Manfred Zylla

manfred zylla

This publication features a selection of work produced by German/South African artist Manfred Zylla since 2007 to the present.

Researched and designed by Jannah Ruthven, participant in Erdmann Contemporary’s internship programme October/November, 2014.

Introduction by Heidi Erdmann

Opening address by Premesh Lalu, Professor of History at the University of Western Cape (UWC), 12 March 2014

ERDMANNCONTEMPORARY

Seventy five year old German/South African artist Manfred Zylla is foremost a swimmer. He swims every day. When he is in Cape Town, he alternates his programme between the ice cold Atlan-tic Ocean and a public swimming pool in Observatory, the suburb where he has been living, and swimming, since the 1980’s. When in Munich his swimming jaunts take him to the lakes and rivers in and around the city. Zylla’s pursuit for that ultimate swim in beautiful and clean waters inspired the title of his 2014 solo exhibition: I want to swim a thousand miles. It also points to a will and a hope for prosperity.

Born in 1939 in Germany, the second child of deaf parents, Zylla experienced not only the ravages and aftermath of World War II, but also witnessed the suffering of discrimination against people with disability. Those early childhood experiences shaped his career as a resistance artist. In South Africa, he became prominent in the 1980’s, as an artist highly critical of apartheid, producing hard hitting drawings, prints and paintings; many of these works are now in museum collections. His works are widely acknowledged as vital in understanding resistance art, an important chapter in South African art history. Zylla has continued to work within a paradigm of social critique. His work comments on globalisation, urbanisation, climate change, exploitation of natural resources, alternative energy, and attitudes towards disability.

In the book, Manfred Zylla Art & Resistance he is quoted:“By 2011 I felt drained. Inexplicably my focus had shifted. It was not as if the issues of the world had been resolved, or that I was no longer affected by them, but I suddenly had a longing to paint landscapes again. I experienced a need to be out in the open, surrounded by nature. And I wished to paint only the physical world, the world that I could see and feel.”

But this was not to be.

On 22 November 2011 the South African parliament passed the Protection of State Information Bill, turning back the clock to the darkest times of the apartheid era.

“Now is not the time to paint landscapes, my work as a resistance artist was not over. Aluta Continua….”[Manfred Zylla Art & Resistance 2012].

Zylla did not pursue his desire to paint landscapes. Instead he turned towards Marquis de Sade and Pier Paolo Pasolini and pro-duced one hundred and twenty guache and mixed media paint-ings, entitled 120 Days of Sodom. These intimate paintings, not measuring more than 100 x 150 mm each, are powerfully rich in narrative, explicit, raw, and delve deep into the territory of sexual violence, war and cruelty.

In the summer of 2013, while in Germany, Zylla produced a series of self-portraits on brown paper bags. He printed Bertolt Brecht’s poem, An die Nachgeborenen (To those born later) over each one of the portraits. In the final stage Zylla transformed his own face into that of known saviours, heroes, villains, fighters, Hussein and Hitler. He titled the series I Am…

The comment is multi-fold. The use of the poem functions as a reminder that not much has changed since Brecht penned that poem in 1939. We still live in dark times, and there is great suffering around us. But it also points to a determination to continue a commitment to engage and fight and hope for prosperity.

In 2015 Manfred Zylla’s works will go on view in Rome and San Benedetto in Italy, followed by a solo exhibition in Cape Town. A book on his series 120 Days of Sodom is currently in production and will be launched in London in June 2015.

For You - Beef, Pork or Rabbit I & II

From I want to swim a thousand miles exhibition

Acrylic on canvas32 x 27 cm each

2000

For You: Rabbit, Beef or Pork


Acrylic on canvas20 x 20cm each

2000

For You: Pork, Rabbit or Beef I & II


Acrylic on canvas32 x 27 cm each

2000

I Am - Before Overprint


I Am - After Overprint


I AmFrom I want to swim a thousand miles exhibition

Guache, oil, crayons, lacquer marker & wood cutBrown Paper bag

180 x 141 cm2013 / 2014

SOLD

Swimming in Oil (Portrait)


Acrylic on aluminium coated black paper110 x 110 cm

1993

Swimming in Oil (Head Stand)



1993

Swimming in Oil (Floating)



1993

Swimming in Oil (Tanker)



1993SOLD

Aluta Continua Fracking the Karoo

Live drawing performance

(Before and completed work)

Colour Pencil and acrylic paint on paper150 x 150 cm

2014On Reserve

Live drawing performance at the exhibition opening of I want to swim a thousand miles.

