Norman Catherine

artkapture (41)in #resteemator • 8 years ago

Norman Catherine was born in East London, South Africa in September 1949. He studied at the East London Technical School of Art and held his first solo exhibitionin 1969. This exhibition consisted of oil paintings on wood, bone, wire and an assortment of found objects. The following year he began his career as a commercial artist in Johannesburg.

Shortly after his first exhibition in 1969, Catherine began collaborating with Walter Battiss on the project ‘Fook Island’. This project involved the building of Fook Manor at Hartebeespoort Dam, designing murals and merchandising. For a period of almost 20 years, he prepared the design of a book with Allan Cameron entitled “The Legend of Memo the Hierophant” which was finally published in 1995.

Catherine spent time overseas, in New York and Los Angeles, working on various projects. One of these projects was the animation for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. He has represented South Africa in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Art Basel, and has been included in numerous important shows in New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin.

As both a sculptor and painter, Catherine works in an assortment of media, ranging from oil, acrylic, watercolour, and airbrush; as well as wood, fibreglass, wire, and metal. He incorporates surrealistic elements into his work, and uses humour with a dark overtone to confront the horrors of apartheid (see figures 1 and 2).

Catherine’s art has undergone several metamorphoses over the last 40 years. Each passing decade was characterized by different features, from the airbrush paintings of the 1970s, to the mixed media works of 1980s. His work in the late 1980s was characterized by wire sculptures and tin cans, and his paintings from the early 1990s set the tone of future artworks, which have been described as a “pre-millennial menagerie of anthropomorphic beasts”.

In the thirty years spanning his career, Catherine’s visual trademarks have included rough-edged comical and nightmarish forms, rendered in brash cartoon colours (figure 3). He has had 25 solo exhibitions and his work is displayed in numerous public and private collections, both locally and internationally.

Sourced From http://www.sahistory.org.za

A series of Lithographic prints

Sourced From: https://www.normancatherine.com/

Sculptures

Fook Island
In 1971, in response to yet another conceptual art show, Walter Batiss purportedly came up with the idea of creating a fake island. “I will make up a concept of an island,” he said, and “the concept will become real. It won’t just be a selfish thing that an artist makes and pins onto the wall, but something that everyone can participate in. That will make the island real…[although] it is a fake island.”

Over the proceeding years, Batiss’s fictional island became ‘real’ through the prolific creation of tangible every-day Fook objects, from maps and banners, to ritual sceptres, games, money, postage stamps and cutlery. A history of Fook Island was recorded in a devised alphabet, based on Southern Arabic and San rock art. This recounted the arrival of one Ferdinand on Fook Island on January 6 1723, of whom King Ferd III (Batiss) was the ruling descendant. He invited other artists to join him on Fook Island, one of who was Norman Catherine in 1973. Catherine devised many Fook creatures and inhabitants, and together they populated the conceptual island with all manner of real things.

The exhibition at Art On Paper, Stuffed Moonwhite Trout and Twilight Sauce: Walter Batiss and Norman Catherine Fooking Around, is a collection of art and objects that the two artists created together in the name of Fook.

In many of the artefacts, satire underpins the humour. An advert in the FOOK NOOKSPAAKER offers one “Uninhibited Island for Sale”, and an annotated chess game satirically plays on the moves made by the black and white pieces. Fook Island was not intended to be an overt political statement. However, it can be read as a kind of alternate but parallel history to South Africa in the 1970s; a kind of absurd response, the only kind of response one could argue, to the realities of the time. For Batiss, Fook Island represented a creative utopia, a “world of phantasy & pleasure [that] far exceeds in reality the crude world around me controlled by dreadful might alone”.

Fook Island is a world apart from the real one, which Batiss and his cronies created for themselves to romp and play in. But testament to its initial conception, it is a world that all can share in; it’s not just one artists indulgence.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/227150374934824914/

Fook Island Series: