Warm welcome for artists, buyers
● Africa’s biggest art fair rolled into town again this week with the opening of the FNB Joburg Art Fair at the Sandton Convention Centre on Thursday night.
And it drew a heaving crowd of art players, socialites and the moneyed set, who, technical recession or not, were keen to invest in the contemporary pieces from across the continent on display.
Someone hoping to open up her luxury handbag to support an artist was media personality slash businesswoman Carol Bouwer, who tells me she’s off to the US as an advocate for Unicef SA.
As Carol greets her old Rockville, Soweto, primary school mate, former Multi-Choice marketing boss Nomsa Chabeli, I head off in search of that art. Instead, I come across advocate Cawe Mahlati, who some might recall as the SABC board member who alleged corruption at the public broadcaster way back in 2012 and ended up being dumped unceremoniously for her effort.
Cawe had chided me only a few days earlier for my frequent comments about Judi Nwokedi’s penchant for short skirts when up walks the Tourvest COO herself in a peplum top with those famed pins — shock horror — covered by trousers and finished off with a pair of Ferragamo heels.
I leave the two to catch up, wondering which smart alec didn’t turn up the aircon in the steamy hall, and find myself at the Everard Read Gallery booth, where I spy nightclub owner Stephane Cohen’s wife, Jan, eying a striking Guy du Toit sculpture of two rabbits sitting on a bench, titled King and Queen 2018.
Someone else also feeling the heat was one of the land’s most glamorous women, Lee-Ann Liebenberg, though she saw the advantages: “It’s like a sauna melting my fat.”
At the space booked by the Goodman Gallery, I spot one of the country’s most famous artistic sons, William Kentridge, looking pensive with a Montblanc pen peeping out of his shirt pocket.
Two of the night’s artistic stars were Billie Zangewa, the dulcet-toned Malawian who creates enthralling tapestries with raw silk offcuts, and Haroon Gunn-Salie, whose installation Senzenina delves into the Marikana massacre.
Haroon, this year’s FNB Art Prize recipient, is there with his parents, Aneez Salie and Shirley Gunn. Former MK cadre Shirley, asked if her son was surrounded by art from an early age, says: “The struggle was more integral as part of his DNA.”
I find Billie, the art fête’s featured artist this year, in a forest of potted greenery where her works are displayed. She proudly tells me that her meeting with the Tate Modern that I’d mentioned last year paid off — it snapped up one of her carefully cut and hand-stitched works, titled Date Night.