Photographs by Paul Grendon

Manfred Zylla’s art is as much a tribute to Bertolt Brecht as it is a gesturing to the lasting consequence of the thought of the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau Ponty. Like Brechts epic theatre, his work constitutes its audience as a collective. Manfred Zylla helps us to distinguish between reproduction of dystopia and discover-ing the conditions of life. He asks us what it means to swim and stay afloat in a sea of dystopia. It is an important reminder that when the spectre of death casts its shadow over life, there is always also life. I believe that as an audience collectively constituted by Man-fred Zylla’s artwork, we need to ask not what Manfred has given to politics in South Africa, which is of course substantial, but what, if anything, might politics take from his work. It is to the idea of politi-cal perspective, of a politics informed by perception that I wish to point in opening this exhibition.

I want to begin by thanking Manfred Zylla for performing the thank-less task of reminding us that politics is inconceivable without per-ception. The work of art, as those of us who grew up on the wind-swept Cape Flats knew all too well, constitutes the conditions of life as much as it gives to life a sensory quality that is at the heart of proclaiming our subjectivity as human. Unlike the dystopia found in the work of Kentdrige for example, Manfred Zylla can be depend-ed on to take us for a swim…to dissolve waste matter into a matter of life. In his hands, the reconfiguration of the meaning of life history is not inconsequential, especially as the dead certainties of a bat-tered landscape give way to a realm of perception that reworks how we come to understand the relation between our political subjectivities and transient biographies. It is not surprising then that this show puts the work of portraiture in relation to the work of a mo-dernity at sea. This is perhaps best thought of as a script produced between utopia and dystopia, one that Manfred contributed to a major tradition of art making in South Africa.

Emile Maurice, the curator of our collections in the Centre for Hu-manities Research at the University of the Western Cape, recently waxed lyrically about his first encounter with Manfred’s work. Emile Maurice encountered Zylla’s two woodcuts from the 1970s – Kinder-steele and Kindermoodernaar, and realised immediately that Zylla was cutting to the heart of the debate on art and resistance

in South Africa at the time. Stumbling upon Zylla’s work, he hastily revealed upon the glimmer of hope that Manfred’s art offered in an environment of stultified debate about the arts in the 1970s and 1980s. As Maurice suggests, Manfred seemed to bring the work of metaphor back into resistance art, thinking about form and con-tent as dialectically constituted, but never allowing content to colonise form. A crucial part of that intervention related to how to keep the work of art perceptually open in a field that demanded commitment, grounding and standpoint. Stated differently, it was an invitation to swim in a sea of despair, of hypermasculinity (the penis afterall functions as an absent cause in Manfred’s work), and to stay awake and afloat.As Cesare Casarino once put it, our modernity has always been at sea. Whether in the work of Mellville’s Moby Dick or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the sea has a terrifying yet enticing symbolic currency in our anticipation of life after industrialisation and the rule of pri-vate property. But like Casarino who argues for new concepts in the midst of industrial dystopia, Manfred Zylla asks us to think about the conditions of life anew.

This is as much a matter of technique as it is of thought. Besides the Brechtian currents in Manfred’s work, we also find resonances with the phenomenological thinking of someone like Maurice Mer-leu Ponty. Viewing the tryptych of the Aphrodite series, I could not help but bring myself to think about that wonderful discourse on perception by Merleu Ponty contained in “the primacy of percep-tion”. In no small measure, Manfred Zylla wants us to rethink politics and perception. In this, his work brings politics to the point where it brushes up against the philosophical thinking of perception, more forcefully than his early work, which seemed to be doing the re-verse. And this is where his Brechtian sensibility gives way to Mer-leau Ponty.

Merleau Ponty gives us a way to think of perception as an open field, as never really being wrong. The example he gives is about a walk on the beach, where one sees an object in the distance. At first glance, the object appears to be a branch. But fifty meters on, it takes the shape of a dog (with a penis I might add).

But upon arriving at the object, you realise that it is a person. In each anticipation of the object, our perception is wholly adequate to the field of vision in which we are ensconced. The triptych seems to play out this subtle philosophical point that one finds in Merleu Ponty’s work to great effect.

