Anna Laudel participated for the first time at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in South Africa, held from February 17 to 19, 2023. Known for being Africa’s biggest contemporary art fair, the 10th edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair focused on the notion of time, which highlighted its journey over the last decade. Anna Laudel’s participation in the fair included a unique selection of artworks produced by Daniele Sigalot, Mathias Hornung, and Ramazan Can.
The artworks of Daniele Sigalot from Italy, Mathias Hornung from Germany, and Ramazan Can from Turkey com- bined a wide range of materials, including metal, stone, wood, paper, wool, and neon. They expressed a strong sensual stimulation of touch, offering different perspectives for the viewers.
Daniele Sigalot is a conceptual artist whose artistic language is joyful, cynical, absurd, and shocking through its content, materiality, and scale.
He created sharp and short sentences which critique the art market, perception of life, and expectations from the future. His enlarged post-it notes in aluminum are part of the production of ideas, but they are indeed satirical, which captures the audience with their humor. In his photography works, the image of his hand protrudes from the water, holding a burning torch of life that beautifully brings together the contrast between water and fire, questioning the visibility of the bigger picture beyond the surface.
They explore in their works with a desire to create new possibilities and spaces of thought and vision within the past, present, and future.
Mathias Hornung’s works dissolve the boundary between graphics and sculpture. They are sensual and, at the same time, conceptual images that play with the space and interspace between media and materials. The artworks of Hornung are based on rectangular grids printed either on paper or carved three-dimensionally on wood. Topography, time, and space play an important role in his works, but the ultimate idea behind his works is the break from the perfect, even, and regular web of life. In his woodblock prints, past, present, and future enter into an idiosyncratic, oscillating relationship. In a world of ever more perfect technical images, he linked their codes with the old process of high pressure with his direct manual access to sensual immediacy.
In his works, Ramazan Can investigates the issues of modern life by establishing connections between past and present and presents forgotten anecdotes from “primitive” traditions. Inspired by Shamanism, rituals, totems, Anatolian traditions, mythology, and identity issues, he invites the audience to witness and experience his journey into his mind and childhood memories as a nomad. He works across different mediums, including neon, oil paint, collage, bead embroidery, mosaic, concrete, and wood, to create paintings, installations, sculptures, carpets, and weavings to tell his story and the nomad culture, allowing him to compare the modern and the primitive and to produce works where he uses the practices of primitive traditions to explain today’s conflicts.
Investec Cape Town Art Fair focused on the notion of time, highlighting its journey over the last decade.
Each of the three artists in the selection produced multilayered, impactful works and used art as a medium to access strong physical sensations as a response to the current age of digitalization. The passage of time for these artists forms a common ground of focus that they explore in their works with a desire to create new possibilities and spaces of thought and vision within the past, present, and future. Positioning itself as the place where the fast-growing African art market and the international art world meet, the 10th edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair showcased exhibitions by 88 exhibitors from around the world.
The exhibitors were divided into different curated sections, including Tomorrows/Today, SOLO, Past/ Modern, EDITIONS, and ALT.
