Art of freedom: SAF, TAI host Jantjes in Whitechapel Gallery
- 12 Jun 2024
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
South African painter, printmaker, curator, writer and lecturer Gavin Jantjes is having a major exhibition of his work in London (June 12 - Sept. 1). Titled To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970 – 2023, it is organised by Whitechapel Gallery, London – where the works will be displayed - Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) and The Africa Institute (TAI), Sharjah. It is being curated by Salah M. Hassan, Chancellor of Global Studies University, Dean of The Africa Institute and Distinguished Professor at Cornell University, USA; Gilane Tawadros, Whitechapel Gallery Director; and Cameron Foote, Whitechapel Gallery Curator.
Jantjes was born in 1948 in Cape Town, just as the apartheid regime in South Africa was beginning its ascent. Drawing on personal experience, he has explored the role of art in furthering human rights, freedom of expression and cultural understanding. Having exhibited internationally, his works can be found in the collections of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Tate, London; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has received commissions from the United Nations Refugee Council and the UN Commission on Apartheid.
He has lectured at Chelsea College of Arts in London and served as artistic director for the Henie Onstad Art Center, Norway (1998–2004), and has been a senior curator for the National Museum, Oslo (2004–2014). His many books include A Fruitful Incoherence (Iniva, 1998) and the four-volume Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907–2007 (Wits University Press, 2010). The London exhibition will be the artist-activist’s largest solo presentation in the UK and brings together many unseen prints, drawings and paintings, numbering over a hundred. To Be Free! traces the multifarious journey of Jantjes as a change agent. His formative years in Cape Town coincided with the early years of South African apartheid, 1948–1994. (Significantly, 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first free elections in South Africa, providing an important topical context for the presentation).
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Jantjes’ artistic and personal journeys embody a quest for artistic emancipation, with a liberty free of the Eurocentric gaze or expectations of Black creativity. For Jantjes, his quest meant a life of exile; it also resulted in multiple careers. His engagement with anti-apartheid activism in the 1970s and 1980s led to his political exile, with his work being censored in his home country. To Be Free! explores the impact it had on his life and work, during his European exile. Works on show span his extraordinary career, encompassing his ground-breaking print works, his compelling, figurative and metaphorical portrayals of the global Black struggle for freedom, through to his recent transition to non-figurative painting. It also explores his critical role in the discourses and representations regarding Africa and its diasporas.
The exhibition reflects on his transformative role at art institutions in the UK, Germany and Norway. In particular, To Be Free! highlights his influence on the cultural landscape of London. His seminal print series, A South African Colouring Book (1974–1975), which is a searing critique of apartheid, was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1976; his involvement as exhibiting artist and co-curator in the ground-breaking exhibition From Two Worlds (1986) at Whitechapel Gallery and his participation in the pivotal exhibition The Other Story (1989) at Hayward Gallery, cemented his position as a major voice in the UK’s art scene.
His Brixton mural with Tam Joseph - The Dream, The Rumour and The Poet’s Song (1985) - captured the resilience of the Windrush generation, and was commissioned by the Greater London Council. With the support of creative media agency JackArts, in the week after the exhibition’s opening, Whitechapel Gallery will reproduce a poster-version of the mural in the local area. Presented across the gallery’s main exhibition spaces, To Be Free! is structured as a series of chapters, each focused on pivotal evolutions in Jantjes’ practice. Visitors will encounter a comprehensive display of his prints from the 1970s to the 1990s as well as a selection of early paintings during his years of exile in Europe.
The Korabra series of large-scale paintings from the 1980s draws attention to the European slave trade, clearing the ground for his epic canvases of the late 1980s that explore the interaction between African and European art histories. The Zulu series (1986–1990) traces his evolution from figurative representation and linear narration towards allegory, metaphor and the poetic. The final chapter in the exhibition presents the artist’s hitherto unseen recent paintings. They mark a complete shift to non-figuration and evoke issues of personal and cultural freedoms. His ‘Exogenic’ series (2017) represents a move away from expectations of what African contemporary art should be like, and the ‘Witney’ series (2020), ‘Sharjah’ series (2022) and ‘Kirstenbosch’ series (2023) invite audiences to rethink their relationship to painting in a globalised art world.
Accompanying the exhibition is a publication documenting the full breadth of the artist’s career. It includes a foreword by SAF President Hoor Al Qasimi, a critical essay on the artist by Salah M. Hassan, and contributions from writers Allison Young, Kendell Geers, Lars Elton, Dag Erik Elgin and Premesh Lalu. A 45-minute documentary, To Be Free, by Paul Jantjes, produced by Studio 3 Oslo in Norway, will also be screened during the exhibition period. Despite his impressive oeuvre, Jantjes has not had a major exhibition in the UK. To Be Free! provides him with much-deserved institutional recognition.