Summer Salon is a retrospective group exhibition that celebrates the artistic collaborations that have blossomed at David Krut Projects over the years. This showcase brings together a diverse group of artists, both local and international, whose works are filled with vitality and offer an acute reflection of the times in which we live. With an eclectic array of artists, Summer Salon provides a multifaceted arena of subject matter, inviting the audience to explore and contemplate dynamic narratives.
Over the years, this space has fostered artistic exchange, resulting in an ever-evolving dialogue between artists, art lovers, and the broader creative community. Summer Salon pays tribute to this unique spirit by featuring a selection of artists who have, at various junctures, engaged with David Krut Projects. It is a testament to the enduring relationships and creative camaraderie that have flourished in this vibrant artistic environment.
This curated selection is not bound by a singular theme or narrative. Instead, it serves as a multifaceted arena where artists present their unique viewpoints and interpretations of the world. From the introspections of the self to critical global dialogues – these artists, each with their distinctive voices and perspectives, have created artworks that capture the essence of our complex and ever-changing world. From dynamic abstract compositions to provocative figurative pieces, the exhibition aims to mirror the revitalising energy of a new season.
Kate McCrickard
Kate McCrickard is a British painter, printmaker and writer based in Paris, France. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1998 where she received her MA Honours Degree in Fine Art. Her work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, The Davison Art Centre (Wesleyan University, Connecticut), and The Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh).
As a writer, aside from the publications mentioned above, McCrickard was a regular contributor to the American global journal ideas, Art in Print. She has also contributed to Print Quarterly, Art South Africa and exhibition catalogues for Hayward Touring, London, Thames and Hudson and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.
Matthew Hindley
Matthew Hindley (born 1974, Cape Town, South Africa) is a South African painter. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2002, where he was awarded the Michaelis Prize.
As one of the country’s most recognized younger painters, Hindley’s intense, poetic and delving artworks have featured in various critical and seminal South African exhibitions.
Recent solo presentations have included An Everlasting Once at Brundyn + Gonsalves, Cape Town (2011) and Twilight of the Idols at Biksady, Budapest (2013).
Hindley’s exhibition of drawings at David Krut Cape Town coincided with the official launch of the book, The Five Magic Pebbles & other stories. His notable solo painting presentation Resurrection (Der Brennende Wald) was held at Everard Read Cape Town gallery, in October 2015.
In addition, he has presented at the world-renowned Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, Michigan (2012) and the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India (2012). In 2014 he worked on a series of paintings inspired by the mythological African tales of South African writer Don Mattera, for a book published by Rhodeworks, in Berlin, Germany. In 2015 his artwork was part of the imago mundi, Benetton Collection at the Venice Biennale, and his major public sculpture Speak Naturally and Continuously was installed above the entrance of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. This artwork was rebuilt in late 2018/early 2019 and reopened to the general public interaction May 2019.
Robyn Penn was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and currently lives and works in Johannesburg as a fine artist, an art teacher and a printmaker. Penn’s prolific printmaking career started in August 2011, when she began collaborating with David Krut Workshop (DKW) on a series of monotypes and gave a lecture to the DKW team on colour palettes. Penn had her first solo exhibition with David Krut Projects (DKP) in November 2011, titled Pretty World. Since then, she has had four solo shows with DKP, most recently Cloud of Unknowing in June 2016.
Penn’s enduring fascination with cloud imagery is evident from her early shows to the present day. Initially, this took the form of an exploration of the sublime, but her clouds have since shifted from romanticized sky-scapes to beautiful but politically charged meditations on climate change denial. Penn has an honours degree, with distinction, in Fine arts from Canterbury University, New Zealand, and did a year’s training in Fine Arts at The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa. She also has a BA in Psychology from Wits. In 1998, Penn was awarded the Bickerton – Widdowson Trust Memorial scholarship. That year, she completed her BAFA, majoring in painting.
Since collaborating with DKW in 2011, Penn has produced numerous series’ of prints, ranging from mezzotints to sugarlifts, totalling twenty-two editioned works. In 2012 she had her first solo exhibition at David Krut Gallery in Johannesburg, as well as showing in group shows in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Italy, London and New York. In 2017 she had her first solo exhibition at Barnard Gallery in Cape Town. Her work is represented in private and corporate collections. Currently she works as an independent artist and teaches art classes privately.
