Material Meditations:
Nicholas Hlobo and Cinga Samson’s ‘Umthamo’
Material Meditations: Nicholas Hlobo and Cinga Samson’s ‘Umthamo’
ArtThrob | May 18, 2023
Kopano Maroga
"For me, Hlobo’s work has always veered toward the delightfully morbid and fantastically grotesque. A visual language typified by a fixation on rendering and un-rendering form. ”
Image Credit:
Maitland Institute. Photo: Anthea Pokroy/Courtesy of Maitland Institute
Levelling The Playing Field
Leveling the Playing Field
Modern Luxury | 2018
Julie Belcove
"Nonprofits such as the nascent Maitland Institute play a role in Cape Town, too, showcasing influential artists like Subotzky. ”
Image Credit:
South Africa. Cape Town, Maitland Institute. 2017.
Installation views of Yellow Bile (or Work In Progress)
Art, Art Everywhere: The Gallery Hopper’s Guide to Cape Town
Art, Art Everywhere: The Gallery Hopper’s Guide to Cape Town
NY Mag | April 26, 2023
Sarah Khan
"Maitland has been home to a dynamic installation and public engagement project by the legendary and much-loved activist Zanele Muholi. Often there will be collaborations between young up-and-coming artists and curators and the established artists and galleries within these spaces.”
Image Credit:
Maitland Institute. Photo: Anthea Pokroy/Courtesy of Maitland Institute
LIVE ART Festival to take over Cape Town
LIVE ART Festival to take over Cape Town
IOL | August 18, 2023
"This year the ICA LIVE ART Festival delivers an ambitious collection of over 40 works for the public to feast on – including works of visual art, dance, music, and literature – in a diverse and provocative programme that will take audiences on a performative journey across Cape Town.”
Nicholas Hlobo and Cinga Samson
Nicholas Hlobo and Cinga Samson
ArtForum | Sean O'Toole
"Hlobo, like Samson, is a cosmopolitan with an acute awareness of traditional Xhosa culture and rites. In 2011, for instance, speaking about the ambiguities of Xhosa male identity, he remarked on the lowly place of boys before the all-important circumcision practices marking the transition to manhood. Drawn to soft and pliable materials including fabric, hide, and rubber, Hlobo’s early sculptures and ritualistic performances were equally informed by traditional Xhosa culture and gay pageantry; his most recent solo exhibition, “Sewing Saw,” attempted to deconstruct his attraction to malleable raw materials."
Image Credit:
View of Nicholas Hlobo's Umthamo, 2017, copper, dimensions variable.
Apre al pubblico la fiera Investec Cape Town Art.
Eight artists to see at – and around – the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2018
Eight artists to see at – and around – the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2018
Investec | 15 February 2024
Sean O'Toole
"The Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2018 offers visitors a bumper programme of offerings. But it is not the only game in town. Many galleries and institutions now shape their programme around this flagship event early into the South African art calendar.
Stevenson, for instance, has a remarkable solo exhibition by award-winning artist Kemang wa Lehulere, and Maitland Institute is showing new work by Nicholas Hlobo. For the enterprising, the fair week offers an abundance of things to do and see. This guide to eight artists points you to highlights."
Umthamo: Nicholas Hlobo and Cinga Samson
UMTHAMO: NICHOLAS HLOBO AND CINGA SAMSON
VISI | 23 March 2024
Cheri Morris
"Maitland Institute presents Umthamo: a deeply engaging installation-cum-exhibition that is, among many things, a dialogue between artist Cinga Samson, artist Nicholas Hlobo and macro-/micro-environments.
In this enthralling exhibition, Nicholas takes his exploration of copper pipes to the next level with a dense arrangement of permeated mass that engages with negative space. Through artful experimentation, Nicholas hopes that his artistic practice with copper will lead him to his next challenge."
Image Credit:
Mario Todeschini (© Nicholas Hlobo, Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Maitland Institute, Cape Town)
Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress): The Artwork of Mikhael Subotzky
Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress): The Artwork of Mikhael Subotzky
"Revisiting his background as a photographer, Magnum’s Mikhael Subotzky picks apart what the practice of photography means in a new body of artistic work showing at the Maitland Institute in Cape Town, South Africa.
The very title of the show “Yellow Bile”, referring to the bodily liquid, taps into notions of revulsion and rejection that the bitter substance is synonymous with. As Subotzky himself points out, in ancient Greek Hippocratic medicine, yellow bile is one of the four essential elements that constitutes the body. “An excess or overbalance of bile was thought to lead to aggression and anger.”"
