Strauss & co - 15 February 2020, Cape Town

3  RUBY SWINNEY SOUTH AFRICAN 1992– The Arboretum 2017 oil on tracing paper 212 by 184cm R40 000 – 60 000 PROVENANCE WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, 2017. Private Collection. EXHIBITED WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town Art Fair , 17 to 19 February 2017. Swinney’s work responds to the physical, virtual, and spiritual worlds around her. If art is to imitate life, then art, as Swinney’s paintings are, is a copy of a copy – leading us, again, towards illusion, rather than reality. Swinney engages with Plato’s philosophy of art, which describes the physical world as an imperfect and decaying copy of a perfect, eternal changeless original. This reverts back to the tensions made tangible by Swinney between unreal and hyper-real natural environments, such as aquariums, greenhouses, and botanical gardens. She depicts nature through illustrating the hyper-natural in a dream-like fog, defamiliarising it almost in an attempt to familiarise us with it: to make us feel what nature has been or could be. 1 1. Lindsay Raymond (2019) Ruby Swinney: Hold Still . Cape Town, WHATIFTHEWORLD. 16