FORMS Gallery is a dynamic structure for working with artists. It was founded by Anthea Buys in 2021 and works closely with ten artists, most of whom are in the early stages of their careers.
FORMS draws on gallery, institutional and independent curatorial models, presenting a programme that takes shape through a combination of online and in-real-life manifestations. At the heart of this programme are ongoing collaborations with artists who make work that is critically, aesthetically and politically important. Also central to the FORMS ecosystem are connections with like-minded spaces, people and organisations.
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FORMS Gallery is a dynamic structure for working with artists. It was founded by Anthea Buys in 2021 and works closely with ten artists, most of whom are in the early stages of their careers.
FORMS draws on gallery, institutional and independent curatorial models, presenting a programme that takes shape through a combination of online and in-real-life manifestations. At the heart of this programme are ongoing collaborations with artists who make work that is critically, aesthetically and politically important. Also central to the FORMS ecosystem are connections with like-minded spaces, people and organisations.
Parallel Process
Matty Monethi, Khotso Motsoeneng and Adrian Fortuin.
David Krut Projects, 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg.
Visit the online viewing room hosted by David Krut Projects here (external link)
Download the exhibition catalogue here.
FORMS Gallery and David Krut Projects are pleased to present Parallel Process, an exhibition of unique monotype prints and paintings by Matty Monethi, Khotso Motsoeneng and Adrian Fortuin.
Monethi, Motsoeneng and Fortuin were invited to spend time in the David Krut Workshop at Arts on Main in downtown Johannesburg, experimenting with monotype printmaking techniques under the guidance of the David Krut team of printmakers and facilitators.Through three short residencies, they each had the opportunity to put work through a printing press, a process that creates imagery and marks which the artists would not ordinarily be able to achieve in their own studios. They used a combination of oil and watercolour pigments to create unique painting transfers on paper, incorporating other processes like cyanotype, drypoint and collage elements as well. In Parallel Process, these prints are presented alongside paintings which the artists completed in response to their time spent in the workshop.
While each artist addresses different themes and works with different aesthetics in their individual practices, there are some threads which run through the works included in this exhibition. These include the passage of time, how visual marks are used to articulate a sense of place, mapping, and telling stories about people, conversations, and processes. Organic lines and surfaces interact with found imagery and geometric forms, and formal invention and improvisation sit alongside meticulously calculated representation.
About the artists:
Khotso Motsoeneng (b. 1993) is a self-taught painter whose training in photography developed his keen eye for colour and form. Motsoeneng's practice seeks out an abstract formal language which brings together his keen observation of nature and intuitive perspectives on the relationship between different colours and emotions. He is particularly inspired by woodgrain as a trace of natural processes, and looks to plant life as a metaphor for human experience. Motsoeneng's brightly coloured canvases are also sites of emotional exploration, and participate in a complex symbolic system in which colour and emotion are intertwined.
Matty Monethi (b. 1996) uses painting, printmaking and text to explore the personal dimensions of migration and memory. With a keen sense of her own place in broader historical contexts in Africa - having lived in different parts of the continent during her childhood - she scrutinises her connections with her adopted countries, cultures and close relationships. Monethi draws on memories of her own experiences, as well as family photographs from her childhood, to create emblematic pictorial scenes punctuated by empty space and text. Her evocative representational works address evolving selfhood, the depiction of the past, and the relationship between personal archives and nostalgia.
Adrian Fortuin’s (b. 1994) practice explores the relationship between intuition, intersubjectivity, identity, image-making and abstraction. Working in a range of media, the scope of which is informed by a primarily conceptual approach, Fortuin is interested in the limits of representation and the legacies of identity and experience connected to family, ancestry, community, and society more broadly. His current work explores the emancipatory potential of abstraction in varying degrees. Over time his practice has shifted from a performative and lens-based approach to a prolific study of painting and drawing. These works are characterised by an obsessive process of revision, in which paintings are sedimented under newer paintings, so that the surface becomes an archive of thought and gestures and a metaphor for the endurance of personal historical traces in the present.
Matty Monethi, Khotso Motsoeneng and Adrian Fortuin.
David Krut Projects, 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg.
Visit the online viewing room hosted by David Krut Projects here (external link)
Download the exhibition catalogue here.
FORMS Gallery and David Krut Projects are pleased to present Parallel Process, an exhibition of unique monotype prints and paintings by Matty Monethi, Khotso Motsoeneng and Adrian Fortuin.
Monethi, Motsoeneng and Fortuin were invited to spend time in the David Krut Workshop at Arts on Main in downtown Johannesburg, experimenting with monotype printmaking techniques under the guidance of the David Krut team of printmakers and facilitators.Through three short residencies, they each had the opportunity to put work through a printing press, a process that creates imagery and marks which the artists would not ordinarily be able to achieve in their own studios. They used a combination of oil and watercolour pigments to create unique painting transfers on paper, incorporating other processes like cyanotype, drypoint and collage elements as well. In Parallel Process, these prints are presented alongside paintings which the artists completed in response to their time spent in the workshop.
While each artist addresses different themes and works with different aesthetics in their individual practices, there are some threads which run through the works included in this exhibition. These include the passage of time, how visual marks are used to articulate a sense of place, mapping, and telling stories about people, conversations, and processes. Organic lines and surfaces interact with found imagery and geometric forms, and formal invention and improvisation sit alongside meticulously calculated representation.
About the artists:
Khotso Motsoeneng (b. 1993) is a self-taught painter whose training in photography developed his keen eye for colour and form. Motsoeneng's practice seeks out an abstract formal language which brings together his keen observation of nature and intuitive perspectives on the relationship between different colours and emotions. He is particularly inspired by woodgrain as a trace of natural processes, and looks to plant life as a metaphor for human experience. Motsoeneng's brightly coloured canvases are also sites of emotional exploration, and participate in a complex symbolic system in which colour and emotion are intertwined.
Matty Monethi (b. 1996) uses painting, printmaking and text to explore the personal dimensions of migration and memory. With a keen sense of her own place in broader historical contexts in Africa - having lived in different parts of the continent during her childhood - she scrutinises her connections with her adopted countries, cultures and close relationships. Monethi draws on memories of her own experiences, as well as family photographs from her childhood, to create emblematic pictorial scenes punctuated by empty space and text. Her evocative representational works address evolving selfhood, the depiction of the past, and the relationship between personal archives and nostalgia.
Adrian Fortuin’s (b. 1994) practice explores the relationship between intuition, intersubjectivity, identity, image-making and abstraction. Working in a range of media, the scope of which is informed by a primarily conceptual approach, Fortuin is interested in the limits of representation and the legacies of identity and experience connected to family, ancestry, community, and society more broadly. His current work explores the emancipatory potential of abstraction in varying degrees. Over time his practice has shifted from a performative and lens-based approach to a prolific study of painting and drawing. These works are characterised by an obsessive process of revision, in which paintings are sedimented under newer paintings, so that the surface becomes an archive of thought and gestures and a metaphor for the endurance of personal historical traces in the present.
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