“No cats allowed!” emblazons the marketing poster.
Expect the unexpected in the eponymous Nel gallery in Cape Town’s city centre art hub. Owner Luan Nel, eccentric and boldly supportive of local artists, delights in challenging gallery-goers — although the current exhibition, Dog Show, provides fun and contemplation in equal measure.
Nel has one of his own works on display, Morris, of his beloved Doberman who died 20 years ago. I ask him if it was painted from memory. “No, from a photograph!” he exclaims. We laugh together: our pets are often embedded in our minds, but even the fondest impressions and imagery fade; memory is fragile, which is part of art’s beautiful necessity.
Understandably, as curator he is reluctant to disclose his favourite pieces. I have no such constraints; I keep returning to the works by Katherine Bull and Elodie Burls.
Bull is prolific, and her paintings are often disconcerting. Not so for the smaller exhibit, Reclining Dog #16 (Rhubarb), which is pure playfulness. “Scratch my belly,” the canvas hound seems to urge. Alongside it, however, is the larger Reclining Dog, which causes a double-take. Cross-legged, luxuriously enrobed, the greyhound poses like a lady of the manor. Indeed, stand further back and, apart from the glint of bared teeth — or perhaps because of this mild menace — she could be one’s elderly aunt who has popped by for tea. What does this say, the enigmatic piece asks, about how we project onto our pets, thereby treating them inappropriately even when this is done with love?
“I am drawn to pet portraits in which the individual animal appears to be completely self-possessing and uncompromising in their physical being despite their domestication, containment and framing as human-like,” says Bull. Wrapped within the enigma, too, is the “honouring of an interspecies connection,” despite — or in parallel with — the anthropomorphism.
There’s ambiguity, too, in Burls’ Was it wrong to steal Mila? Some viewers may not even discern a dog within the cage; the ephemerality addresses the hazy morality when the welfare of a domestic animal requires immediate but illegal action. Mila’s story is explained in an annotation to the piece — it’s a bittersweet tale, because her rescue happens too rarely.
Burls’ style is unusual, blending solid geometric definitions with wispy impressionism, reminiscent of some of Cézanne’s paintings. The questioning within Was it wrong to steal Mila? typifies her work. “I really don’t think one can have certainty about anything,” she says. Painting, for her, “is the best way to process my own demons as well as the demons of the world. It’s a way to deal with it, to be with it, to understand it (or try to), but without being pulled into the darkness.”
Up the winding, one-way traffic staircase to Nel’s upper floor reveals two particularly intriguing works. Luxolo Witvoet’s PASOP, an acrylic and gold leaf collage on canvas, references the perspective of the country’s domestic workers, gardeners, and street people. “Pasop vir die hond”: it’s SA’s ubiquitous front-gate warning, an admonishment to stay away. The dog’s aggressive pose is garnished with gold teeth, reminding us of the wealth inequality between the respective sides of the suburban homeowner’s fence. The colours of the German flag are surely Witvoet’s wider warning: a chasm of inequality, like the 1930s Weimar Republic, is a harbinger of awful things.
A few paces away is a curtained-off, darkened section looping three videos of outdoor performance art, or public interventions, by Steven Cohen. From 1998, they show Cohen cavorting, dancing and prancing, dog-like and mostly naked. The Sandton Square restaurant piazza crowd react by pretending not to react. Their cognitive dissonance on display is amusing, then, after a few minutes, uncomfortable to watch, because it mirrors our own. Cohen’s Dog performances, like Witvoet’s piece, use man’s best friend as a portal to interrogate how we behave among ourselves, and how we treat one another.
The sculpture medium is also well represented in Dog Show. Ella Cronje’s ceramic Confession is a knockout piece of a Pitbull in the dog box. The creature’s glum, apologetic eyes, her head bowed to make herself small, perfectly captures that typical, uniquely canine contrition that melts our hearts.
Well-known portrait artist Juria le Roux, however, wanted her contribution to Dog Show “to shift focus without resorting to the usual sentimental slant often seen in pet portraits”. She has two canvasses on display, created specifically for the exhibition: one of her Merle Great Dane named Lord Roquefort, the other showing Walter the Border Collie cross. The brushstrokes are alla prima, her preferred, strongly evident, wet-on-wet style, with classic chiaroscuro light-and-dark contrast.
Without even showing the depth of their eyes, Le Roux has perfectly captured the Great Dane breed’s distinctive mournfulness and the inquisitive, rascally nature of her other, rescued pet. They’re “an impression of the soul of the sitter”, she says. Which is precisely why I don’t think she’s met her own spin on the brief: they’re enchanting and deeply sentimental, resonating with the artist’s adoration.
• Dog Show runs until July 31 2025 at the Nel Gallery.
