SUPER BORING - Wayne Barker

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Wayne Barker’s drive to make an art project happen has never been more evident
than in his curatorial exercise, ‘Laager’. Not invited as a participant onto the 1 st
Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, Barker contrived to place himself and thirteen other
young artists at the dead centre of the offi cial Biennale events, somehow commandeering
fourteen empty shipping containers and having them placed in an embattled circle midway
between the MuseumAfrica and the Electric Workshop. Artists included himself, Brett
Murray, Lisa Brice, Hentie van der Merwe and Kate Gottgens, one to each container.
Acknowledged as a major attraction at the Biennale, ‘Laager’ drew an invitation for all the
artists to exhibit in Chile the following year.
WAYNE BARKER
SUE WILLIAMSON
When I fi rst met Wayne we were on our way to an exhibition and he was telling
someone how he had been struggling all day on a painting which wasn’t working properly.
I felt strangely comforted because I had only been painting for a while, and here was
Wayne who was already famously famous for the FIG Gallery, et al., conferring to doubts
and diffi culties not dissimilar to my own.
After that initial meeting he invited us to one of his legendary dinners in Troyeville
where he had a studio next to Bob’s Infamous Bar. We arrived to a long table laden with
plates of prawns and overfl owing with bottles of wine. Jollility reigned and raucous it was,
and that was the beginning of a long friendship….
And now a decade later, after being so familiar with Wayne’s world, I look at the four
paintings we have of his hanging on our wall at home and realize how amazingly talented
he really is. His deep compassion and concern for humanity, a poetic vulnerability if you
will, underpins I think the underlying quality in all of his work. He’s not afraid to express his
pleasure or his pain, and that takes courage especially in today’s world where art can be
so conceptual and where the idea behind the work has become more important than the
feeling in the work itself.
DIANA HYSLOP
SUPER BORING
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