An All-New Group Exhibition by Artists Selected from the 2023 Same Size, Same Price, No Signature Exhibition.
Opens:
30 April 2024
Closes:
22 May 2024
Chosen by 23 selectors – professional artists, the 2023 NMU Fine Art Honours Students, and members of the art loving community – 10 talented artists are gearing up to present their latest works, free from the constraints of size limitations.
Curated by BA Moolman, this exhibition will feature a diverse group of artists, ranging from seasoned individuals with established portfolios to emerging talents just embarking on their artistic journeys.
The selection process, rooted in the Same Size, Same Price, No Signature Exhibition, highlights artists who showcased remarkable technique and vision, capturing the discerning eyes of the selectors.
Get ready! These artists will unveil five new pieces each in the medium for which they were selected, embracing the freedom to express themselves without restrictions.
MEET THE ARTISTS & ENJOY THEIR WORKS
Leanette Botha
Leanette Botha works primarily in photography and drawing to explore her interest in the basic elements and principles of form, space and texture as found in both natural and built environments. Her work focuses on the surfaces, textures and inherent aesthetic of the subject, rather than depicting a particular narrative.
In both drawing and photography, she is intrigued by the discipline and the creative act of seeing and composing. Her work conveys a meditative and atmospheric stillness, rich with line and texture.
Based in the Garden Route, Leanette has exhibited on various South African platforms, both solo and in group exhibitions, and has curated several exhibitions. Her work is held in private collections in Europe, the UK, Australia and Canada.
Rika Haasbroek
Rika Haasbroek’s whimsical, intricate ceramic sculptures each have a story to tell, amalgamating textures, surface design and narrative. Working with porcelain and stoneware, she finds beauty and inspiration in the imperfections, impermanence and incompleteness of nature and ordinary life. Her artworks are unique one-offs as she continuously experiments with techniques of ceramics making and glazing, textures and decorative elements, often accented with metallic lustres, for pieces that evoke a sense of joy and fun.
Rika’s current work features playful cat sculptures, with felines personified into famous characters in intricate, quirky detail.
Lillian van Aarde
Lillian van Aarde is a multidisciplinary artist and creative living and working in Gqeberha. She has a national diploma in fine art (printmaking) and has worked in research, layout design, and visual editing, as well as creating commissioned artworks. Lillian explores and experiments across painting, photography, digital printmaking in abstract and nature-inspired multimedia works.
Monique Wiffen Rorke
Monique Wiffen Rorke is a mixed media and digital artist, inspired by the beauty in stark places and aiming to express not only what a particular place and moment looked like, but how it felt. Her work explores the tension between built structures and the natural environment, merging techniques from photography, digital processes, drawing and painting, and experimenting with the photographic surface. Disrupting, fragmenting and reassembling images brings to mind memory and forgetting – which impressions last, and which fade away.
Monique has exhibited extensively in the Eastern Cape and four of her works have been acquired by the national collection of the William Humphreys Art Gallery.
Stephen Rosin
Stephen Rosin is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Plettenberg Bay. In addition to working in ink and digital photography, he favours unusual media such as beeswax, gunpowder, and bullet lead.
Rosin’s artistic practice is characterised by a conceptual approach to socio-political commentary and subtle satire, which he achieves through intricate and detailed imagery.
He won the prestigious Barclays Bank l’Atelier award in 2009 and his work is held in a number of corporate art collections, including the Sasol, Telkom and Absa galleries, as well as in the permanent collections of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum and the Nelson Mandela University.
Lois Strong
Lois Strong is inspired to push the limits of working with clay, as a means of self-expression and creative fulfilment. She has developed her own unique techniques to create lacy and woven, deceptively delicate-looking vessels and sculptures, inspired by the crafts of lace, tatting and her mother’s embroideries.
Her work is promoted by the Spier Arts Trust, and she has received numerous awards and has been featured in exhibitions countrywide.
Jen Vlok
Jen Vlok has a background in drama performance and production design for film, commercials and television. From producing objects, décor and jewellery for her work in set-styling, she has moved to create mixed media artworks which allow her to explore a love of printing, paper crafts, upcycling found objects.
She is attracted by the incongruous and the quirky in her surroundings, contrasts between positive and negative space, simplicity and complexity, noise and silence, obscene colour and stark contrasts.
Jen aims to represent the boundless possibilities of “the humble line” in abstract images, typography and texture in various drawing and painting media.
Bianca Whitehead
Bianca Whitehead has taught and practised professionally in ceramic fine art for over 20 years. Her colourful, patterned, textured one-off pieces can be functional or decorative, and she particularly enjoys making forms that “nudge the boundaries of utility”, objects with an unclear narrative whose ultimate purpose may be simply to be enjoyed and admired.
Bianca’s designs stem from an interest in naturally occurring forms, patterns, and textures, expressed in bold colours influenced by trends in interior, fashion, and textile design. Her work has featured in numerous local, national, and international exhibitions, and she has recently started exploring her interest in painting.
Bongeka Makabeni
Bongeka Makabeni is a visual arts honours student at Nelson Mandela University, and previously worked as a photographer for SANParks. She is a visual storyteller and passionate about conveying the story of wildlife and ocean conservation through her camera. She is a Fellow of the Nature, Environment & Wildlife Conservation Trust (NEWF), a network of Africans in media, conservation and science advocating for conservation through visual storytelling.
She was chosen for Curators Choice exhibition with her ethereal gestural figurative photographs exploring the movement of the human form.
Magdalena Madejska-Jackson
As a printmaker and fine artist, Magdalena Madejska-Jackson has always been drawn to the tactile nature of printmaking and the potential it holds for storytelling. Her artistic journey, academically rooted in a Master’s in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Poland, is deeply embedded in the practice of linocut, etching, aquaforte, and aquatint.
Magdalena’s work is a personal investigation into the human figure, exploring themes of maturation and the myriad human experiences from a female perspective. She explores the silent stories our bodies tell and the unspoken narratives that unfold through the process of ageing and the collective female experience – connecting the universal threads of growth, identity, and transformation. Her prints reflect and capture emotion in the physical form, created through the methodical, time-consuming processes of printmaking that mirrors the complex layers of the lives she seeks to represent.
