Wim Botha: Stil Life with Discontent (Artist Talk)

Ambiguity and clarity​, ​rigor and spontaneity—South African artist Wim Botha​, ​who opens an exhibition split between Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Art and Durham’s 21c Museum Hotel this week, ​doesn’t wriggle out of these traditional dualities so much as stand with one foot in each. In sculptural work that draws upon historical depictions of the Pietà and Laocoön and an obsessive series of small paintings of Leda and the Swan, he summons complex ideas of grief, righteousness, and ethics by reminding us that myth is both artificial and real. His use of materials and their revealing construction reinforces this idea. Figures are hewn from stacked encyclopedias with bolts protruding from their heads. Styrofoam constructs are cast in bronze and painted black. Hanging wires and the power cords of fluorescent bulbs are left in full view. Many artists use ambiguity to subvert clarity and cut rigorous form with a spontaneous mark; Botha uses them to support and deepen each other until they become the same thing.