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The Gallery @ Grande Provence Presents ‘Figures In A Landscape’ by Guy du Toit and Johann du Plessis

An exhibition, titled ‘Figures in a Landscape’, by acclaimed South African artists, Guy du Toit and Johann du Plessis, will open at The Gallery, Grande Provence Estate, Franschhoek, on Sunday 6 May 2007. The collection of these works demonstrates each of the artists’ unique and different perspective, in different media, on the dynamic and contradictions of the human condition. The exhibition will be opened by Professor Dr Elize Botha and will run until 13 June 2007.

For sculptor Guy du Toit human existence on earth is characterised by changes, transformations and makeover and a continual flow of “births and deaths”. For Du Toit these “little deaths” psychoanalytically connote continual change of mind and semiotically the notion of the “death-of-the author” in which the artist remains “asleep” and the spectator takes over.

Johann du Plessis, working principally with pencil on paper and collage, subtitles his work as E-Scapes. For this exhibition, though, the “original” work has been photographically translated into prints on archival paper, subtitled as E-scapes. He depicts the human figure in an “escape” from land-, mountain- and seascapes that are all, in the end, something other than what they appear to be. Working with a grid like system, he uncovers a sublime aspect: aspiring to high intellectual, spiritual and moral worth, as well as possessing the ability to pass from a solid state into the ethereal. The viewer is therefore offered a glimpse of what is and what isn’t there.

Guy du Toit was born in 1958 in Rustenburg and graduated from the University of Pretoria with a distinction in sculpture. He currently teaches art part-time at the University of Pretoria and works full-time from his studio in Swavelpoort. Johann du Plessis was born in 1953 in Frankfort, and graduated with a BA (FA) and HED from the University of the Free State. He has been involved in art education since 1981, and currently lives and works in Paarl where he is also part-time lecturer at Boland College. Both artists have exhibited extensively and are represented in public and private collections in South Africa and abroad.