AbstRacT – Synchrony Revealed
Timed Online Auction, 4 - 23 July 2025
AbstRacT – Synchrony Revealed
About the SessionIn 2024, the Rupert Museum presented AbstRacT – The Hidden Synchrony, an exhibition inspired by Oscar Forel’s Synchromies series - close-up photographs of tree bark that transformed the familiar into bold abstraction. These works were paired with South African modernist paintings from the museum’s collection, creating surprising visual harmonies and fresh interpretations.
Building on this concept, AbstRacT – Synchrony Revealed is the result of the museum’s third Open Call, which received over 300 submissions. From these, 41 artists were selected to showcase their work in a group exhibition - now part of an exclusive online auction in collaboration with Strauss & Co.
The auction offers collectors a chance to discover new voices engaging with themes of ecology, memory, materiality, and abstraction. Each work reveals a dynamic interplay between natural form and artistic expression - where chance, structure, and symbolism collide.
During the period of the online auction the exhibition is accessible to be viewed at the Jan Rupert Art Centre, 41 Middle street, Graaff-Reinet.
Collection of the artworks will be available once the exhibition closes on 16 November 2025.
Please contact Eliz-Marie Schoonbee to arrange collection/delivery
tel: 021 888 3261
email: eliz-marie@rupertmuseum.org
About this Item
Notes
The strange organisms known as lichen – two distinct life forms living together as one – often blend into the landscape as abstract patches of colour and texture. Long before Oscar Forel captured Synchromies, it was botanist and mycologist Albert Frank (1839–1900) who first coined the term symbiosis in his study of lichens.
A painterly rosette of lichen, when examined closely, reveals a pattern formed by living individuals coexisting as a colony within their own self-sustaining ecosystem. The artist imagines that each colony leaves behind a unique footprint – a source of inspiration for the pattern represented in this ceramic work.
Clay, as a medium, can be shaped with intention, but once in the kiln, the intense heat and chemical reactions of glazes and oxides introduce a level of unpredictability. Shapes may shift, colours may crack, run, or merge, resulting in patterns that range from the wondrous to the disastrous.
Clay also holds a quiet resonance with the natural world – it feels, in theory, non-invasive. The artist imagines that, in a thousand years, these works might become dust or fragment into shards that blend with earth and stone, perhaps forming part of the layered pattern of humanity’s past.
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