Legendary South African Artist Gavin Jantjes Will not Be Pigeonholed

“I want I knew how it could really feel to be free,” croons Nina Simone on a 1967 track of the identical identify. “I want I might break all of the chains holding me, I want I might say all of the issues I ought to say.”

These lyrics made the track a Civil Rights Motion anthem in its day. For artist Gavin Jantjes, the track has turn into a “leitmotif” during the last 4 years—which makes it no shock that his present London retrospective, on the Whitechapel Gallery, additionally takes part of a lyric from that Simone track as its identify.

Jantjes, who hails from South Africa, stays best-known for work and collages about Apartheid, a segregation coverage in his homeland that was in impact from late Nineteen Forties via 1994. However he has made works on many different themes, from honoring Pan Africanist and Ghana’s first president Dr Kwame Nkrumah in “For Ghana, 1978” to “For Mozambique, 1975,” about independence battle, and has even begun to department out into abstraction.

In an interview with ARTnews, he mentioned he didn’t wish to be pigeonholed by a method or thematic concern—one thing that always occurs to artists from Africa, who’re anticipated to make artwork that speaks to their identities.

“You’ll by no means ask Andy Warhol what his id was, whether or not he was Jewish. You wouldn’t ask Andy Warhol whether or not he supported the Communist Occasion, the Liberal Occasion, or the Democratic Occasion,” acknowledged Jantjes. “And you’d by no means anticipate to see in Andy Warhol’s work something of that. He’s free to do no matter he needs. And why does this not apply to some other artists, no matter the place she or he comes from? … These are the problems that lie on the core of this exhibition.”

Jantjes will not be trying to inform a viewer what to consider his work. However he wish to train individuals, particularly younger artists, “to be an impartial, free particular person making your personal choices” and to be freed from expectations from any quarters.  

The artist’s retrospective contains a few of his most well-known works: prints from the sequence “A South African Colouring Guide” (1974–75), concerning the Apartheid system; examples from the “Korabra” sequence (1986), aboutthe transatlantic slave commerce; and objects associated to his work as a co-curator, with artists Sonia Boyce and Veronica Ryan, in “From Two Worlds,” a legendary 1986 exhibition on the Whitechapel Gallery that surveyed artists of varied diasporas who had been based mostly in England on the time, from Rasheed Araeen to Denzil Forrester.

However the present additionally contains works from his “Exogenic Collection (Aqua),” from 2017, which marked a shift towards abstraction, with rippling blue strokes that recall the ocean’s floor. The sequence got here whereas Jantjes was residing in Norway, working primarily as a curator whereas taking a break from making artwork that lasted greater than a decade. He needed “to do one thing new, as is the prerogative of the so-called fashionable man that we hold shifting ahead,” he defined. “We don’t go backward, we hold going ahead.”

In 2015, he purchased three canvases of the identical dimension after which beginning portray. These three work grew to a complete of 14 works over the course of two years. In engaged on these work, he did have a look at the historical past of Summary Expressionism, however he realized he wanted to do one thing for himself and never “observe the expectation of that historic timeline.”

Jantjes likened the expertise to establishing area on the planet and imaginatively coming into it on his personal. That assertion might as nicely apply to his follow extra broadly.

“And I feel regularly, as you progress via the gallery and see an increasing number of of current work, you actually get a way of the type of evolution of this follow,” mentioned Cameron Foote, a co-curator of the Whitechapel present, which first appeared final 12 months on the Sharjah Artwork Basis in collaboration with the Africa Institute. “And the development of an area the place the colours and the contrasts are rather more blended. You get the feeling of coming into an area within the portray.”

The Whitechapel present has been billed as his greatest one in London to this point, however with 100 works, it can not encapsulate all that Jantjes has executed for the British artwork scene. The artist “has occupied these a number of roles as an artist, curator, organizer, and political activist,” Foote mentioned. “All the way in which again within the Eighties, he was actually essential in establishing the insurance policies which knowledgeable the work of the Arts Council,” of which he was a member from 1986 to 1990. In 1994, he additionally performed a job in founding the Institute of New Worldwide Visible Arts, which seeks to provide prominence to non-Western artists and curators. Plus, Jantjes has served as a trustee of Whitechapel, Tate, and the Serpentine Galleries.

And that’s to say nothing of the worldwide artwork scene extra broadly. He served on the search committee for the 2007 version of Documenta, a intently watched artwork competition that takes place in Kassel, Germany, he has held prime posts in Norwegian establishments and was chair of the Curatorial Advisory Group of the Zeitz Museum of Modern Artwork Africa in South Africa (the place he’s at present a trustee.) A retrospective like this one merely can not include Jantjes.

He was born in District Six, a neighborhood in Cape City, South Africa, in 1948, the 12 months Apartheid began. At age 3, he began frequenting a kids’s arts middle, a community-based initiative that responded considerably to the federal government’s lack of cultural packages for Black individuals. 

When Jantjes studied on the Michaelis Faculty of Positive Artwork on the College of Cape City, he was the one Black pupil within the artwork college. In 1970, he left South Africa for Germany to check on the Hamburg Artwork Academy, after which he moved to England, the place he lived between 1982 and 1998. There, he lectured on the Chelsea Faculty of Arts.

The racism he confronted in South Africa and the ignorance of individuals in Europe concerning the realities of Apartheid impressed sequence reminiscent of “A South African Colouring Guide,” a fiery critique of the categorization of individuals based mostly on race, the brutal therapy of Black individuals, and different horrific insurance policies of the Apartheid system. Within the late Seventies, the discourse his work created round Apartheid led to censorship by the then South African authorities whereas he was based mostly in Germany. All of the sudden, it was unlawful for anybody to be seen with any of his work. He couldn’t return to the nation in consequence, and even confronted the specter of extradition.

Within the late Nineteen Nineties, Jantjes moved to Norway the place he was the creative director of Henie Onstad Artwork Centre, after which senior curator on the Nationwide Museum of Norway. Whereas there, he wrote books and curated exhibitions of different artists however none of himself.

Jantjes mentioned when he first lived and labored within the UK, structural obstacles made it difficult for artists like him to thrive inside the nation’s prime cultural establishments.  

That the Whitechapel exhibition is his first huge present within the nation in about 20 years speaks to that scenario. Whereas he’s “extraordinarily blissful” about this present, he lamented that there are nonetheless few alternatives for African and non-European artists within the nation, though there have been some modifications within the current years, partly because of the nationwide insurance policies he helped put in place. Proper now, South African photographer Zanele Muholi is having a Tate Trendy survey, and Yinka Shonibare, a British sculptor of Nigerian descent, is debuting new works on the Serpentine. All of this could have been “wishful pondering” a number of a long time in the past, Jantjes mentioned.

A retrospective like his on the Whitechapel is important, he mentioned, as a result of “your identify and work enters historical past” by exhibiting at esteemed establishments. However, he mentioned, “What I actually need is that equivalence. I wish to arrive. I wish to be free from the suppression that denies me an equivalence with our friends of the identical technology. Different artists who’ve been working and whose work have entered into historical past, have been proven in mainstream establishments.”

“I don’t wish to be down there, and for [Western artists] to be up there, simply because they occur to be white and from this tradition and since I’m a foreigner,” he continued. “I would like that stage of equality sitting within the discourse round my work. So, that’s essential.”