As if to replay this theme from Merleu Ponty, Manfred Zylla asks that the commitments of a work ought to derive from the realm of per-ception. The object of politics when threaded through perception is not therefore one that can be know in advance. Stated more bluntly, if art governed politics, then politics could only ever be a problem space in which we learn to swim.

In many respects, the work of Manfred on display here tonight is a lesson in politics that our society would do well to heed. If political thought were threaded through Manfred Zylla’s work, they would discover politics as an art, in which the very prospect of reducing political statements to simple reductions of standpoints would be called into question. What the work displays is a need to open poli-tics to perception, to the receding horizon of the human condition, the distribution of its objects, and how what we think those objects are differ with the passage of our being. Stated differently, Manfred Zylla is not satisfied to return aesthetics to politics, but to think poli-tics through the perceptual field that the work of art offers.And while we are at it, in the turbulent sea in which the scene of the sublime is enacted again and again, or more comfortably stroll-ing thoughtfully along the beach we realise that the world opens up to us in the same manner that life is set to sea.

In opening this exhibition, I want to thank Manfred for his insights. This country needs Manfred Zylla more than it realises.

Clap Your Hands

Mixed media on paper150 cm x 220 cm

2007SOLD

Jam


2007SOLD

What Else?


2007SOLD

Sorry, We’re Closed


2007SOLD

Sewage Brigade

Mixed media on paper220 x 150 cm

2013SOLD

Riel Dans


2013

Cats and Birds

Acrylic on wood 138 x 110 cm each per panel

2013SOLD

Trapped, Steps to Success


2012SOLD

My Pool

Mixed media on paper160 x 150 cm each

2013

120 Days of Sodom

Gouache on paper (120 paintings in total)15 x 21 cm each, 2012

SOLD

I Want More I, II, III & IVThe Industrial Karoo - Fear and Loss Exhibition

Drypoint handcoloured etching27 x 39 cm each, 2014

SOLD

Exhibitions List

2014 Group Exhibition, Rome, Italy 2014 Prints & Drawings 1960 - 1990, Lanz 7 Gallery, Munich, Germany2014 The Industrial Karoo - Fear and Loss, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein, South Africa2014 Twenty: Contemporary South African Art, The Appalachian State University, North Carolina, United States2014 I want to Swim a Thousand Miles, ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town, South Africa2013 Crossing the Divide, ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town, South Africa2013 Zylla & Erasmus, EineWeltHaus, Munich, Germany2013 120 Days of Sodom, Munich, Germany2013 Re-Drawn Conclusion, ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town2012 In Retrospect; Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein, South Africa 2012 In Retrospect; William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberly, South Africa2012 In Retrospect; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth, South Africa2010 Future Memories; Centro Luigi Di Sarro, Rome, Italy2007 New Paintings; ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town, South Africa 2006 Faces of Saron; Artscape Theatre, Cape Town, South Africa 2006 Mixed Messages; Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, South Africa2005 Works on paper: 1960 to 2005; ErdmannContemporary, South Africa2004 Unauthorized; Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, South Africa2003 Interim; Munich, Germany2002 EineWeltHaus, Munich, Germany1998 Dritte Welt Café, Munich, Germany1996 Hörbach Festival, Hörbach, Germany

1993 Dritte Welt Café, Munich, Germany1993 Ecke Galerie Kneipe, Augsburg, Germany1992 Glockenbachwerkstatt, Munich, Germany1991 Art des Foyer; Munich, Germany1990 South African Association of Arts Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa1986 Amnesty International; Munich, Germany1982 Inter-Action; Community Arts Project (CAP), Cape Town, South Africa1980 South African Association of Art, Cape Town, South Africa1978 Kleine Schlossgalerie, Munich, Germany1975 The Space Theatre, Cape Town, South Africa1975 Exhibition on the passenger liner, Europa1966 Ecke Stuben, Augsburg, Germany1965 Obere Stube, Ulm, Germany

© Images Manfred Zylla© Text Heidi Erdmann & Premesh Lalu

For further information please contact:

ERDMANNCONTEMPORARY& thePHOTOGRAPHERSgalleryZA84 Kloof Street l Cape Town, 8001

T. 021 422 2762 l E. [email protected] www.erdmanncontemporary.co.za.

Manfred Zylla

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