Gerhard Marx occupies an increasingly important niche in South African contemporary art. His brilliant new exhibition at Everard Read Gallery in Rosebank, Joburg, demonstrates not only a commitment to his materials, but to the importance of the ideas with which he works.
Most contemporary artists work with a specific set of thematics or visual motifs that define their work, either stylistically or in terms of the visual presentation — the “content” that viewers see first and respond to. The artists who don’t do so tend to follow other visual trends in the hope of aesthetic or commercial success, or they tend towards the decorative, adjacent to the tourist market or interior design.
This is not a criticism as much as an observation about an art “world” — in reality an art market — where competition is fierce and clients thin on the ground. Artwork that is safe, visually comfortable and appealing in its colour palette and presentation has more chance of commercial success in such a market.
Marx is a different kind of contemporary artist to this. Predominantly a sculptor, he has worked for many years with the idea that the ways in which we map our world — what one might call the cartographic impulse — is an important part of how we change our perception of the world and the power dynamics within it.
This should be clear to anyone who lives in Africa, with the very shape and scale of the continent changed and diminished by Mercator projection mapping, the scramble for Africa among the colonial powers creating artificial borders and arbitrary national states to suit the imperialist agenda.
Marx reconsiders the process of mapping and marries it to a sensitivity to the deeper meanings of the natural world. In the process he uses roots, stems and vegetation as much as he uses paint, glue and chisel.
The title of the exhibition “Landscape would be the wrong word” alludes to Marx’s commitment to vegetal materiality in his work, quite literally, but also to the idea of landscape painting — a painterly capturing of the natural world — as remaining at an artificial distance from its subject matter.
Marx’s ecological commitment enables him to draw together the materials with which he works and to monumentalise the natural world. His sculptures illustrate how much we draw from nature in our use of materials and structures. These dendritic fabulations take the place of maps, offering a blueprint for a hidden natural world with a great deal more beauty and pattern than the one we commonly see. Marx works over the vegetal structures and patterns again and again with more conventional painterly material, painting, lacquering, drawing into and over the surfaces, until they become sleek aesthetic objects.
Interspersed with these mysterious yet precise natural phenomena, mostly rendered almost in two-dimensional framing, is a series of more conventional three-dimensional sculptural pieces, revisiting Marx’s consistent trope of the exploded, fragmented, reconfigured maps. Once again, the idea is to take a partial, often ideologically charged document of the world, of an objective reality which has been changed into a different medium, and to change that medium into an aesthetic object. Even conventional sculptural materials — cast bronze — are imprinted literally with the earth.
Ultimately this new body of work leads from the earthly to the cosmic, using its materiality to link landscapes comprising the parts of nature that link together (roots, branches, stalks) with the things that we see (flowers, colours, conventional beauty).
In setting these works alongside a set of wholly new objects that once were maps, Marx challenges us as viewers to see anew; to see the wider possibilities we have been missing. And that is what art should do for us all.
‘Landscape Would Be the Wrong Word’ runs at Everard Read in Johannesburg until November 1.
