WAYNE BARKER Beadworks 2011-2013

WAYNE BARKER
2011-2013 BEAD WORKS

Installation view Circa Gallery, Standard Bank 2011 & 2012

Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, and the Italian art-historian Giovanni Morelli
may not at first appear to have anything in common with each other, let alone with
Wayne Barker, but – as Carlo Ginzburg has argued in an influential essay – these three
characters each embody a version of a particular modern approach both to problem
solving and to the re-creation and discovery of the past. Holmes, Freud and Morelli
all find clues to events in the past – whether crimes, forgotten events, or the identity
of an original artist – in scattered small details: a footprint, an inexplicable dream,
or the shape of an angel’s ear. These apparently trivial details yield rich rewards when closely
studied.
Wayne Barker should be associated with this trio and this tradition as, like them,
he is part detective, part psychologist and part art historian. These threads come together
successfully and naturally in his latest series of bead “paintings”. At first glance,
the works are glittery, dazzling and seductive but it soon become clear that there is a rich
vein of social comment buried beneath the bright surface. If we take Barker’s personal
iconology into account we can recognise that these works represent a natural progression
from his earliest work as a rebel bohemian attacking an establishment. His distinctive
and unmistakable stylistic language has remained constant in the decades since his start.
Text from «Super Boring» catalogue.
Carol Brown, 2012
Curator at Durban Art Museum, South Africa 2008
International curator for Southern Africa

MY JOZIE DETAIL

MY JOZIE DETAIL

CHURCH LADY 200 x 200 cm

LAND & DESIRE 200 x 200 cm

GOLDEN CHURCH LADY 200 x 200 cm

LAND FOR SALE 200 x 200 cm

MADONNA BLUES 200 x 200 cm

JOBURG JAZZ 200 x 200 cm

CITY OF GOLD 200 x 200 cm

IT’S IN YOUR HEAD 200 x 200 cm

LADY GAGA 200 x 200 cm

CURRENT EVENTS //
// ART FAIRS 2013 //
London Art 13
Dubai Art Fair
Sydney Art Fair
Johannesburg Art Fair
// GROUP SHOWS 2013 //
June 2013 : ”My Joburg”, Fondation Maison Rouge.
Several local group shows in South Africa.
// PUBLICATIONS //
1.Featured in“Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa»,
Smithonian Museum, 2013.
2. Featured in «Art at the end of apartheid» by John Peffer, University of Minnesota Press.
3. «Art in South Africa» by Sue Williamson an Ashraf Jamal.
4. ’Super Boring’ catalogue, Standard Bank retrospective.
5. Artist’s Monograph, Wayne Barker.

PRESS //
City Press, september 2012
Two creative luminaries on parallel life paths
found their work speaking in a singular voice
at Circa on Jellicoe last week.
The spectacular bad boy of South African art,
painter Wayne Barker; and the sagacious jazz
pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim, became the subject
of a unique artistic conversation as their work
serendipitously found a simultaneous audience
at the Joburg gallery.
The conversation involved Barker’s current
exhibition of paintings and glass-bead panels
titled Love Land and the music of the elder
jazzman.
Ibrahim gave a rare series of solo piano recitals
at the venue. He followed these up with
another series at the Everard Read Gallery in
Cape Town.
Under the sedate aura of Circa’s honey-coloured
lights, the pianist soared into sonic vistas
as the painter’s work attempted
a visual equivalent.
The fine artworks displayed in the main
gallery hall also include a few works from the
Legends series.
Some of these formed part of Barker’s midcareer
retrospective show, titled Super Boring,
but were never shown.
They are oil-on-canvas paintings dedicated to
giants like Hugh Masekela, Nelson Mandela
and, of course, Ibrahim himself.
The painting (pictured bottom right) created in
ode of the pianist is titled VICTORY. Its motif
comprises a portrait of Ibrahim with his eyes
closed and hands clasped, as if in prayer.
The sage’s likeness is painted as an imposition
on a Pierneef painting of an early urbanscape
of the Cape of Good Hope.
It is in line with Barker’s long-standing project
of revisiting Pierneef’s landscapes.
So Ibrahim’s meditative face is deployed to
disrupt or intervene in Pierneef and his Afrikaner-nationalist
unpeopled vision of
South Africa.
By insisting on Ibrahim’s inclusion in an Afrikaner
nationalist’s representation of the Cape,
Barker seeks to remind his forebear that the
land and its people are one and that’s a beautiful
thing.
The rebelling younger painter then paints an
olive branch along with the words “victory”
and “play”.
It’s another serendipitous gem in this interdisciplinary
jam session, almost as if the painter
knew that the victorious completion of the
work will come when Ibrahim plays in the
work’s presence.
Circa’s cavernous structure, with more than
200 art lovers congregated around the jazzman,
acquired a ceremonial solemnity.
This even as the pianist’s exacting appeal to
decorum apparently contrasted the painterly
recalcitrance of parts of Barker’s project.
However, the works seemed to have found
each other in the quintessential spirit of jazz.
The marked ebb and flow of improvisation
and premeditation seemed to be a unifying
factor: like an inter-textual dialogue with every
gracious melodic phrase on the piano finding
a fitting answer in each whimsical brush
stroke on Barker’s canvases.
Barker relies on the whole history and tradition
of painting along with the problematic legacy
of dodgy creatives like Pierneef to ballast his
blast of beauty.
Ibrahim, too, ascended the plinth to sit at the
baby grand piano with charts of composed
music.
So, as he issued immaculate clusters of
improvised colours, there was an established
sureness of hit songs like Ishmael, Blues For
A Hip King and Tintinyana to provide a steady
foundation. » Barker’s Love Land is on at
Circa on Jellicoe in Rosebank, Joburg, until
October 6