Danny Shorkend
WENDY ANZISKA has exhibited quite extensively, both solo and as part of group shows, been a feature of a number of publications and is represented in numerous public and private collections.
I visited her studio and we spoke about her work.
Reflecting on her paintings, it was not difficult to acquire a sense of sublime mystery, painstaking searching and heartfelt desire to communicate, understand and intuit.
What is particularly interesting about her recent and current work is the fact that she often fragments the piece into a number of segments.
I asked her about this and in rather philosophical and mystical verve, Anziska hinted at things like the fact that in the scheme of things an individual life is but a dot, an almost zero-sum in the great expanse of time; that history keep on repeating itself though in different guises and names or with the intervention of technology and media, and that though we try to make sense of it – “to tell a, or the history” – there is no continuous narrative.
Subsequently, the illusion of the film strip that once sequenced produce sensible sights and sounds obfuscates the fact that reality is not necessarily a semblance of order, that if it so presents itself, this may be fictionally warped and ideological, masked further by the technological innovation that appears to construct a narrative about who we are, where we come from and where we are going.
Considering her profound interest into the nature of reality and human identity in trying to assert what constitutes reality, it is not surprising that her work often has a pop-art like influence and effect.
Images that refer to the growing world of computer technology, images that refer to icons of today and yesteryear, fragmented photo-like figures and faces that remind one of some sort of photoshopping technique and even cartooning.
In this hype, the modernist “everything changes” tends toward the logical, perhaps post modern conclusion – “nothing is real”.
This hype and mixing and matching is such that the artist plays with images: things are fragmented, images of cat woman abounds, sometimes she draws classically and at other times naively, even caricature.
In this hodgepodge of images and styles, in this irony, quoting, pastiche and plethora of images both contemporary and ancient (the repetition of the Egyptian pyramids, for example), reality becomes that much less transparent, time less linear.
In the day and age of the Internet, what is secret, what is sacred and who in fact has time?
This surface (and deep) set of questioning is enacted in the way Wendy Anziska paints: her mark-making is vigorous, energetic and restless.
There are blobs and squiggles, scribbles and figurative elements all at once.
There is a struggle between highly charged stretches of colour, between as hitherto mentioned the segmented fragments and between the often jarring colour combinations.
And yet at other times, there is a softer feel, a subtle modulation of one colour, and a depressing use of black that then transmutes into the mystical or incubates neon like yellows or greens.
Here I am drawing from my experience of her works in general, but it would be most rewarding to see on an individual level the individual works of art.
One may sense the artist’s simultaneous sense of urgency and patience, her sense of play and struggle and the tension between a foreboding apocalypse and the hope for a new world.
In her painting entitled Spider Woman, the protagonist – Spiderwoman – is shown painting and yet what she creates looks back at her!
It is a fantastical image, drawing together consumer culture and fine art in order to reflect on culture in general, while making the point that fine art is not sacrosanct – its creations also look back on us, as it were and therefore our alter ego – the superhero – becomes almost more real than the creator.
Another modern Frankenstein concept.
With the possibilities that science offers today – genetic modifying, plastic surgery and whatever buzz words promise self transformation, it is indeed unclear who is creating whom, and in that maelstrom what is indeed is real, original and natural.
What is particularly pleasing is the way she manages to combine heavy impasto, an emotional charged linear investigation and colour into what I would call an energy field that seems at once to sit on the surface and recede in depth. Such “moments” together with more realistic or familiar imagery transport the viewer into a conjured world that only exists so long as one is plugged in, and then vaporises as one exits and enters another dimension or when the computer is unplugged.
But we are not machines; we are not just products of culture.
Indeed, Wendy Anziska in reflecting on war in a painting titled as such, appears to hanker after the grotesque in life, but at the same time I see in her painting and in particular the incredulity toward violence, the desire to stop, to end not with decimation, but with the colour blue.
A blue that promises the great waters that shall wash away the blood of a bloodied history, just as her image of Robben Island, while pondering the fact that this may have been clouded by a dark history, there is the possibility of renewal and overcoming bad culture, if you will, or a culture that supports bad politics howsoever one should put it.
Of course one is hesitant to simply use the word “bad”, for as in art so in life it is in the intermingling and dialectic between differences that create harmony, not simply the cold labelling of one set of things as true and good and the other, false and bad.
In this respect, the artist enters the darker atmosphere in order to give it an angelic, other-worldly light, or to mine it for light.
Her paintings are, in my estimation, testament to that.
Some of Wendy Anziska’s public collections have included the Friends of S.A. National Gallery, Cape Town; Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg; the Pretoria Museum of Art; the Sanlam Collection; the Pietersburg Collection; the Sasol Collection; the Sentrachem Ltd Collection; Cape of Good Hope Bank Collection; the Rand Merchant Bank Collection; the Joan St Leger Lindberg Foundation and the Santam South Africa Collection.
Her work is represented in many private collections in South Africa, the UK, USA, France and Germany.
l To view the artist’s works: 021 434 2336.