Bitches Brew, a group show by three of South Africa’s leading contemporary women artists — Lucinda Mudge, Lady Skollie and Sanell Aggenbach — is a sign of the times.
As the catalogue for this, Everard Read Joburg’s latest show, puts it: “South Africa is a battlefield, especially for women.”
The exhibition is on the frontline of this particular fight, and tackles issues including femicide and sexual violence, colonialism, race, patriarchy, the complexities of the female body, as well as lust and sexuality.
Yet Bitches Brew manages to not take itself too seriously (while not making light of serious issues, either). Aggenbach, who is also the show’s curator, describes it as “Mother Nature’s wrath meets bad feminism” — observing how, as a country, we use dark humour as a coping mechanism. This dark humour flashes throughout the exhibition’s subject matter and the droll titles of some of the works (think: 14-Year Sex Drought).
The show is aesthetically beautiful and an electric fusion of colour — ensuring that the striking sculptures, ceramics, photographs, and mixed media artworks are not just topical, they’re displayable too.
With 69 works on show, Bitches Brew is no small deal. Aggenbach had the idea for it a couple of years ago but was forced to stop and take time out during a bout of Covid.
It had to be Lucinda Mudge and Lady Skollie, because we all share a sense of humour and we all refer to women’s issues, but not in a head-on way
— Sanell Aggenbach
It gave her the space to plan. “From the get-go it had to be Lucinda Mudge and Lady Skollie, because we all share a sense of humour and we all refer to women’s issues, but not in a head-on way. I think we all use metaphors quite strongly in our work to address societal problems.” While the three come from different upbringings, cultures and racial groups, a clear skein of unity runs through their work.
Jazz lovers would know Bitches Brew as the classic 1970 Miles Davis album; Aggenbach says she loves the word “brew”. Aptly so: the art is clear evidence of the trio’s creative, at times witchy, simmer.
Floral rebellion
Cape Town-based Aggenbach focuses on feminine tropes and themes. Moving between the disciplines of painting, printmaking and sculpture, her current works build on themes introduced in previous exhibitions, including rootlessness and her Afrikaner heritage.
Striking, subversive botanicals are a recurring element. Some of them are scrolled on the body or painted in extreme colours — violent red and scorching pink. Her oil paintings of sharply manicured ikebana are alluring but disturbing.
To create them, she sought out black and white images found in mid-century floristry books. They were produced, almost always, by the male floristry master, for “good housewives”.
Her sculptural work parodies masterpieces from Michelangelo, Henry Moore and Warhol — looking at these references from a woman’s perspective. For the show, Aggenbach has produced a varied collection of botanical bronzes, wooden animal heads and the amusing Oh pretty boy (can’t you show me nothing but surrender) — a giant play on the Pink Panther stretch toy popular in the 1970s and 1980s.
Delving deeper
Mudge was born in Knysna and now lives in Keurboomstrand near Plettenberg Bay. She is best known for her large, patterned vases in vivid colours, scrawled with amusing, pithy text.
Her choice of the vase as a canvas is not without significance. That these vessels are familiar, functional household objects is part of the dynamic. But a closer look reveals outrageous or witty statements and images, turning these everyday items on their heads.
That said, Bitches Brew introduces us to a new side of Mudge — she has started to paint, in part, thanks to continuous load-shedding. Mudge explains: “I couldn’t fire up my kiln without electricity and because each vase needs multiple firings, there was no momentum to my process. It’s the story of a lot of small businesses.”
But, she jokes, she also started painting so she could have the largest work in the gallery. Her paintings are an exciting and otherworldly array of stained glass-like waterfalls cascading with flowers and insects, and, upon closer inspection, symbolic objects including winged stilettos. Cast your mind back to the way party shoes disappeared during the pandemic …
Wild dreams
Cape Town-born Skollie, aka Laura Windvogel, won the 2022 Standard Bank Young Artist award in the visual arts category. Her work revolves around themes of gender, sex, race and her identity as a coloured woman in South Africa. Skollie is at a critical point in her life — married and pregnant, a place she didn’t necessarily see in her own future.
Loud, proud and always entertaining, Skollie could easily start a hit talk show or podcast if the art world loses its appeal. On an artist’s walkabout of the exhibition, she regaled an amused audience with tales of a watercolour class she took with her mother as a child; the two were about as far removed as possible from the other participants, all elderly white women, who spent the class listening to a soundtrack of Celine Dion’s greatest hits.
Skollie describes her ink, watercolour, and crayon pieces as “hard, fast and now” and her style as “demented nursery school”. Surreal pieces such as Ek is ’n Watermeid and Mgodoyi attack: in the premonition I didn’t have a knife but I have a knife now were inspired by dreams. The more overtly sexual and disturbing Scold’s Bridle IV and Big Girl Panties spring from a trip to a sex and torture museum in Prague.
The show is an artistic triumph that proves there is magic to a creative female space; a place where a cackling coven of “bitches” can brew. Says Skollie of this electrically dreamy exhibition: “Part of being the bitch is we are all just doing what we want.”
* Bitches Brew runs at the Everard Read Gallery in Joburg until May 7.
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