WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH

24
In 1989, Nelson Mandela was
still in prison; P.W. Botha had
suffered a stroke and F.W. De Klerk
was about to replace him as State
President. The first lurid exposés of
apartheid hit-squad atrocities were
rattling the headlines of the
independent press.
Battering, bruising and
abrading pieces of metal until
images suggested themselves on
the surface like channelled spirits,
the artist then pasted ready-made
products or painted a series of vivid,
colliding images in oils on his dusty
downtown canvasses. These
canvasses would make up Images
on Metal, his first solo show, held
at the Market Galleries.
He transformed the gallery
space into a closed reality littered
with pop signs and scruffy wonders
- goldfish circled their bowls on the
floor beneath the paintings.
Interspersed with a series of line
drawings of black faces - called
Victims - symbols of Afrikaner
nationalist history looked out,
as Powell described it, "from
fragments of a murder".