South Africa may be out of the World Cup, but their exit, with a 2-1 win over France, was respectable enough for the country to go right on partying. On Wednesday night last week Mark Coetzee, energetic Program Director of PUMAVision was the benign host at the opening party of an exhibition of portraits of football stars by American artist Kehinde Wiley, who I last encountered giving a talk about his solo show at the Studio Museum of Harlem almost two years ago. Wiley is celebrated for his portraits of young African American men, posed against rich backgrounds of African fabrics.
Puma had commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of three stars of African football teams, from Cameroon, Ghana and the Ivory Coast, with one portrait of the three together. Unfortunately the portraits had got stuck in Chinese customs and had not arrived in the country by the opening night, so overnight the Scanshop, working from digital images, had printed the portraits on fabric and stretched them like canvases.
Did anyone notice? After all, the labels still read ‘Oil on canvas’ and television cameras and photographers were everywhere. Wiley was there, of course, and fashion mogul Kimora Lee Simmons arrived with an entourage, and head down, made straight for the roped off VIP space at the back.
We went on to the opening of the Andrew Lamprecht curated show, ‘Tretchikoff and Me’, at Salon 91 in Kloof Street. Vintage prints by the artist, long considered the king of kitsch, hung in tandem with responses by local artists, some very witty. The gallery was packed, with people spilling out onto the street. There seemed to be just as many guests here as at the Kehinde Wiley bash, causing my friend Dutch artist Rob Moonen to comment in astonishment that in Holland, one was lucky to get thirty people at an opening.
Fashionista Suzy Bell shows off her Tretchi lookBut if we didn’t go to openings, how else would Capetonians keep up with all their friends?
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