EXHIBITIONS
High craft: two tapestry artists worth juxtaposing
In the 1980s it was a fashionable sideshow at galleries, rather feebly called "fibre art". It was art-making that used the stuff usually employed in industries like upholstery and dress making or hung up as fantasies in kiddies’ rooms. Tapestries have a distinctly historical tradition, but contemporary arty hotheads like Athi-Patra Ruga have taken it to amusing new levels. There are two exceptional exhibitions in Cape Town that demonstrate gloriously how "house stuff" — once far outside of the high craft of culture — can be unshackled, reinvented as tapestries and invade gallery spaces to tease the spirit. With the youthful Standard Bank Young Artist of 2018, Igshaan Adams, and the brilliant Ghanaian art professor El Anatsui at play in town simultaneously, serious art lovers will want to see both exhibitions, to experience the material mastery of an established performer against the dense thinking of a younger adventurer. There is delightful interplay and echoes in Anatsui’s Default...
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