PRINTING THE SEVENTIES: Battiss, Burwitz, Skotnes and More at GALLERY AOP (Johannesburg, June 2012) relates Stephen Gray’s creative collaboration in the Seventies with Walter Battiss, Nils Burwitz and Cecil Skotnes. 

“I had stayed away overseas for most of the 1960s, but now that I was returning to my home country I needed to inspire myself with South African images. During my rigorous school years in Grahamstown I had always walked past the house of black-bereted Walter Battiss and his wife Grace, marvelling at how she could approve of his puttering about in public in unmatched takkies, with oil paint in his fingernails. I was sharply warned off becoming close to such Bohemians, yet I was secretly aware of how he alone went against public opinion (everyone else considered them childish graffiti) by stumping in periodicals like Lantern for the aesthetic merit of Bushman cave murals.

 

“A copy of his (Battiss’s) Inaugural Lecture, given in 1965 when he was appointed Head of Fine Arts at UNISA, was posted to me. There he called on each of his younger fellow artist to be ‘alive to his hour and conscious of his future.’ This applied to himself, of course (born in 1906), but he also referred to several others by name, including Cecil Skotnes (born 1926) and Nils Burwitz (born 1940). This rousing call was a factor in my decision to repatriate and join the artists.” (Excerpt from exhibition brochure text by Stephen Gray)

Artworks from Stephen Gray’s personal collection will be on display and include screenprints, linocuts, woodcuts, a monotype and pen and ink drawing variously by these three artists. Annotations on many of the prints bear witness to his relationship with them. Three of the original print portfolios/books on which he collaborated with Cecil Skotnes also form part of the exhibition: The Assassination of Shaka (1973, II/XXV), Baudelaire’s Voyage (1975, APIII/XV) and Man’s Gold (1975 -1979, 27/75). Photographs, letters and other ephemera are on loan from Stephen Gray for the duration of the exhibition.

Stephen Gray is a well-known South African writer, critic and erstwhile academic, born in Cape Town in 1941. He studied at the University of Cape Town, Cambridge University and University of Iowa. Until 1992 he was Professor of English at what is nowadays called the University of Johannesburg. He has published poetry collections, novels, short stories and plays. He has edited various collections of South African poetry and of the work of Athol Fugard and Herman Charles Bosman. In 2007 he was awarded the Literary Lifetime Achievement Award by the Department of Arts and Culture. Stephen Gray lives in Johannesburg.