MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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David Koloane: Something out of nothing
Outstanding work from subtle chronicler of apartheid injustice
KOLOANE: Three Women, 2015
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
DAVID KOLOANE, who died last year at the age of 81, produced work that shines with a rare glow of truth which will stand the test of time. Some of it can be seen in the exhibition of his work currently online at the Goodman Gallery in London.
Koloane grew up in the Johannesburg township of Soweto and although he’d been drawing since his schooldays, he recalled: “I was a late starter. I never knew that black people could become artists ... I was amazed to discover that black people were allowed in art galleries.”
Apartheid is at the root of his work, with his subject urban life as experienced by black Africans and modernism frees him to express oppression and resistance with a rare passion and subtlety which avoids simplistic didacticism.
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MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
CHRIS SEARLE pays tribute to the late South African percussionist, Louis Moholo-Moholo
NICK MATTHEWS previews a landmark book launch taking place in Leicester next weekend