Wayne Barker | Super Boring | Retrospective Exhibition | Standard Bank Gallery

01 Feb 2011

Wayne Barker’s mid-career retrospective exhibition, ‘Super Boring’, runs at the Standard Bank Gallery from 2 February – 16 April 2011. It is a tribute to an artist who has, over a period of some 25 years, consistently made provocative and thought-provoking work, marked by a hard-hitting mix of politics and subversion.

The exhibition will be opened by Matthew Krouse, arts editor at the Mail & Guardian

The concept for Wayne Barker’s exhibition, ‘Super Boring’, was born at the private showing before the opening of the 2009 Venice Biennale, given to recognising an older generation of conceptual artists, including the American John Baldessari. Barker was in Venice to show on a fringe exhibition, ‘I Linguaggi del Mondo: Languages of the World’, curated by Vincenzo Sanfo. On the Grand Canal hung a banner declaring Baldessari’s words from a 1971 artwork: “I will not make any more boring art.”

Barker is a colourful, provocative and rebellious persona and an artist who lives a life of seemingly endless outrageous incidents. Barker and his work are anything but boring, lending an ironic twist to the exhibition’s title. He firmly rejects the idea that art should be “idle navel-gazing”, as it is said in his exhibition catalogue. What Barker presents instead is work that is arresting, incisive and a challenge to political perceptions and understandings, morality, authority and values.

Over the years, Barker has produced various bodies of rich, stimulating work which deal with both the old and new South Africa. He is most renowned for his re-interpretations of paintings by JH Pierneef.

‘Super Boring’, initially a curatorial collaboration between SMAC Art Gallery, Andrew Lamprecht and Barker, has now travelled in an evolved form to the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg as a retrospective exhibition curated by SMAC Art Gallery. It is accompanied by a catalogue contextualising his new work in relation to earlier bodies of work. It includes text by Lamprecht and contributions by Simon Njami, Carol Brown and Thembinkosi Goniwe.