ABOUT BEAUTY

Exhibition Opening Thursday 13 December at 18:00 and closes 5 January 2007

GOODMAN GALLERY CAPE is proud to present our end-of-year exhibition featuring the work of Frances Goodman, Joy Gregory, Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Vivienne Koorland, Penny Siopis, Kathryn Smith, Nontsikelelo Veleko and Sue Williamson. Exploring the complex mythology surrounding beauty, they suggest that beyond beauty's allure lies a darker and complex history of ideas and practices that are the very antithesis of beauty. How beauty operates, how judgements are made and how these impact physically, psychologically and politically are explored in a wide range of ways.

'About Beauty' takes its cue from Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, the award-winning collection of essays by leading African artists and authors, edited by Sarah Nuttall. Like the book, the exhibition explores the radical transformations that are shifting perceptions of beauty as well as particular challenges offered by African and Diaspora artists to the world's predominantly Eurocentric ideals.

Lolo Veleko's presentation of 'young, gifted and black' youth who are refashioning the reception of African beauty epitomises a seismic generational shift of power from an old order to a new culture, exerting the power of the observed to challenge a historically white, Western gaze. In two very different series British photographer Joy Gregory invests ordinary objects of beauty with the iconic power to represent the horrors of apartheid South Africa and the circulation of lives, wealth and Diasporic memory between Europe and the Caribbean.

New York-based South African painter Vivienne Koorland, whose exhibition 'Reisenmalheurs' was recently seen at the Freud Museum in London, draws from children's images of the Holocaust and forced removals to explore the traumatic and transformative potential of travel. William Kentridge's drawing and prints at once reference colonial expansionism and genocide in Africa, the enduring pleasures of the body and the resilience of spirit that refuses to be crushed by them.

Robert Hodgins's paintings and monoprints explore social constructions of beauty inflected by assumptions about cultural and class distinctions. Mixing seduction and aversion, Kathryn Smith reflects on the interrelationship of Empire, decadence and gendered violence in her exquisite Victorian jewellery boxes.

Sue Williamson investigates the exhaustive and sometimes absurd demands of grooming while Frances Goodman examines the prejudicial judgements that expose society's dual fascination and revulsion with others as well as the ways in which anxieties and vulnerabilities are performed through language. Penny Siopis's recent paintings traverse the knife-edge between extreme experiences of beauty and trauma.

In their distinct ways each artist acknowledges that beauty is not an inherent property but the outcome of the interaction between self and an other, imbricated in a matrix of overt and subliminal experience that is always sensual and never merely the result of a set of criteria.

3rd Floor Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town | PO BOX 1106, Woodstock 7915 TEL: +27-21-462-7573/4 | FAX: +27-21-462-7579 | EMAIL: info@goodmangallerycape.com | www.goodmangallerycape.com OPENING HOURS: Tuesday - Friday 09h30 - 17h30, Saturday 10h00 - 16h00. Closed Sunday & Monday.