Our
Realities
7 March – 1 April 2006
34 LONG is delighted to present a collection of Wendy Anziska's
recent paintings in a show entitled Our Realities, opening on
March 7, 2006.
Wendy, the daughter of a well-known sculptor of the 1960s Parisian
art scene, has a growing international reputation and is listed in
the International Who's Who in Art. She has been painting for
many years and is represented in most South African public
collections and in numerous private and corporate collections abroad
and locally. She has a considerable following in Cape Town, and her
return to the local exhibition circuit should be a notable event on
the calendars of the city’s serious art collectors and more casual
art lovers alike.
In recent years she has produced numerous works for exhibitions in
Bonn, London and Paris, and for a highly acclaimed show in
Johannesburg in 2004. Despite her physical absence, she has retained
her long and solid association with Cape Town and her firm position
in public consciousness here by showing selected works in group
shows, maintaining her popularity with the art public.
Wendy produces her works slowly and meticulously, spending much time
and effort in absorbing new experiences, travelling, visiting world
art centres and exhibitions in order to expand her personal visual
idiom. The world is her source, contemporary life her inspiration.
She is fascinated by people: what they do, what they yearn for, how
they go about achieving their hearts’ desires. Art, fashion, the
media, family life, memories and dreams inhabit her fertile
imagination and animate her art. She has an insatiable appetite for
diversity and fantasy. Her work is often humorous, bordering perhaps
on flippant, but it never loses its reflective subtext. Her imagery
is gleaned from diverse ideological, visual, and personal sources
and she often composes her works in panels in order to invest them
with layers of visual and narrative complexity. By working intensely
with deeply personal and intimate experience, she paradoxically
achieves a rich universality of expression that invites and compels.
Cape Town is in for a fabulous surprise. Wendy’s new work is bold,
inventive, personal, observant, critical. Her spectacular
manipulation of colour, always one of her strongest aspects, has
matured into an even more unwavering intensity and freedom of
handling, saturating her canvases with vibrant power and energy. Her
imagery provokes and enchants, and her commentary calls forth a
myriad realities and ways of being that reconstitute contemporary
human experience in a densely poetic painterly dance.
