Daimler Award
for South African Sculpture 2002
Jane Alexander
Sculptures, Collages
Daimler Contemporary
26 July - 15 September2002
Foreword
Jürgen E. Schrempp
Chairman of the Management Board
DaimlerAG
Special Exhibition
George Grosz
The Sculptures of Jane AlexanderLet us assume you saw Jane Alexander's works for the first time, through the eyes of an observer well versed in western art and not knowing that the artist is South African. You would probably first perceive a feeling of irritation ans strangeness, of a shocking factual nature that is impossible to be reconciled with the cool reservation of abstraction, the so-called global western language, and a crossover being owed to the zeitgeist.
At the same time, however, rising from pre-conscious depths, an artistic world unfolds that spans from Hieronymus Bosch via Max Ernst to Edward Kienholz and further on to the present time' to Paul McCarthy or Sarah Lucas.
A western-world style "Musee Imaginaire" of the depths of the human soul and a world depicting the psychological deformations of the social body, showing human beings in extreme stages of metamorphic transformation.
Jane Alexander: african adventure
Jane Alexander: man with TV
It is this background that we have to consider in meeting the South African artist Jane Alexander. In an unrelenting and unsentimental manner, seemingly seeing through unblinking eyes, her work reflects a present that is pervaded and distorted by a history which systematically bereaves human beings of their most personal and authentic features.
Many of her figures wear animal masks, eradicating their racial background and allocating them to taxonomic categories: the history and current expressions of racial discrimination merge with occult, magic and ritual moments. Some of Jane Alexander's figures wear eye bandages or look out into an incomprehensible world through animal eyes - for blind people and animals alike, black and white are not categories which impact their consciousness. And so an utopian element emerges from deformation.
Anyone becoming absorbed in Jane Alexander's world of pictures will realise that the iconographic reading takes them deep into the political and historical problems of the African continent. This merges with the personal perception of the artist, eventually to lead out again into a world of images and symbols that is open to people with the most diverse cultural backgrounds.