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Jack Bell Gallery is pleased to present Cameron Platter's 'Everyday Apocalypse', the artist's first exhibition in the UK.
These drawings form part of an ongoing, projected ten-year series of large-scale documentary drawings. Works from the same series will be included in 'Imaginary Fact: South African Art and the Archive', an upcoming exhibition for the South Africa Pavilion at Venice's 55th Biennale. Platter thinks of these pencil on paper works as "Nomadic Murals", as Le Corbusier considered tapestries. His drawings are a series of interlinking thoughts and
meditations, capturing the most fleeting moment as well as the most expansive scene, linked together to form a singular meta-narrative.
Translating contemporary reality, Platter's work fills the ordinary and the marginal, with incendiary new meaning. Interacting with transitory subjects and sources considered delinquent, sordid and lowbrow, he reconnoiters notions and concepts on the outside fringes of popular culture to create a highly edited, transitive, violent, personal, cynical, symptomatic and abstract vision. In this exhibition, his stance on the fringe, both conceptually and geographically, highly personal and distinct aesthetic, obsessive work methods, and non-conformist approach, come together to form a singular poetic moment.
Cameron Platter was born in 1978, Johannesburg. He graduated with a BFA in painting from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 2001. Recent exhibitions include 'Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now,' Museum of Modern Art, New York; 'Rencontres Internationales,' The Centre Georges Pomidou, Paris and Haus Der Kultur, Berlin; Le Biennale de Dakar 2010, Dakar, Senegal; 'Coca- Colonization,' Marte Museum, El Salvador; and 'Absent Heroes,' Iziko South African National Gallery. His work appears in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; The FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France; and the Iziko South African National Gallery. His work has been highlighted in The New York Times, Vice Magazine, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, Utflukt, and Art South Africa. He now lives and works in KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town, South Africa.