Writing Art History Since 2002

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For a number of years Mary Wafer has remained below the contemporary art radar. While her paintings popped up intermittently, on book covers and small group shows, and most visibly at David Brodie’s Joburg Art Fair booth two years running, she certainly hasn’t had the profile she deserves. Wafer’s autumn show at Brodie/Stevenson, The frontier is never somewhere else, went a long way towards remedying that. This strong, sizeable body of work revealed an artist less interested in existing painterly trends and more concerned with establishing her own territory.

For a number of years Mary Wafer has remained below the contemporary art radar. While her paintings popped up intermittently, on book covers and small group shows, and most visibly at David Brodie’s Joburg Art Fair booth two years running, she certainly hasn’t had the profile she deserves. Wafer’s autumn show at Brodie/Stevenson, The frontier is never somewhere else, went a long way towards remedying that. This strong, sizeable body of work revealed an artist less interested in existing painterly trends and more concerned with establishing her own territory.Johannesburg (including its inhabitants) has been the subject of much visual art in the last two decades. The overwhelming majority of this work has been made by photographers (Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim and David Goldblatt), Dorothee Kreutzfeldt one of the few painters to tackle the urban clutter and social recalibration occurring in the inner city. Thus Wafer’s paintings operate as something of a revelation, establishing a surprisingly appropriate visual syntax of drips, smears and semi-opaque layering in muted tones with which to construct her typically anonymous views of the city’s urban sprawl.Wafer says of her project: “My paintings take the urban landscape of Johannesburg as subject matter. They aim to articulate through the processes of painting, the visible and invisible city, aspects of the social/urban environment that can be seen or recognized, and those that are obscured or hidden.” Her painterly strategies play directly into this notion of the city, obscuring its particularities and highlighting its topographical banalities.Formally, Wafer’s work put her in the company of European painters like Carla Klein, Eberhard Havekost, even Sarah Morris, with their interest in the philosophical implications of architecture stretched, fragmented and dissolved in paint. But Wafer’s approach is distinct, resisting the European too-cool-for-school ennui: hers is a thoroughly engaged unpacking of the vicissitudes of the city. Works like Turnstiles and mezzanines (2009) and Loose in the air (2008) display a mature intensity and an ability to balance style and content that is rare. One is struck not by the undeniably en vogue topicality of dealing with urbanity, but rather Wafer’s ability to construct compelling images in an original way.Wafer’s aesthetic challenge to her audience goes beyond image to surface: paintings, like Dark (office park) (2008) and Dark (Pirates v Chiefs II) (2008) use enamel’s sheen to interrupt consumption. These works, though it seems less popular with buyers, further investigate the visible/invisible dichotomy, forcing the viewer to move around in front of the images to fully decode them. Yet it is with the semi-opacity of images like Leaders of the free world, Let it bleed and An end has a start, marrying as they do a painterly generalism with linear, almost diagrammatic abstraction, that Wafer’s approach reaches its heights. Beyond achieving her stated goals, these works positively vibrate out from the gallery walls, and signal a fertile future path for Wafer.
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