MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
David Koloane: Something out of nothing
Outstanding work from subtle chronicler of apartheid injustice
KOLOANE: Three Women, 2015
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
DAVID KOLOANE, who died last year at the age of 81, produced work that shines with a rare glow of truth which will stand the test of time. Some of it can be seen in the exhibition of his work currently online at the Goodman Gallery in London.
Koloane grew up in the Johannesburg township of Soweto and although he’d been drawing since his schooldays, he recalled: “I was a late starter. I never knew that black people could become artists ... I was amazed to discover that black people were allowed in art galleries.”
Apartheid is at the root of his work, with his subject urban life as experienced by black Africans and modernism frees him to express oppression and resistance with a rare passion and subtlety which avoids simplistic didacticism.
More from this author
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany
CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt
CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile
