lerato Motaung weaves the familiar with the imagined to create a personal and intuitive evocation of history.

 

Drawing inspiration from his day to day life in metropolitan Johannesburg where he lives and works — as well as from memories of his youth in the North West Province and his coming of age in Katlehong township — he brings the viewer closer to grasping the intangible by pushing beyond the possibilities of the physical, and attempting to plot the unmappable parts of the human mind.

While the intangible is present, Motaung situates his works in the corporeal world. He says, “My work is situated in an unknown time and is influenced by the past and the present”.

At the intersection of Neo-Expressionism and Modern African Art, Lulama Wolf interrogates the pre-colonial African experience through the contemporary mind by using smearing, scraping, and deep pigment techniques that were used in vernacular architecture, and the patterns created largely by women to decorate traditional African homes.

History and the proof of life are the core concepts in her work. Where there has rarely prior been reference of life in black spirituality, she counters that narrative by creating two dimensional paintings to embody the simplicity and deep spiritual power of the native eye.

 

Her motivation is both tender and protective of her imaginary world, and her symbolic view of how her world looks into an alternate universe. She is set on creating both a photographic and graphic experience, that morphs and shapeshifts into a higher dimensional plane.

"My work carries my spirit, before it carries a message. My intuition plays a vital role in the direction I go and then I compartmentalise with what I prioritise. I represent different parts of my self including abstraction, curiosity, mythology, spirituality and introspection. Blackness is vital in my work because it is created by a black woman despite the medium or language it speaks, it is vital because proof of existence is rare in the black community, information is shared but isn’t sustained in ways that are knowledgeable to us right now. I express my yearning for answers and clarity in ways that make my blackness clear even when the work is abstract. My practice embodies subtlety in a form of texture and expression, a curious mix of ambiguity and curiosity. I experiment with different textures and moulds that are formed from the earth."