Diane Victor was born in Witbank, South Africa, in 1964. She received her BA Fine Arts Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with a major in Printmaking. In addition to graduating with distinction and winning various awards, Victor also became the youngest recipient of the prestigious Volkskas Atelier Award in 1988. The Volkskas Award granted Victor a ten-month stay at the Cité International des Artes in Paris, allowing her time to work collaboratively with other experienced printmakers and to observe and reflect on a society very different from her own.
Since 1990, Victor has been a part-time lecturer, teaching drawing and printmaking, at various South African institutions including the University of Pretoria, Wits Technikon, Pretoria Technikon, Open Window Academy, Vaal Triangle Technikon, the University of the Witwatersrand, Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg.
The tension generated by Diane Victor’s impressive body of drawings and prints arises not only from her biting social commentary and the sometimes macabre nature of her images and narratives, but from an interplay between the tough and the fragile, the hard edges of her visual narratives and the delicate mark-making and fragility of her preferred media.
Stephen Hobbs
Stephen Hobbs was born in Johannesburg in 1972. Since 1994, Johannesburg has served as a critical reference point for Hobbs’ artistic and curatorial insights into the apartheid-city-turned-African-city, with a particular interest in the impact of defensive urban planning and architecture on the behavioral aspects of city and society. Hobbs functions not only as a practicing studio artist and dedicated printmaker, but also as a public arts curator and advocate.
Hobbs’ printmaking practice is informed by the complex, often obfuscating, visual language and urban defensive planning used to construct cities. He works predominantly in etching, linocut and monotype, and his prints serve as a distillation of his practice – public and studio-based.
Dazzle camouflage has been a key trope in Hobbs’ practice for many years – a zebra-like pattern used on gunships in the early 1900s to fragment the visual field of enemy sites in combat situations. Although dazzle patterning became obsolete after World War I, Hobbs has mined the potential that such visual deception presents for aesthetic reflection on dystopian urban environments. During Hobbs’ recent stay in the Republic of Ireland 2019-2021, he began to activate a new making trajectory influenced by a three-year-long research project resulting in his Permanent Culture exhibition in Cape Town and Johannesburg in 2015. Consequently Hobbs has embarked on a new body of work and thinking informed by living in rural Ireland.
Hobbs graduated from Wits University with a BAFA, in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000, and Co-Director of the purpose-built Gallery Premises (2004-2008) at the Joburg Theatre. Since 2001 he has co-directed the artist collaborative and public art consultancy, The Trinity Session, and since 2004 has co-produced a range of multi-medium urban and network-focused projects with Marcus Neustetter, under the collaborative name Hobbs/Neustetter. From 2017-2019, Hobbs joined the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, as Unit Leader and resident critic. Since 2002 The Trinity Session has provided consultative and turnkey services for the conceptual development, coordination and curation of various scales of public art, in several major metropolitan areas in South Africa.
Stephen Hobbs is based between Johannesburg and London.
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt has a strong interest in painting and ‘urbanity – how we understand cities/space within an increasing nation conscious/globalised economy, mobility and imagination’. Most of her work has developed in direct relation to the context of Johannesburg – and South Africa.
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt was born in Namibia in 1970 and moved with her family to Germany in 1982 when political unrest in the country intensified. She completed Abitur in Hamburg in 1990 and returned to Namibia in 1992 where she enrolled at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1993. Kreutzfeldt completed her undergraduate studies in 1996 (painting) and worked in Cape town for 4 years as artist and lecturer, freelancing in the film-industry and public art initiatives. She been based in Johannesburg since 2000 and wants to stay till 2010. Kreutzfeldt completed her MA in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2004.
Of Kreutzfelt’s art, Sue Williamson has written: ‘Plugging into a universal unconscious, the artist works with images that are already there, that exist on a page in a magazine or newspaper, that already have a history. Kreutzveldt does not attempt to ‘express’, but sees her function as one of extrication, or laying bare, of setting up a drama – a drama which questions land, space, relationships and the relevance of [artmaking].’
Maja Maljevic
Maja Maljević was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1973. Having completed her schooling, she spent seven years obtaining her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Belgrade, graduating in 1999. In 2000 she moved to South Africa, in order to escape the political turmoil in her own country. She has been living and working in Johannesburg since then.
