Clare Menck: Hidden Life
20 Years of painting 1990 – 2010.

Sanlam Art Gallery
Sanlam
2 Strand Road, Bellville
26 October – 9 December

Clare Menck has been painting passionately for the last twenty years focusing on subject matter which at first glance appears to be the obvious and familiar yet on closer inspection and engagement with medium paint reveal a fresh and life affirming vision of the environments around us. Very much a documentation of her own personal life this retrospective exhibition traces the evolution of a unique painter from her final year as a student at Stellenbosch University, through the agonies and frustrations of balancing motherhood and family life with the need to and demands of pursuing a career as an independent painter.

Isolated from the city and the vagaries of the contemporary art world with its lust for quick fix, fashionable hermetic codes and exploitative interactions, Clare has focussed on what she is most familiar with: herself pondering, wondering, swimming; the persons she knows and loves, her children, close encounters and the environments she works in, drives through and stumbles upon. With stubborn intensity she has refined her skills of observation, toiled with the images of other artists such Lucian Freud, Gwen John, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Gerard Ter Borg and Gustave Courbet, to name but a few, to develop an approach and vision the engages the eye, heart and mind of any viewer.

The exhibition is accompanied by a superbly illustrated catalogue edited by Stefan Hundt, curator of the Sanlam Art Collection, containing contributions by Amanda Botha, Prof Michael Godby, Ingrid Winterbach and Hayden Proud. This publication will be on sale for a special opening price of R220.

The exhibition will be opened by Hayden Proud, curator for Historical Painting and Sculpture at the Iziko South African National Gallery on 25 October at 19:00 in the Sanlam Art Gallery, at the Sanlam Head Office, 2 Strand Road Bellville.

For more information call Stefan Hundt on 021 947 3359 (office hours) or email [email protected].

Entry to the Sanlam Art Gallery is free.

Visiting hours: Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 16:30.