Explore the work of award-winning South African artist and sculptor Jane Alexander at Tate Modern
Should you go to Tate Modern to see the American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s exhibition (she is known for the flower paintings that look like lady’s parts), do make your way across the hall and go to the extraordinary Jane Alexander exhibition.
Johannesburg-born Alexander is an award-winning artist and sculptor best known for her internationally famous figurative sculpture, The Butcher Boys (1986), considered to be her response to the state of emergency in South Africa in the late 1980s.
An alarming installation of three life-size humanoid beasts sitting on a bench, it was first exhibited at the Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg, before being bought by the National Gallery in Cape Town.
Her current exhibition at the Tate Modern is no less striking. A group of figures, including a man with a meerkat head standing on a barrel, stand tentatively and intriguingly, luring one in closer to look at them.
Created from plaster, fiberglass, oil paint, clothes and a wide range of accessories, the critics love them. You could describe her work as an accessory to a truth and a history which force her to make these monsters who carry messages about the consequence of history. Or just look at them and enjoy their uniqueness, madness, wildness.
Of her work, Alexander, born in 1959, says : “My themes are drawn from the relationship of individuals to hierarchies and the presence of aggression, violence, victimisation, power and subservience, and from the paradoxical relationships of these conditioned to each other.”
Alexander is currently a professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town.
This exhibition is free and ongoing, on Level 2 of the Boiler House.
Tate Modern is open 10am to 6pm Mon to Thurs and 10am to 10pm weekends.
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