Title: Untitled (Witness Series 36)
Medium: Encyclopaedias, wood, stainless steel
Dated: 2015
Unframed: 80cm x 180 cm
After Wim Botha won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2005, the press release described him as “a very private person [who]… conversely says that his life is contained in his art and can be decoded by anyone who cares to look carefully” (Stevenson 2005:61).
Wim Botha has been sculpting portrait busts for the last decade. The first bust, Self-portrait as a Common Ancestor, was exhibited in 2003 as part of his solo exhibition, Speculum. Subsequently he has created portrait busts in a variety of media: carved from stacks of bibles, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, from wood, and more recently cast in bronze.
Liese van der Watt (2005:5) explained Botha’s work as a hostility towards grand narratives. She explained that central to his work lies a concern with power and the binaries that it creates, for example: good/evil, friend/foe, sacred/profane, sanctioned/rejected, order/chaos, purity/taboo, canon/exclusion. According to her: “Botha explores these themes not only in relationship to the here and now, but also in relation to the tradition of art-making and art history, as well as in those insidious rituals that govern everything from personal decorum to religion and nationalism.”
This artwork was carved from stacked encyclopedias using an angle grinder. It was exhibited at Art Basel in 2005 where it formed a key attraction at the Stevenson Gallery exhibition.