Maljević’s particular style begins with “dirtying” the canvas with a layer of bright paint that breaks the baldness of the white surface and opens up the space for Maljević’s intuitive jigsaw endeavour. Onto this ground, Maljević builds up surfaces with drips, blocks, bands and waves of colour, searching for harmony between colour and form, line and shape, expansive surface and small detail. For Maljević, physical movement is an important part of the process – never can she be found sitting at an easel. Through her own version of gestural abstraction, Maljević prevents the composition from becoming staid and self-indulgent, as she has put it, and allows action and conflict to occur between the different elements with which she is engaged. Reworking the formal mechanisms of Modernism to suit her contemporary needs – as a painter, a printmaker and also most recently as a sculptor – Maljević’s primary objective is coherence between all the individual elements within a composition, whether they are in conflict or co-existing harmoniously, and therefore its integral logic.
Mandlenkosi Mavengere was born in 1992 in Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. Mavengere’s works are predominantly a combination of printing and painting. He moved to South Africa after completing high school in Zimbabwe.
His artworks bring into conversation and discussion the issues of migration and labour relations in contemporary society. Mavengere is an accomplished printmaker, as his linocut banknotes are used prominently in his artworks. The banknote artworks are a framework within which one can observe the issues of migration with relevance to socio-economic divergence of identity and convergence of another. The directional lines in the banknotes depict the scattering of people and population displacement; the repetition of patterns symbolise the circumstantial economic system embedded to the stereotyped migrants. The linocut banknotes printed onto the fabric emphasise the constructed perambulation of the population in search for income and better life. The figures and portraits are economically fabricated identities who are fitting into a new homeland of occupation versus the home of origin.
Olivia Botha
Olivia Botha is a multi-disciplinary artist working predominately in video performance, installation, collage and painting. She is interested in concepts of language – how we communicate, and how we are unable to communicate. Through this framework, Botha explores the different ways in which our relationships – with inanimate objects, as well as the animate – affect our lives.
Botha was born in Bloemfontein and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a Fine Art degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where she graduated in 2017. In 2018 Botha received the Cassirer Welz Award, which resulted in a new body of work exhibited at SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg. After her residency at the Bag Factory, she stayed on as a resident artist at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios. Botha has also participated in numerous group shows, most notably at The African Center in New York, Turbine Art Fair in Johannesburg, ABSA Gallery in Johannesburg and at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare.
In 2018, Botha was a recipient of the Moleskine Foundation Scholarship granting her the opportunity to participate in the AtWork workshop conducted by Simon Njami and Andrew Tshabangu at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare. In 2019, the artist was invited to attend a workshop presented by Penny Siopis as part of Siopis’s residency programme at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo.
Her video work, Silence Bleeding, was screened at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, and at the International Short Film Festival in CortoLovere, Italy, as part of the Video Art Awards.
Most recently, Botha was the recipient of a 12-month fellowship with the renowned DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, as well as a 2-month residency at SCAC Marestaing in France, both of which she undertook during 2021-2022.
Anna van der Ploeg
Anna van der Ploeg (1992) is a contemporary South African artist. Her professional practice is far-reaching and although she works primarily in painting, printmaking and sculpture, she is not limited to those fields. Anna has held several solo exhibitions, has shown in galleries locally and abroad, and has works in private collections and institutions, among which the South African National Art Bank. She has participated in artist-in-residence programs in Japan, India and France and is currently working on a video project with an artist from Berlin under the collaborative EveryMutter. Anna van der Ploeg is currently pursuing a masters degree in fine arts at KASK Royal Conservatory of Art in Belgium.
Her artistry is built on a foundation of technical competence and intellectual curiosity: she is vigorous in both her making and thinking. Anna is also an avid mountaineer and experienced rock climber, with the kind of resolve one might hope for in someone you’re tied to with a rope. On one hike in 2011, her party was swarmed by bees. Everyone was stung multiple times – except for Anna. After this she sought out a beekeeper with whom to apprentice, and began to keep bees of her own. Her research into the symbolic history of beekeeping laid the groundwork for her figurative imagery: the beekeeper becoming a recurring protagonist, the societal structure of the hive a synecdoche, and warm ochres combined with woad blue to define her preferred palette.
Van der Ploeg’s tendency to borrow from literary terms is significant. She is compelled by representational imagery for the qualities it shares with literature: an ability to be didactic, to create a fiction in which to probe at the truth. As a reader and an occasional writer of poetry and short stories, she has a sharp interest in language, as intimated by her titles. For her, writing runs parallel to making, and titles precede, or prompt, the actual artwork.
