HEAD TO HEAD WITH A MODERN MASTER
Graham Wood speaks to Norman Catherine about his first solo exhibition in 10 years, now on at Circa
The title work of Norman Catherine’s new exhibition, Head to Toe, is a monumental bronze sculpture, about 2m high plus 80cm for the plinth.
“That’s a new piece, which I did last year,” he says. As something new, and at such scale, it is very much the anchor of the exhibition. Of course, it’s instantly recognisable as a Norman Catherine.
He has been a huge presence himself on the
South African art scene for more than half a century Catherine is now 73 and the energy, humour, distinctiveness and accessibility of his work have won him fans far and wide. (David Bowie, no less, wrote the foreword to the most comprehensive book on his work so far.)
Head to Toe will, inevitably, stand as a landmark in this phase of his career.
And, while it is emblematic of his work over the past 20 years or so, there’s also something quite distinctive about it.
This kind of variation on something that seems familiar has been part of Catherine’s way of working throughout his career. He likes to reprise, reinvent and revisit themes and motifs. He has created something of a personal mythology a made-up world that he explores and adds to endlessly.
Even artworks dating to the 1970s and 1980s, which look very different from his recent work, have characteristics that he still uses today: a hand that
turns into a snake or another head, for example, or the way he depicts teeth and eyes, or the animal/human hybrids.
While there are several works which, like Head to Toe, haven’t been exhibited before, this exhibition is not about specially prepared new works. It is actually the first solo exhibition he’s had in 10 years.
“That’s been the longest break I’ve had, but I kind of needed it,” he says. So, not only does the exhibition pull together works from this period, but reaches as far back as the 1990s, and even earlier. The newer works don’t really belong to a singular body of work, which is why he refers to it as “a bit of a mishmash”.
This exhibition has the flavour of a mini-retrospective, or at least an overview of his work over the past
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20 to 25 years. There’s also a focus on multiples, such as prints of various kinds, and, of course, sculptures. That said, there are also paintings, a tapestry and a mosaic.
Catherine’s work since the 1990s has an aspect of the dark and the macabre a kind of black humour and cartoonish violence but it’s nowhere near as chilling or sinister as it was in the 1980s, when, as he describes it, his work was much more “aggressive looking” and “spiky”.
His 1980s work was filled with nightmare visions prompted largely by the politics of the time, and there was “very little humour”. (Before that, in the 1970s, he characterises his work as more “whimsical” and fantastical.)
In the 1990s, the tone shifted. There was still something dark and disturbing about it, but, as he says, “it was also satirical”. The overt politicism dropped off and, he says, the dark side of his imagination “manifested itself more [as] social commentary”.
It became more broadly “about the human condition”. The sinister characters from the apartheid security services were replaced by gangsters and businessmen still violent, ambiguous and animalistic but often represented as divided or at odds with themselves rather than symbolic of an institution like apartheid.
His statues of businessmen are well represented in this show, and it is from them that the monumental Head to Toe figure is drawn. But there’s a difference. “The work itself looks more relaxed,” says Catherine. “I wanted ... rounded shapes.” Also, rather than looking up, as his other large-size works have tended to do, this one’s head is bowed, bent by “the weight of things”.
“It’s not an aggressive work,” says Catherine. Rather than being divided or at war with himself, this figure is introspective, meditative, contemplative. It represents an attitude when “you want to put your head down and try to stay calm and relax”.
It’s a moment to “think about things” or “just not think of anything”.
If this work represents a distinctive mood of the moment, there are other recent works in the exhibition that reprise some of his recognisable figures from the
1980s. In particular, the masked figure with the homburg hat that Catherine used to represent the apartheid government’s Bureau for State Security makes a return during the Zondo commission. This is also one of the few occasions since the 1980s when Catherine relates works to specific events.
This time, however, they have titles such as State Witness and Shadow State (which features three brothers).
Almost 40 years after their appearance in a work like
There’s a Storm on the Bosses Farm, the familiar masked figures now mean something different. They’ve been rolled together with Catherine’s gangster figures to create an image of a “gangster state”, echoing the title of investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s book, which was published the year the pictures were made.
Catherine’s most recent works, linocuts titled Adam and
Eve that haven’t been shown before, take on quite a different character. He calls them “fun and decorative”, and even “quaint”. That said, their “contained and orderly” aesthetic, their peaceful, delicate designs, while recognisable as Catherine’s work, signal a different tone once again. “Adam and
Eve are lighthearted,” he says. “There’s nothing sinister to me about them.” (Except, perhaps the fall to come.)
The Eden to which they belong might recall the work he did as a young man with Walter Battiss in the 1970s, in this conceptual creation of the fantastically escapist “Fook Island”.
Though, Catherine says, when speaking about work from that time, “Walter’s work never showed darkness or aggression”.
“That’s the big difference between me and him,” he says. Neither darkness nor humour is ever far off in Catherine’s work.
But he warns against attempts to detect new directions. “My work goes up and down, and this way and that way, and I never know quite where I’m going,” he says.
But in this representation of two or three decades of this artistic to and fro enhanced by a hiatus from the art world treadmill there is a multifaceted picture of the state of our conscious and unconscious experience of the period.
In its selection, Head to Toe does what Catherine has always done so well: not necessarily protest or analyse too much, but through a distinctive vision of the dreams, myths, archetypes and nightmares of our time, portray our individual and collective experience.
‘Head to Toe’ is on at Circa until April 9 2023