Women in Vorster’s ‘Memorabilia’

Veteran artist Pedro Vorster’s latest solo exhibition opens in the evening, but a young woman urges me to view the selection at the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN) by day.

The promise is a particular gleaming, a certain catching of the light that seems to set the oil on canvas aglow as ‘Memorabilia’ opens a gateway into Vorster’s artistic soul.

While much can be said about Vorster’s Namibian landscapes – fragmented, geometric, kaleidoscopic and secreting images amid the rocks – one’s eye may very well be drawn to the artist’s treatment of women.

Imagined as muses, priestesses and guides, Vorster’s images of women are coloured with an admiration and sense of beauty that speaks to the artist’s reverence for the feminine.

Framing women as holy, sources of inspiration, and as wells of wisdom in paintings such as ‘Three Priestesses’, ‘Four Muses’ and ‘The Guide’, Vorster contrasts these more flawless archetypes with a bride in love with someone other than her husband, a woman deep in thought, and another bent with insecurity.

In ‘The Warrior Confronts his Bride with the Heart of her Love’, Vorster presents a dramatic depiction of a woman whose betrothed has seemingly killed her love. Both in a state of undress as her infidelity of the heart is laid bare, the woman seems to look on stoically as her groom draws a spear across her chest, tearing the skin.

Literally violent but tonally strangely serene, the image is an unsettling one that forces the viewer to consider Namibia’s grave instances of gender-based violence as well as the sanctity of human life.

A wife is also the subject of Vorster’s ‘Shy Bride’, in which the artist paints a woman in the nude, covering her abdomen self-consciously. Though the setting is sumptuous and vibrant as the background creates a wedding veil or virginal halo, the woman looks down apprehensively.

In this, Vorster displays some sensitivity to the unspoken anxieties a new bride may experience given the expectations of a wedding night. Vorster also nods to the more general inadequacy women may feel given society’s hyperfixation on women’s bodies in relation to traditional and accepted beauty standards.

An artwork evoking similar contemplation is ‘Portrait of a Young Woman’. Here, Vorster paints a woman deep in thought, her hands clasped and a wine glass at her touching feet.

Appearing worried, lost in thought or perhaps drowning her sorrows, as suggested by the wine glass, ‘Portrait of a Young Woman’ underscores the complexity and even the turbulence of women’s inner worlds in contrast to more monolithic or simplistic conceptions.

Such complexity is evident in a piece that is not Vorster’s own work but is one of his titular memorabilia, a vintage print towards the entrance of the exhibition in the upper gallery.

The print was sold to loyalists to raise funds for the Republic of South Africa’s National Party and Vorster, born at Grootfontein in 1952, recalls loving the colour of its proteas when he was a 10-year-old.

“Bought by my patriotic mother,” says Vorster in the print’s caption.

And so, another woman comes slightly into focus, a woman who was the artist’s mother but who, according to Vorster, was also supportive of the party which oversaw apartheid in then South West Africa (now Namibia).

While Vorster hints at this complicated personal history, this loaded memorabilia, the artist depicts smiling motherhood in ‘Woman and Child’ with a loveliness and awe seemingly akin to his generally positive and multifaceted treatment of women.

Sage in his manipulation of colour with every frame purposefully and vividly composed, Vorster’s ‘Memorabilia’ offers an engaging artistic excursion that traverses landscapes of the earth and of the mind amid a perceptive ode to women.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com

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