Here it feels relevant to note the finesse of Anna’s practice. Though the catalyst to a work is loosely conceptual, her process is labour-intensive, perceptive and specialized. Her dexterity and moxie – she makes her own clothes and generally a quick study in hand work – are not unrelated to her imagery or her mediums. Recently, carved, painted wood blocks have come out of her sustained interest in the confluence of print, painting and sculpture. In 2017, her experience as a printmaker led her to Japan, where she trained in Mokuhanga: traditional woodblock printmaking.
João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga
João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is a Peruvian Italian Brooklyn-born Johannesburg based artist, composer and maker of physical and virtual “things” that play with reality by deconstructing it, shifting expectations of standard uses or purposes of objects and processes.
Through experimentation and improvisation Orecchia explores sound’s connective capacities through both its physical properties and material preconscious properties, seeking a balance between computer technology, hand-made electronics and real world sounds like the human voice, field recordings and traditional musical instruments.
Orecchia’s background as a self-taught musician is in improvised performance and composition for video art, film and theatre. His practice extends to public performance and intervention and his recently completed master’s degree in Digital Arts brought a shift towards a more spatial and physical approach to composition, where sound, vibration, space, music and audience become connected in experience.
Deborah Bell
Deborah Bell (born 1957) is a leading painter, sculptor and printmaker in South Africa. While her early work was more political, her work across different media she is more recently concerned with worlds in between: the realm between “mortality and immortality, matter and spirit, presence and absence, the quotidian and the mythic, the grounded and transcendent.”
Bell has noted, of her practice: “The idea of an artist as a magician delights me. It is about alchemy and the turning of base material into gold.” Bell’s work is fundamentally informed by a personal search for the ‘Self’ and she often draws on spiritual imagery from a wide range of sources. Multi-layered references and connection to ancient sources and memories is linked to her spiritual beliefs and how she defines herself as an artist in Africa. This continuity of form and content within Bell’s oeuvre allows the possible meanings within her work to reach beyond the personal search of the artist herself.
She is the winner of multiple awards and her works lie in numerous collections, including the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian Institute, both Washington, D.C.
Maaike Bakker (b. 1986, Pretoria) is a visual artist and illustrator working with various drawing, sculpture and installation-based mediums as well as digitally with regards to her illustration-based work. She obtained a degree in Visual Arts (2009) and her MA in Fine Art (2013) from the University of Johannesburg. She currently lives and works in Johannesburg.
Bakker’s work can be described as light and eclectic, and can be both concept-driven or light-hearted and rough. Bakker’s work predominantly explores themes of notation and ephemerality. Her practice also investigates limitations imposed by systems or structures and aims to determine at what point such may become excess and irrelevant, ultimately exploring futility. Bakker’s unique style is formed through the creation of line-based patterns, combined with soft, muted, pleasant colours, which together create a sense of richness.
Maaike Bakker (b. 1986, Pretoria) is a visual artist and illustrator working with various drawing, sculpture and installation-based mediums as well as digitally with regards to her illustration-based work. She obtained a degree in Visual Arts (2009) and her MA in Fine Art (2013) from the University of Johannesburg. She currently lives and works in Johannesburg.
Bakker’s work can be described as light and eclectic, and can be both concept-driven or light-hearted and rough. Bakker’s work predominantly explores themes of notation and ephemerality. Her practice also investigates limitations imposed by systems or structures and aims to determine at what point such may become excess and irrelevant, ultimately exploring futility. Bakker’s unique style is formed through the creation of line-based patterns, combined with soft, muted, pleasant colours, which together create a sense of richness.
Fanie Buys
Fanie Buys was born in Gansbaai in 1993. He attended the Michaelis School of Fine Art, graduating with a distinction in Studiowork in 2016. Buys was a co-recipient of the Judy Steinberg Award for Painting and the Simon Gerson Award for an exceptional body of work.
Buys received training in printmaking, but now works primarily with oil painting. His paintings explore how the human body gets represented in various types of media, such as paparazzi photos, lost family picture albums, screenshots, etc. By depicting these types of images in oil paintings, Buys attempts to capture personal experiences and provide the viewer with a glance into the subject’s experience.
