An immensely impressive exhibition

REVIEWED BY ROBYN SASSEN

Pictured: Pieter Hugo: Portrait of Steven Mohapi (photograph) 2003.

The work shows a balding, soft-around-the-contours Kentridge gazing deeply into the inner confines of his drawings, through an espresso cup, which becomes an ironic cipher for the ways in which pedestrianism and fantasy blend and dance to make something extraordinary. Having this work in the central downstairs space, of this quirky yet relevant exhibition about portraiture, immediately lends the initiative perspicacity to make it fly, as it will lend you the momentum to come back to visit it again and again.

This curatorial wisdom is articulated in many other surprising and beautiful ways. Here, a bronze sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi, by Anton Momberg stares you down as you mount the staircase. There, Steven Cohen’s screen-printed face makes eye contact with you, from the back of one of his upholstered chairs.  

Curated by Barbara Freemantle, the exhibition reaches across 300 years, dissecting and contemplating the ubiquitously annoying selfie, against a weighty backdrop of art historical context. They’re not all self-portraits. They’re also not all South African – there’s a remarkable etching by Lucian Freud and a silkscreen by Andy Warhol – their commonality is in the extraordinary skill invested in their making.

From a wild portrait of Alan Crump by Robert Hodgins to Paul Stopforth’s devastatingly subtle three part image of The Interrogators, created as commentary on Steve Biko’s death, to Dorothy Kay’s solemn painting of “Cookie” a domestic worker, to Irma Stern’s monumental portrait of her mother Henny, to Pieter Hugo’s haunting image of Steven Mohapi (2003), a small boy with no pigmentation, this is an immensely impressive exhibition.

Thankfully, the one really focused bit of “selfie” gesture is confined to a single electronic screen, which is easily by-passable, but the point is made: reaching one’s eye and heart back into the annuls of portrait tradition, we see something tremendous, we embrace something wonderful, and we know that something shallow and foolish is the product of our own time.

• From Sitting to Selfie: 300 years of SA portraits is at Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, until September 6 (011) 631-4467.