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HENTIE VAN DER MERWE winner of SASOL WAX ART AWARD
Hentie van der Merwe has been awarded the Sasol Wax Art Award 2008, the country’s most prestigious accolade recognizing the contribution and work of professional artists.
Van Der Merwe’s work is a complex installation which pushed the boundary of his own practice. In his work, entitled ‘Reaching New Frontiers’, van der Merwe explores new avenues in terms of medium, execution and display.
The relationship between art and industry is not only contemporary, but is recorded throughout art history. According to the artist, one of the earliest examples of an artwork where the relationship between art and industry is explored, is in a poem by Virgil called ‘The Georgics’ from 29 BC, in which “a strong sense of the necessity and dignity of labour breathes throughout the poem from beginning to end”. In the fourth book of this poem the poet speaks of bees and beekeeping as a means of exploring the strife and flux between the metaphysical and the material.
Another conceptual concern which the artist outlines is that of the artist/patron alliance. This theme is explored trough a video of an unnamed man in a suit reading Virgil’s text in its original latin (with subtitles on the screen). The screen is located on the wall of a sterile office cubicle, executed to the exact specs as set out by governmental labour practices.