David Krut Projects X FORMS Gallery
Matty Monethi
Adrian Fortuin
Khotso Motsoeneng
David Krut Projects and FORMS Gallery are pleased to present Parallel Process, an exhibition of new monotypes and unique works by Matty Monethi, Khotso Motsoeneng and Adrian Fortuin.
In March 2022, David Krut Projects and FORMS Gallery began a collaboration centring around the printmaking processes and possibilities afforded by the David Krut Workshop. Three artists represented by FORMS Gallery were invited to spend time experimenting and making monotypes in the workshop, under the guidance of DKW’s team of expert printmakers.
Matty Monethi
Matty Monethi was born in Maseru, Lesotho in 1996, and grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Monethi completed her Diploma in Fine Art at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town in 2016, and in 2017 embarked on a semester abroad at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, where she specialised in printmaking. In 2020 Monethi completed a BA in Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, where she is currently based.
Monethi uses painting, printmaking and text to explore the personal dimensions of migration and memory. With a keen sense of her own place in broader historical contexts in Africa, she scrutinises her connections with her adopted countries, cultures and close relationships. Monethi draws on memories of her own experiences, as well as family photographs from her childhood, to create emblematic pictorial scenes punctuated by empty space and text. Her evocative representational works address evolving selfhood, the depiction of the past, and the relationship between personal archives and nostalgia.
Matty Monethi (right) discussing her works with printer Kim Loggenberg (left)
You can be the pink boat (2022)
Watercolour monotype with Kitakata
32 x 40.5 cm
R 5 175 VAT incl. framed
Father Coffee (2022)
Watercolour monotype with Kitakata
43 x 34 cm
R 5 235 VAT incl. framed
Not as good as the old one (2022)
Watercolour monotype
43 x 34 cm
R 5 235 VAT incl. framed
Adrian Fortuin
Adrian Fortuin (b. 1994, Johannesburg) is an artist based in Johannesburg whose work explores the relationship between intuition, intersubjectivity, identity, image-making and abstraction. Working in a range of media, the scope of which is informed by a primarily conceptual approach, Fortuin is interested in the limits of representation and the legacies of identity and experience connected to family, ancestry, community, and society more broadly. His current paintings and drawings explore the emancipatory potential of abstraction in varying degrees.
Fortuin graduated from the Wits School of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 2020, and was the recipient of the Wits Young Artist Award and the Martienssen Prize in 2019. Since graduating, his practice has shifted from a performative and lens-based approach to a prolific study of painting and drawing. His paintings are characterised by an obsessive process of revision, in which paintings are sedimented under newer paintings, so that the painted surface becomes an archive of thought and gestures and a metaphor for the endurance of personal historical traces in the present.
Fortuin is influenced by the work of South African artist Tracey Rose, who was his advisor at the Wits School of Arts, and Moshekwa Langa, as well as expressionist tendencies in African modernisms and postmodernisms. He has exhibited his work in group exhibitions in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kampala, and the roaming African platform Boda Boda Lounge .
Adrian Fortuin working on a watercolour monotype with crayons
I am the Wound and the Knife (2022)
Watercolour monotype triptych
75 x 168 cm
R 22 085 VAT incl. framed
Khotso Motsoeneng
Khotso Motsoeneng (b. 1993, Free State) is a self-taught painter and printmaker whose training in photography developed his keen eye for colour and form. Motsoeneng’s practice seeks out an abstract formal language which brings together his keen observation of nature and intuitive perspectives on the relationship between different colours and emotions. He is particularly inspired by woodgrain as a trace of of natural processes, and looks to plant life as a metaphor for human experience. Motsoeneng’s brightly coloured canvases are also sites of emotional exploration, and participate in a complex symbolic system in which colour and emotion are intertwined.
His work has been included in several group shows in South Africa, most recently at the 2021 Turbine Art Fair, and is represented in international and local private collections. A past finalist for the prestigious Cassirer Welz Award (2019), Motsoeneng is a resident artist at August House studios in Johannesburg.
Khotso Motsoeneng mixing oil-based inks for his works
Busy Crossroads I (2022)
Oil-based monotype and handwork
69.7 x 86 cm
R 10 750 VAT incl. framed
Mafube I (2022)
Oil-based monotype with Puff-Paint collage and handwork
28.5 x 41.2 cm
R 5 145 VAT incl. framed
Parallel Process
Opening 19 May 2022 at 18:00
At David Krut Gallery, 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood.
David Krut Gallery and FORMS Gallery are pleased to present Parallel Process, an exhibition of new unique works on paper and paintings by Matty Monethi, Khotso Motsoeneng and Adrian Fortuin.
Parallel Process emerged out of a collaboration between the two organisations centered around the activities and skills transfer opportunities presented by the David Krut Workshop (DKW) in downtown Johannesburg.
This collaboration began in early 2022, when FORMS Gallery founder Anthea Buys reached out to the David Krut Team to establish a connection between the artists she works with and the DKARTS Collaboration Programme activities. The three artists selected for this project, Monethi, Fortuin and Motsoeneng, were invited to make unique works on paper under the guidance of DKW’s team of expert facilitators and printers.
The opportunity of putting work through a press creates imagery and marks which the artist would ordinarily be unable to achieve in their own studios. The artists worked using the presses with a combination of oil and watercolour pigments to create unique paintings on paper, incorporating other processes like cyanotype, drypoint and collage elements. Making art in a workshop allows the artist to create images in a unique manner. Working in a public space is also unique and a confidence-building experience. While each artist addresses variable themes in their individual practices, lines can be drawn between the works created. Following these trajectories, one can take note of the passage of time, the weight or lightness of individual moments, and the marks and meaning of place – visually mapping stories of people, conversations, and processes both organic and societal, intentional and fortuitous.
The short residencies have led to exploratory works being created by all three artists, who have since created paintings in their own studios for the exhibition.
About the organisations
FORMS Gallery is a dynamic structure for working with artists. Based in South Africa, FORMS draws on gallery, institutional and independent curatorial models, presenting a programme that takes shape through a combination of online and in-real-life manifestations. At the heart of this programme are ongoing collaborations with artists who make work that is critically, aesthetically and politically important. Also central to the FORMS ecosystem are connections with like-minded spaces, people and organisations.
DKARTS Collaboration Programme brings together various art practitioners to facilitate the making of art, technical exposure, educating, and collaborating. DKARTS includes the David Krut Workshop in Maboneng and the David Krut Gallery spaces in Parkwood.
