The relationship between the contemporary artworks of Athi-Patra Ruga and that of the late, celebrated canonical painter Irma Stern is one of contrary tendencies: both admiration and disruption are evident. Since 2008, Ruga has been drawing on and reworking Stern’s most compelling paintings, including Watussi Queen, Swazi Youth and Zulu Woman.
To further this dialogue between the two artists’ works, the UCT Irma Stern Museum (ISM) will host an exhibition where the works of both artists, Irma Stern and Athi Patra Ruga, will be installed alongside each other within the museum. The exhibition will include new site-responsive works that Athi Patra Ruga produced during a 3-month residency at the ISM, combined with select and iconic loan works. The exhibition opened for public viewing on 31 March 2022 and runs until 18 June 2022. The show is accompanied by a series of walkabouts, talks and workshops.
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Famous during the later years of her career, and to this day, Stern’s work is now well entrenched in the annals of South African art history. Largely in response to witnessing first-hand the horrors of the South African War, First World War, and losing loved ones to the Holocaust, Stern sought an alternative to western urbanised civilisation in a fantasy of noble exotic cultures. As such, many of her paintings portray an idealised and romantic version of “native” culture.
Attracted by Stern’s technical ability, lavish use of colour, her bold position as Expressionist painter in the conservative South African art world of her time, and the atypical life she led; but acutely aware of Stern’s colonial viewpoint, Ruga time and time again casts a revisionist eye over her work and generates new interventions.
The retrospective will feature select examples of Ruga’s iconic tapestries from the period 2009 – 2018 which reference paintings done by Stern during her 1943 and 1946 expeditions to central Africa.
For more information and dates for walkabouts and events, please see below and visit the UCT Irma Stern Museum website
