David Barkham
Overexposed as we are to the continuous stream of images that overwhelm our consciousnesses, the artist attempts to freeze a moment in time extracting it from the virtual and rendering it in hard paint that one may reflect on the poignancy, the irony or the sheer absurdity of the moment, and perhaps infer some relevance. Or feeling.
My pictures are frozen frames of movie clips, sight bites, inferences, fragments of story resonating behind the threshold, rendered with a child’s delight in applying paint and heightened by the eroticism of stiff bristles plowing through wet paint and the friction of the responsive canvas.
A reduction of the works of Wilhelm Reich to sound bites could be ‘The Function of the Orgasm is to liberate us from the Mass Psychology of Fascism,’
It is in this spirit that I offer these.
Everything is about sex except sex.
CV
Born 31 August 1945
1964-66 University of Natal
1966 180 Day Detention
1967 Leicester College of Art
1969 Berkeley Free Speech Movement
Berkeley Commune Anti Vietnam War Committee
1972 -8 Marimba School of Music and Art Swaziland
1980 – 2000 Production Designer in Film Industry
2004-10 Exhibited Paintings in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto
2013 Moved to Cape Town. Exhibiting at New Heritage Gallery.