Title: Wire Guard
Medium: Wire work
Walter Oltmann explaining his work:
“My main area of creative focus is on sculpture, and more particularly in fabricating woven wire forms which sometimes reference local craft traditions. My drawings are also based on and explore similar references. I have researched and written on the use of wire in African material culture in this region and am deeply interested in the influence of these traditions in contemporary South African art. While I exhibit my artworks quite regularly on group and solo exhibitions, I have in recent years also been involved in large-scale commissions.
In my sculptures I use images of natural phenomena (human, plant, and animal) and play with the idea of mutation, hybrids and reconfiguring the familiar. Through dramatically enlarging and/or transposing features of one to the other, I play with the paradox between vulnerability and the monstrous. Using the language of craft, my artworks are always a product of labour and time.”
Walter Oltmann is as a master of line in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional work (The Artist’s Press 2021:1). He is widely known for his textile sensibility and often address feelings of phobia which can be seen in the artwork, Wire Guard. Through weaving a complex basketlike figure, he references the exoskeleton of an insect and connects the uncomfortable feelings of abjection with that of the decorative and ornamental (Everard Read Gallery 2016:41).
