Jenny Groenewald - Prominant Painter

Jenny Groenewald attended the Johannesburg College of Art ( now the Johannesburg Technicon) after matriculating and completed the basic first year course with the intention of doing the Fine Art Diploma. However, upon realising that the only opening for Fine Artists at that time was teaching and having passionately disliked her school years, she instantly switched to Graphic Design.

After five years in advertising, Groenewald joined up with John Hunt for the following six years (he as copy writer, herself as art director). They were then asked by Reg Lascaris to be founding partners, together with Graham Metcalf, in what was to become Hunt Lascaris.

For the following eighteen years Groenewald was director and partner in one of South Africa's major advertising success stories. Hunt Lascaris has won ‘Agency of the Year’ in South Africa more times than any other advertising company and has been a winner and twice a runner up in the American ‘Advertising Ages International Agency of the Year’ award.

Having personally won more than 100 top local and international awards and having been the first South African female to judge at the Cannes Advertising Festival, Groenewald was named as one of DE KAT’s ‘Twenty Most Influential Afrikaners’ together with the likes of F.W.de Klerk and Anton Rupert amongst others (this despite the fact that she claims her Afrikaans is not too good!).
With Hunt Lascaris bought out internationally by TBWA, Groenewald was at last able to escape with her husband to a small farm on the edge of the Karoo. Here she has, at last, returned to her first love - painting. With a wonderful studio overlooking the Langeberg she intends making up for the ‘lost’ years in advertising.

Alan Egan - South African Painter

Allen started to paint in oils at the age of 17, and went on to study graphic design at Harare Polytechnic. He then worked as a Graphic Designer, which he believes was good formal training in the elements of layout and design, elements that Allen feels are important in his paintings today.

Allen moved to Port Elizabeth in 1990, and soon opened his own silkscreen and manufacturing business. Through the years Allen continued to paint, occasionally holding exhibitions or participating in group or local exhibitions in Harare and Port Elizabeth.

In April 1999, Allen married and moved to Bloemfontein to join his wife, Kirstin. The couple decided to sell Allen’s business interests after several successful years, to allow Allen to begin painting on a full time basis.

Until recently Allen painted wildlife and explored and experimented with abstraction. However with the opportunity to paint full time, Allen has started to explore the human form. Working from photographs, he explores and exploits the human form in great detail. Allen has chosen to paint the people of rural South Africa as he enjoys subtly depicting the obvious hardships of rural lifestyles. He believes these hardships can be seen in the hands and faces of rural people. There is a texture to the lives of country people, which Allen finds fascinating most probably a result of the fact that it is a lifestyle and culture different to his and to that of many other South Africans. Although rural lifestyles have been recorded photographically, Allen believes that this subject matter has not been well recorded - certainly on a contemporary level - from an artist’s point of view.

Angus Taylor Sculpture

Taylor has developed a solid reputation for his accomplished and humorously ironical bronze sculptures. Now he wishes to dislodge himself from his previous comfort zone in terms of sculptural techniques and materials, and in so doing, hopes to strip away the polished surfaces of the finished piece to reveal the physical and mental processes involved in its making.

Taylor works from the premise that deduction gathers a valid conclusion from a more general premise to a more specific. The process of induction involves drawing general conclusions based on a limited and specific inference. Thus, in a technocratic culture that favours simulation and speed over real-time relationships, people and things are reduced to quick-time taxonomies.
Deduction implies the opposite. To deduce involves reasoning from the general to the particular, underscoring the need to engage with culture in terms of its flexible morphology. In this body of work, Taylor attempts to peel away the surface of his art to explore its innards, forcing the viewer to engage with the process of art making. He says in this regard: “Information overload causes the domination of inductive reasoning. I am presenting the sculpture or an idea in aspects, perspectives or in different mediums. By showing a sculpture in repetition but a variant with different defined parts or perspectives I am forcing the viewer to assemble the whole from different aspects. One gains access to the part in considering the whole. The collective defines the individual. For, in the words of Meyer Vaisman, ‘…there is nothing more meaningful than taking meaning apart”.

In this way, the induction / deduction binary is conflated in Taylor’s work which, as a collection is both scopic and expansive. Together, his use of a traditional medium like bronze with the plastic form of LED lights pokes fun at old and new canons. This exhibition, in other words, plays with the cultural and art-historical tropes of meaning making in contemporary Africa.