GALLERY AOP presents a solo exhibition by Judith Mason, titled It’s All About Me. This exhibition follows on her seminal Rictus Sardonicus show at the gallery in 2011. The title of her new exhibition resonates well with that of Mason’s retrospective exhibition, A Prospect of Icons, at the Standard Bank Gallery in 2008. Implied in the title of the retrospective was the notion of stock taking, reflected in the numerous symbols and imagery that she used in the works selected for the exhibition, executed in a vast array of mediums over a long and creative artistic career. In her present exhibition, she confirms her luminous, personal iconography.
Although overt self-portraits - it’s all about her, after all - are subtly integrated in the general, vast array of subject matter Mason deploys on the picture plane, it is really the covert, hidden ones that fascinate in her new body of work. In this regard Mason dons a mask in many of the drawings. The mask obviously hides the self, but more importantly, it intimates a continuous process of transformation and regeneration. And so it is in the numerous ways humans and animals are altered and transformed that one finds the richness of her new work.
Judith Mason was born in Pretoria in 1938. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1950s, obtaining a BA degree in Fine Art in 1960. Her first solo show was held in 1964. In the 1970s and 80s Mason was highly visible in the South African art world at a time when the country was isolated both politically and culturally from the rest of the world. Even so, she was chosen to represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale, and at international art fairs, such as Art Basel. In the early 1990s Mason returned from living and teaching in Florence, Italy. At this time her work became part of the South African school and university curricula and she taught history of art, drawing and painting at the Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town. Mason is still prolific well into the 21st century and is represented in major public and private collections in South Africa as well as collections in Europe, USA and Australia. Her public commissions include tapestries in collaboration with Marguerite Stephens for the Royal Hotel, Durban, and stained glass window designs for the Great Park Synagogue in Johannesburg.
&app=&subm=)