Peter Cohen
Peter Cohen is a Johannesburg-based architect and artist with his own architectural practice, with a particular affinity for designing modern dwellings that imagine the fine artworks that would fill these domestic spaces. In 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, Cohen felt the need to create art outside of the realm of architecture. He began exploring both abstract and figurative imagery in different mediums, in the hours after continuing his architectural business by day. With his early works Cohen was industrious with what tools he could find, painting delicate, precise landscapes on spare pieces of floorboards and rolls of heavy brown paper. Cohen’s typically monochromatic work explores imagery related to the built and natural landscape, classical antiquity and other art historical periods, with a mark that is precise, sometimes eliciting a pixel-like surface.
Clive Sithole
Clive Sithole was born in Soweto, South Africa. He earned a post-graduate diploma at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2007, and has since been honored with many national awards. He traveled around South Africa to study and work with local potters, including Zulu and Venda ceramic artists. He has led workshops internationally, traveling to Nigeria to study the Udu ceramic drum, and to the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, England, to work with Magdalene Odundo. In 2018, Sithole presented a workshop with Zulu potters Jabu Nala and Thembe Nala, demonstrating their traditional and contemporary coil building techniques and surface treatments.
Sithole explores social issues of land, race, politics and culture in his work, utilizing traditional Zulu techniques, symbols, and firing techniques to enhance his work. He imbues his work with a combination of urban savvy and rural influence, which conveys his passion and technical expertise. Sithole has nurtured his experiences and knowledge of Southern African culture into an integral part of a complex, contemporary artist’s practice. In his narrative and iconography, he returns to the theme of cattle, both in figurative sculptures and as a decorative motifs.
Nina Torr
Nina Torr, born 1987, is an artist/illustrator based in Pretoria. After obtaining her BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, in 2010, Torr returned to South Africa to further expand on her artistic practice. Torr frequently participates in various exhibitions and is a lecturer in illustration at the Open Window. Torr has to date had eight solo exhibitions, Wayfinding was her Masters exhibition that took place at David Krut Projects Johannesburg in 2020.
Torr’s work explores mental landscapes inhabited by characters pursuing a journey of sorts. Her images imply open-ended narratives that invite the viewer to participate and engage with them on a personal level.
Torr’s illustrations have been featured in local publications such as Essie Letterpress’ Artist’s Almanac, the Bat Butt Zine and iJusi. Besides working with DKW, she has also produced prints in collaboration with Black River Studio as part of the 50ty/50ty Prints range and lithographs with The Artist’s Press. Torr frequently exhibits at In Toto Gallery (JHB), 99 Loop (CT) and NO END Contemporary (JHB).
Jacob van Schalwyk
Jacob van Schalkwyk (b.1979) grew up in Pretoria, and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn New York where he completed a BFA in Drawing (2003). He went on to live and work in New York, returning to South Africa in 2008.
Van Schalkwyk subsequently started working in lithographic ink, using it as his primary drawing and painting medium. In 2010 the artist featured in his first group exhibition, Drawing Links at Gallery AOP, followed by a solo exhibition in 2011 and ongoing representation by the gallery until June 2016.
Jacob van Schalkwyk began his collaboration with David Krut Workshop in July 2016 and was featured in both David Krut Projects’ (DKP) Curated and Limited Editions Sections at the FNB Joburg Art Fair 2016.
SUNSETS, his solo show at DKP at the Montebello Design Centre in Cape Town in September 2016, comprised of works on paper and accompanying materials that continue his study of category theory in relation to abstraction. Van Schalkwyk is currently exhibiting in the group show entitled /ˈatməsˌfir/ at DKP New York and has subsequently opened his first solo project and print launch entitled DOLCEFARNIENTE at DKP Parkwood on the 9th of March 2017. DOLCEFARNIENTE has traveled to DKP Cape Town which opened on the 4th of October 2017.
Heidi Fourie
Heidi Fourie’s preferred medium is painting, through which she studies what happens when figurative representation and the intrinsic qualities of paint are pursued simultaneously. Her subject matter is simple – everyday scenes of figures and familiar objects – the simplicity of which frees her to practice and constantly refine her balancing act between restraint and excess, between gestural and polished mark-making.
Heidi Fourie was born in Pretoria, where she currently lives and works. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts, specialising in painting, in 2012 at the University of Pretoria, for which she received the Bettie Cilliers Barnard Bursary for Fine Arts. Her first solo exhibition, Islands, was produced under the mentorship of Frikkie Eksteen and presented in 2015 at Lizamore & Associates Gallery in Johannesburg. Since then she has had two other large solo exhibitions in Cape Town and Pretoria, and participated in various group exhibitions countrywide.
David Krut Projects
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