Graham Contemporary is a Johannesburg based gallery which embraces a heady mix of emergent, mid-career and well-established artists. What is immediately apparent is a zest for wonder and joy expressed across genres, be it figurative or abstract painting, photography, sculpture, or installation. The vast scale of the gallery allows for an operatic impact, rendering works immediately engaging. If drama is key, it is because it is not the statistic fetishistic culture of art appreciation that matters, buts art’s animistic force. Ultimately, it is the aesthetic caliber that matters, its dopamine fix – ‘bold colour statements that project the highest vibration, frequency and positive energy’. Though it is not colour alone that matters – great attention is also given to monochromatic works.
In keeping with the global revisionist moment, diversification is key, though never at the expense of the quality of the work. Graham Contemporary is a business less invested in story – in particular the pitfalls of ideology – and far more inspired by the suggestive dance of figuration and abstraction. Dogma is avoided, art with a complex impact embraced. When figuration emerges in a given work, it is abstraction that proves the driving force. And given that abstraction is also globally re-emergent, means that Graham Contemporary stands at the frontline of art beyond limiting ideological constraints.
As Jerry Saltz notes in his ‘Abstract Manifesto’ – ‘abstraction is staggeringly radical, circumvents language, and sidesteps naming or mere description. It disenchants, re-enchants, detoxifies, destabilizes, resists closure, slows perception, and increases our grasp of the world’. This is the core spirit that informs the Graham Contemporary’s practice. Given the extremism all about, a divisive culture and politics, the range of the artists represented by Graham Contemporary enshrine an open-mindedness in heart and mind and a zest for experimentation. After all, as Saltz reminds us, ‘Art is Life’ … ‘one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world’. Graham Contemporary, therefore, seeks to through art to ensure TOMORROW’S HEALTH TODAY.
Graham Contemporary represents living contemporary artists, emerging, mid-career and established, from Africa and diaspora in a critically engaged programme with a focus on concept and abstraction in the African context, exclusively on the primary market.