In Situ – 2017

4–27 May 2017

Lizamore & Associates, 155 Jan Smuts Avenue Parkwood Johannesburg

in association with Barnard Gallery

“The memory of the highveld is as ingrained in me as the accent I have when speaking. I use the language of these memories when painting and I return to the wide, gold-strewn swathes of the highveld in my work” says MJ Lourens about the body of work featured in In Situ. Through a nostalgic process of remembrance, Lourens enters an awareness of fleeting moments. He explains: “I experience the afterglow of loss in the grainy dusk; yet another day dissipating into night, etched by trees, steeples, silos and scaffolding…

Sunrises and sunsets illuminate and forget the land daily.” In these artworks, Lourens also depicts the relentless scarring and extraction of the mining process that characterises the highveld landscape. Roughly half the gold the world has ever processed has been wrested from the belly of the highveld, feeding the glory of its cities and their glowering electric lights. In Situ explores the excavation of this landscape. Through a romantic lens of nostalgia for home and with the vocabulary of the landscape painting tradition, this space where machinery clashes and nature rages becomes otherworldly. In Situ shows the beetling human existence in the face of the sublime.