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
This ongoing series was inspired by Edward Casey’s concept of earth-mapping, which he outlined in his book Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape, in which he states that the earth, along with any earthwork on its surface, is 'a collection of places.' This idea shaped Bezuidenhout’s practice of clay-casting and creating map-like impressions of decaying stumps that act as 'negative maps' reflecting the areas from which they originate in Hogsback and eDikeni (Alice) in the Eastern Cape.
These clay imprints, formed from decomposing tree stumps, reveal intimate, minute details of the stump’s surface, offering a tactile record of history. In Photography, Trace, and Trauma, Margaret Iversen accentuates this concept by highlighting how traces left in the clay bear the weight of both the past and present, akin to ancient writing that preserves a fragmented narrative. The resulting imprints of the decaying stumps present a textured, map-like form that communicates an altered historical story, suspended in time. These stumps serve as records, continuously accumulating by the ongoing creation of duplicates to preserve and retain the indelible traces of the past.
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