Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

9 Valley evokes - green and open space - but rather a dingy, industrial place. Look again at Figures on a Beach – this blandly titled, large series of canvases reveal contested, separated spaces with imposing figures either in confrontation or rather more intimate relation to one another, which require of the viewer to guess at the notion behind this caption, and wonder at a beach scene with no sea visible. Made at a time when controversies still raged in the “new” South Africa, there are serious issues about access to beaches and more humorously, nude beaches in Cape Town, which interested Hodgins at the time he was preparing works for the Cape exhibition where this work was shown. The large triptych Night of the Awards , Hodgins made as a riposte, partly serious and partly humorous, to a challenge in an article by Kendell Geers. The inscription on the reverse of the work demonstrates this, but the work also has a satirical point to make about the artist’s thoughts on awards in the arts. Hodgins said of this work at a walkabout he gave in 1998: “One winner at the Oscars, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Young Artist of the Year Awards, or an annual Music Awards night, cannot truly represent and acknowledge the breadth of the culture which gave rise to them, the wealth of talent giving judges a difficult choice, the endeavours of that year’s artists in whichever field it is, or the disappointment of those who did not win, but had nonetheless given of their hearts, minds and souls in making their works worthy of contention.” Robert Hodgins could be cynical, ironic, angry, even bitter in satire at times, such as aiming at monarchs in a work like The King and Queen of Spain . Still, he enjoyed just as much being ironically amused by deflated power as in the painting An Early Ubu , or a melancholy humour at an aging showgirl in You Want Voluptuous ...? I do Good Voluptuous . This exhibition offers examples of his wicked sense of humour as well as his ability to parody the devious and pretentious. Neil Dundas, Senior Curator at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, July, 2019 Man with a Bandaged Foot See page 28