Paul+Stopforth

=PAUL STOPFORTH= // Comment by Mark Auslander:// Paul Stopforth (South Africa) studied at the Johannesburg School of Art and was awarded British Council Scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London; he and his wife Carol made the decision to leave South Africa in 1988, perhaps the bleakest year of the state of emergency period. Over the course of his career, he has held numerous one-person exhibitions both in South Africa and in the U.S.A. He has been represented in group shows in this country and in Europe, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies. Public collections holding his works include the Harvard Film Archive; the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tufts University Gallery; the National Gallery, Cape Town; the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Gallery; and University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries.

Stopforth is especially noted for an important series of drawings based on the death of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. This work remains enduring testimony to the overt and covert legacies of apartheid-era interrogation and torture, and to the innumerable deaths in detention and through assassination that so characterized the Apartheid regime. Around the time of Biko’s death in detention in 1977, soon after the opening of Market Theater complex in Johannesburg, Stopforth established and co-directed the alternative Market Gallery, perhaps the most important showcase of the visual art of liberation in late Apartheid South Africa.

In his //Island// series, Stopforth revisits scenes of confinement and forced labor on the infamous political prison of Robben Island. He helps us see among the traces of wreckage, among the broken stones of the old quarry so long worked by political prisoners, the possibilities of beauty, of self fashioning, and even of freedom in the most improbable of places.

For example, his large painting //Monument// (2005) manifestly depicts the simple saftey pin used to bind the blankets worn by the island's prisoners. But against a grainy background and a milk wash, the twisting, tension-filled metal perhaps serve as an enduring monument to the contorted limbs of those who labored in the prison's stone quarry. In the wash, from within the outline of the pin, ghostly faces of the imprisoned would seem to look out, uncanny traces of the era of confinement.



Paul Stopforth, //Monument// (2005)

//Comment by Ellen Schattschneider on "Monument"//: The image evokes a hidden history of touch, which implicates the viewer in a tactile historicity that is all too easily discarded yet which, in a curious fashion, endures. As with the rocks, bars of soap, and other elements in the //Island// series, these were objects that were touched every day by prisoners; what happens, we are forced to ask, to the normally mundane, domestic elements of the quotidian in the context of horrific violence and oppression? Stopforth's is not simply a textual history, but one that is intimate, tangible, felt. As one fastens a safey pin, one feels its inner tension. Years later, in turn, as we, the viewers, behold this image, we too sense the accumulated tension, centered on the loop at the end of the pin, a circle that remains whole and uncompressed. We not only see, but physically feel in our bodies, the great narrative of tension and release, of confinement and liberation, that is the epic story of Robben Island.