BEYOND THE LINE. An exhibition of sculptures and drawings by Dumile Feni at Gallery Momo until Saturday. LUCINDA JOLLY reviews
AT the Cape Town Art Fair this year Dumile Feni’s sculpture The Prisoner was bought by an anonymous black business man for R6 million, reputedly the highest amount yet paid for a South African sculpture.
The title of both the exhibition and Chabani Manganyi’s book on the artist includes reference to line reflecting its importance in the artist’s work.
Feni uses a line which is sure and confident and in his understanding of three dimensionality it comes across as preparatory drawings for sculptures. Feni is quoted to have said: “I am amazed by the one thing that I am glad never left me that is, the beauty of the line, the fine lines.”
In his essay included in The Beauty of the Line – The Life and Times of Dumile Feni by Manganyi, the struggle photographer Omar Badsha writes about the powerful impact Feni had on him when he first saw his work in a Durban gallery before the artist was forced into exile in the late 1960’s.
Badsha felt Feni, who is described as the Goya of the township, was an artist who was able to express how the black South African oppressed felt under the apartheid regime. Almost 50 years later, the impact is still felt.
Sam Nshlengethwa who has a tribute lithograph on this exhibition in which he features Feni’s African Guernica reiterates that Feni “captured the sufferings of the people, particularly in the townships, like no other artist”.
Although not on exhibit, African Guernica along with Train Accident are considered two of the most powerful pieces.
Although the influence of Picasso and Goya are present there is an even greater influence of Lucas Sithole and Sydney Khumalo and the works by the Khoisan from whom he said his mother descended.
Interestingly rather than visit exhibitions Feni was known to have preferred attending jazz concerts.
Feni said: “I feel that art should transcend and strive to make life better.”
His approach to his work has been interpreted as “not trying to dazzle his viewers” but rather “trying to get them to understand humanity”.
His belief was that viewers of his work should “hold a conversation with what you are looking at as if they (the viewers) made the work”.
Central in emotional temperature to this exhibition is the sculpture titled History, depicting “the brutality of the master–slave relationship”.
It shows a naked man with heavy feet and hands, reduced to a beast of burden, bit in mouth, bent in half as he draws a cart carrying a man and a woman who are in turn seated on the back of another figure.
Should he stand up he would tip the passengers out of the cart.
The sculpture references the architect of social engineering Hendrick Verwoerd’s chilling words delivered from the top of a table to a group of soldiers to demonstrate his statement that we stand on the back of the black man –don’t ever forget it.
Feni left no diaries but those who knew him spoke of him as charismatic and volatile.
Artist and academic Thembinkosi Goniwe believes that Feni’s work “was always in a process of becoming”.
Check it out for its historical position as one of the most important South African artists.