Towards Easter Sunday 2025: Who am I?

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;
yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 
Ecclesiastes 3:11

The main purpose of this website is to create awareness of my upcoming exhibition of sculptures, to be held at the Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, from 23 Feb to 27 April 2025. I also hope that this website can be an interactive site that stimulates conversation about art in general and, more specifically, my own art making, both past and present.

It is with some irony (and I must add, frustration and a fair amount of despair!) that the dominant theme for this exhibition of sculptural thresholds and their portals, was born out of my 1997 Contemplation: A Body of Work by Gert Swart exhibition, also held at the Tatham Art Gallery. And it begs the question as to why, in 2025, it will have taken twenty-eight years for this exhibition to come to fruition.

In the foreword of the Contemplation catalogue, Brendan Bell wrote that:  'Gert Swart is a man of great intensity. He is intensely dedicated, intensely private, intensely religious, intensely creative. This exhibition is the result of over twenty years of intense self-discipline in concentrating on the production of sculpture rather than the promotion of self. Working in relative isolation from the mainstream, often under trying financial circumstances, it has always been the integrity of the artist that has won through ...'

As a direct result of the strength and artistic merits of the Contemplation exhibition I received the prestigious Helgaard Steyn Award for Sculpture (late 1997). However, having only sold one sculpture from this exhibition, in a desperate attempt to keep the wolf from the door, together with my wife, Istine, we had no other option but to take on whatever sculpture commissions that came our way, both of a public and private nature. Istine played a vital role in all of this as she did all the administration and negotiations to bring these commissions about as well as a fair share of the actual sculpting work.

In between commissioned work, I made what felt like slow progress with my threshold and portal theme. This created a great tension in my life, exacerbated by other exigencies of an extreme nature that were difficult to endure.  All of this came to a head when I accepted a huge commission that in my inmost being I knew I should never have taken on. It went hopelessly wrong, despite having put my heart and soul into it. And as a result of all of this inner and outer tension, I woke up one morning with a paralysed left arm! The cause of this calamity was a severe bout of stress-related shingles that had also attacked my arm’s motor nerves. This happened towards the end of 2011, with my 60th birthday just around the corner, in 2012.

The rehabilitation of my left arm took a long time. More than that, on a psychological level, I had to regain the will and desire to make meaningful sculptures once again, sculptures that can now, in hindsight, truly address the searing question of who I am, that is evoked in the title of the exhibition – in particular, who I am positioned before what I believe is the greatest portal of all; that which was formed through the agony and resurrection glory of that first Easter. And I must add it is only by God’s grace and the encouragement of close friends that I have been able to do this!

As I write this I am feeling overwhelmed by the miraculous awakening of nature from its dormant state, for it is spring, here, in the southern hemisphere, where I ‘live and move and have my being.’ And this brings to mind a mysterious quote from the Polish writer and visual artist Bruno Schulz’s book Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass that has both enchanted and perplexed me no end over the past 40 years, when I first became aware of his writing:

How green with oblivion spring becomes; old trees regain their sweet nescience and wake up
with twigs, unburdened by memories although their roots are steeped in old chronicles.

In memoriam of Zane Lang, good friend and fellow artist, who died this day in 2012.

10 September 2024.