Ink, Paper, Politics: The Agency of Print as Social Critique
The graphic and serial nature of printmaking has, over the course of its complex evolution as a medium of art production, regularly lent itself to radical social and political commentary. Since the polemical broadsides and politicised etchings and engravings of the 16th and 17th centuries, artists have in different ways employed technologies of print to demonstrate their acute and often indignant observations of social injustice, inequality and the violence of war.
This subversive tendency runs like a raw nerve through the print collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery, connecting works across centuries and continents. Tracing this thread, Ink, Paper, Politics: The Agency of Print as Social Critique, brings together a diverse cross-section of etchings, relief prints, lithographs and screenprints. Whether reportorial, satirical or more reflective in nature, all bear critical witness to the social and political conditions of the artist鈥檚 experience. Historical prints by Francisco de Goya, Georges Rouault, K盲the Kollwitz and others, are presented in dialogue with those of more recent social commentators 鈥� including works by artists such as Gavin Jantjes, Tommy Motswai, Nhlanhla Ben Nsusha and Diane Victor.
In their critique of social conditions and catastrophes as diverse as the Peninsular War, Vietnam War and Apartheid 鈥� not to mention the corruption, social inequalities and violence of contemporary South Africa 鈥� the graphic works on show together present a kind of transgressive narrative, a history of dissent. In short, a chronicling of society鈥檚 failures.
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The graphic and serial nature of printmaking has, over the course of its complex evolution as a medium of art production, regularly lent itself to radical social and political commentary. Since the polemical broadsides and politicised etchings and engravings of the 16th and 17th centuries, artists have in different ways employed technologies of print to demonstrate their acute and often indignant observations of social injustice, inequality and the violence of war.
This subversive tendency runs like a raw nerve through the print collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery, connecting works across centuries and continents. Tracing this thread, Ink, Paper, Politics: The Agency of Print as Social Critique, brings together a diverse cross-section of etchings, relief prints, lithographs and screenprints. Whether reportorial, satirical or more reflective in nature, all bear critical witness to the social and political conditions of the artist鈥檚 experience. Historical prints by Francisco de Goya, Georges Rouault, K盲the Kollwitz and others, are presented in dialogue with those of more recent social commentators 鈥� including works by artists such as Gavin Jantjes, Tommy Motswai, Nhlanhla Ben Nsusha and Diane Victor.
In their critique of social conditions and catastrophes as diverse as the Peninsular War, Vietnam War and Apartheid 鈥� not to mention the corruption, social inequalities and violence of contemporary South Africa 鈥� the graphic works on show together present a kind of transgressive narrative, a history of dissent. In short, a chronicling of society鈥檚 failures.
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