Artists’ paths cross at In Toto
BIRDHAVEN - Artists Maria Patrizi and Sarel Petrus will explore ideas of movement, journeys and memories attached to objects in a joint exhibition, Crossing Paths.
Through their individual mediums of oil and bronze, the artists will illuminate the significance of personal objects and reminiscence as a vital source of meaning in history.
“[The exhibition will consider] how particular items become sites of memory and how these artists construct their own sense of the past,” said In Toto Gallery’s Megan Kidd.
“In this body of work, Patrizi contemplated the spiritual and the physical, offering subtle interpretations of the word ‘cross’. The moments that Patrizi selected to represent, in her delicate veils of paint, form the architecture of her identity as an artist and an individual.”
Patrizi based her paintings on photographs she had taken.
“[She] expresses herself through panes of oil, occasionally experiencing a sense of loss or gain as the paintings take shape and evolve under her brush,” said Kidd.
Sculptor Petrus travels to cities and remote spaces to reflect on the “estranged, often ignorant, relationship between city dwellers and the natural world”.
“[He] explores the vacuum left by the often-unacknowledged but essential and infinite connection between human existence and the natural environment,” she said.
“Petrus selects found objects for their aesthetic qualities as well as their potential secret narratives.”
The artist used steel letter punches to highlight the act of writing rather than the text itself, in a search for the ways in which memories escape the rules of language, and how powerful nostalgia can be.
“Petrus and Patrizi literally ‘cross paths’ in this exhibition; their artworks traversing in a gallery space where they tell intimate stories that narrate the artists’ own kinetic, constantly-evolving history, and generate spaces for us to fill in our own narratives, thus becoming passages for our own recollections and feelings,” said Kidd.
“Displacement has a particular resonance in this exhibition, as one gets the feeling that, although Petrus’ sculptures are frozen in bronze and Patrizi’s paintings are static on the canvas, they inspire feelings of change and movement, as though they are about to fly off their stands or step off the frame; ever-changing as time inscribes them with new meanings.”
Crossing Paths will run from 13 March until 5 May at In Toto Gallery, 6 Birdhaven Centre, 66 St Andrew Street, Birdhaven.
Details: 011 447 6543
011 447 6543; www.intotogallery.co.za
