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Artist: Roelof Louw ( South Africa ) -
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Main Category: Sculpture
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Genres: Post Modern Art, Conceptual Art
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Biography: Roelof Louw studied at St Martins School of Art, London. Later he taught there, and was appointed the Director of Studies for sculpture. During this period he exhibited in Europe and represented England at the Tokyo Bienalle and the British Avante Garde exhibition at the New York Cultural Centre. At the advice of John Coplans, Editor of Artforum magazine, he travelled to New York. Here he contributed articles and essays to Artforum, Studio International and the Artists Journal, Tracks, and served as a visiting lecturer at several art colleges and universities.
Approach to Art.
Certain artists seem to indicate their vocation, what they do is inevitable, destined. I find this wonderful. For myself I feel like a character who was shipwrecked at an early age and still can’t find his way home.
After 10 years in London and the same in New York I had to return to Cape Town. My situation forced me to start again. Since I dislike white urbanity I set up studio in a working class Ghetto. This put pay to any sophisticated European aspirations. In any event I didn’t want to go with any handed-down art concerns. To all intents I retreated into a different world. It left me with no option but to make art as basic, raw and primal as the reality around me.
If I were to describe the nature of my art, I’d say it’s low-life upgraded to high kitsch. It’s about primal emotion, getting into the lower-depths of the psyche, dragging the ‘self’ down into some ’archetypal’ place it refuses to go.
I can’t say why I work with certain objects. I don’t choose them, they choose me. This or that object obsesses me, takes hold of my mind, looms large in my imagination, until I do something about it.
I physically act on an object to find out what it means to me. It’s elementary. In the process the image of the object keeps changing, and so do my responses. This goes on until some emotional state I didn’t want to know about reveals itself, just sticks.
Accept it or not, I think of my work as occupying pictorial space, as well as carrying a physical and tactile load. I want the work to move forward, be full-on as an experience, as if confronting a ‘real’ spirit-image or inner demon.
At present, Roelof Louw has a studio on the 5th floor of the Breweries Building, Beach Road, Woodstock, Cape Town.
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Exhibition History: He participated in major site-specific exhibitions and won a Public Art Fund Sculpture competition for the New York Waterfront. He often travelled to Cape Town, his birthplace, for brief periods over the years. In the late eighties he decided to stay and set up a studio on Francis Street, District Six, Cape Town. He has since exhibited at Hanël Gallery, Cape Town; Art Cologne 1999; Whitechapel Public Gallery, London and Museum Do Chiado, Lisbon,–Live in Your Head exhibition; Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town 2001. Roelof Louw has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery, London.
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Collections: V&A, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London, private collections RSA
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