EXHIBITIONS
Stanley Hermans has had 8 solo exhibitions (see list below)
and has participated in many group exhibitions over the years. His
most recent exhibition is about to go up. Details below.
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STANLEY HERMANS
A SELECTION OF PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS FROM 2000 TO 2008
UCT IRMA STERN MUSEUM: 9-26 April 2008
Cecil Road, Rosebank, Tues.-Sat. from 10h00-17h00, Tel. 021 685 5686
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong
to oneself.”
Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)
This selection of paintings and drawings reflects an ongoing
enquiry into possible ways to be, somewhere between elusive though
sublime moments of clarity and discovery, and the unsettling
perception that perhaps too much of our world has become small,
closed and scared.
Parameters for self-expression often seem prescriptively narrow,
and the pursuit of originality, excellence and depth is challenged
by the prosaic, derivative and mediocre. The ease and certainty
of having and possessing appear to subsume the joys and mysteries
of looking for and finding out.
We are generally speaking not an open society, and neither a
fearless nor particularly courageous or creative society. Yet,
there is potential for greatness in the many expressions of the
very best in what we are and have become. In a place and time
distorted with ongoing slaveries, and very little space or opportunity
to dream or contemplate, we wouldn’t know how things could
be. All we know is how they are and how we’d like them
to be.
My feeling is that we stand a better chance of engaging the
future confidently in the good company of the keenest possible
and most candid knowledge of ourselves, and one another. How
to belong to oneself as part of the fullest discovery, knowing
and celebration of self and other then becomes a particularly
urgent imperative. To belong to yourself you have to own yourself
completely. The need to know how to secure and sustain this ownership
of self has illuminated the period of this exhibition’s.
Through the attempts at the direct expression of these themes
over the period 2000 to the present I have kept and collected
those works that seem to best exemplify these concerns in conversation
with one another, each in it’s own register. My hope is
that the viewer will enter into this conversation about who we
are and how we live in a place and time that urgently requires
fresh ways in to notions of identity; understandings of the past
and present, and a perhaps more coherent and more deeply felt
sense of a common humanity.
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List of solo exhibitions
2003 : Private viewings, Rue Bievre, Paris
2002 : Lipschitz Gallery
2000/2001 : The Granary
1999 : Lipshitz Gallery
1997 : Rust-en-Vreugd
1995 : Galerie de Lyon
1991 & 1993 : The Irma Stern Museum
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