Image Credit:
Mikhael Subotzky 'Water Out of Sunlight'. Artwork by Mikhael Subotzky. 2017. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery / Magnum Photos © Mikhael Subotzky | Magnum Photos
Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress)
Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress)
"For the past six years, Mikhael Subotzky has been systematically pulling images apart in an attempt to “get inside” them and understand their representational function. Working with found images as well as his own photographs, these have been radically re-contextualised, smashed, split in half, and reconstituted into forms that Subotzky sees as being a more honest reflection of these images than their original form.
At Maitland Institute, Subotzky continues this process, working for the first time with paint and ink on canvas, as well as in collaborative performance with The Brother Moves On. These new formal constituents are wielded around Subotzky’s personal iconography - images that he has both found and made that resonate with his memories and experiences, as well as certain texts foundational to his understanding of the world."
Image Credit:
Mikhael Subotzky, Water Out of Sunlight, 2017
Looking Forward 2018: South Africa and the Mediterranean
Looking Forward 2018: South Africa and the Mediterranean
Frieze | 19 January 2024
Sean O'Toole, Hou Hanru and Barbara Casavecchia
"For the past three years, Cape Town, a port city of four million inhabitants, has been in the grip of a worsening drought. Estimates are that my hometown’s water supply from various dams will run dry sometime between March and May 2018, round about when performance artist Donna Kukama is scheduled to participate in a three-month public residency at Maitland Institute. Political disasters, economic crises and ecological catastrophes, all of which South Africa currently faces, have a way of challenging but also energizing the affective potential of art."
Photo credit: Donna Kukama, Mass Action Strike! (2009). Performance at Johannesburg Art Gallery. Photo credit: Ivan Eftimovsk
City Report: Cape Town
City Report: Cape Town
Frieze | 15 OCT 2023
Amie Soudien & Sean O'Toole
"So, too, was the Maitland Institute, which opened in February in a former industrial area of the city that is now home to a growing number of artists’ studios. Maitland’s inaugural exhibition was a solo show by Muholi,‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ (Hail the Dark Lioness) – a series of photographic self-portraits in which the activist explores key events in South Africa’s history."
Zeitz MOCAA is here
Zeitz MOCAA is here
Artthrob |
Sue Williamson
"Penny Siopis will be showing a group of large paintings, entitled Transfigure, residues of her recent performative painting residency at the Maitland Institute."
The fine art of domesticating a revolution
Mail & Guardian | 16 Febuary 2018
Sean O'Toole
"Cape Town, a parched city of rain worshippers and opposition contrarians, has in the past few years been refashioning itself as an art destination. New museums and art institutions have opened new spaces, among them the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, A4 Arts Foundation and the Maitland Institute."
The Maitland Institute is changing perspectives on how audiences engage with art
The Maitland Institute is changing perspectives on how audiences engage with art
Design Indaba | 25 August 2023
Emily Uys
"The arts are a reflection of the time in which they exist. The work of musicians, designers and artists question society and deliberate the human condition. But what of the way that art is presented to the public? An artwork’s philosophical or emotional impetus aside, what meaning is lost or gained in the presentation itself?
One of the more common ways to experience art is through the conventional art gallery. But, the conventional model, where the distance between artist and public is unmistakable, is quickly evolving. One of the spaces bridging this distance is Cape Town’s Maitland Institute"
Ungluing a window on Siopis's mind
Ungluing a window on Siopis's mind
Mail and Guardian | 4 August 2023
Olga Speakes
As you walk through the large roll-up doors into the airy, hangar-like space of the Maitland Institute, leaving the noisy hustle of the street behind, the sensation is like plunging underwater in a massive reservoir. The scale of the room heightens one’s awareness of the physical limits of the body; its muffled echoes provide an invisible shield from the outside world. A mechanical pulley hovering close to the ceiling recalls the former industrial purpose of the building. This is the setting for Penny Siopis’s Open Form/Open Studio.
The Maitland Institute: Cape Town’s new space ‘dedicated to art and ideas’
The Maitland Institute: Cape Town’s new space ‘dedicated to art and ideas’
Between 10 and 5 | 28 June 2023
Gabriella Pinto
"The Maitland Institute is run by Tammi Glick, a director at Daleglen Property Group. At a cafe on Long Street, Tammi makes it clear that she’s not a curator but a facilitator of Maitland Institute – a new non-profit art space that was once a casings factory. This title, she says, allows freedom and fluidity when it comes to deciding how the large industrial space is navigated by the artists and audience."
Siopis profile:
Academic exploration of formless art
Artist’s Profile: Penny Siopis At the “Meat Factory”, Maitland Institute
Cape Times: Arts Portal | 21 May 2023
Danny Shorkend
"I was fortunate to meet with her at her current studio space to discuss her rationale and emotive expression that typify these paintings. There is a triptych that is triumphantly enormous, yet fits within the massive studio, a journey into a scale the artist is not accustomed to. Yet she embraces it and in turn it embraces her."