Main Gallery

Elfriede Dreyer - Matrix 2022

18 March to 2 April 2022

Elfriede has been working in the South African arts sector for more than 30 years as an artist, curator, gallerist and academic.  She has participated in many group exhibitions countrywide and held solo exhibitions in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Paris and Oudtshoorn.  Her work has been taken up in major public- and private art collections. 
 
Her artists’ statement states the following on this exhibition.  “On René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images, 1929), the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (this is not a pipe) are written.  The artist makes a statement about the certainty of the observed reality and sets up play with illusionism through the representation that is not an actual pipe but a painted image thereof.  Illusion is probably visual art’s most fundamental ontology, since a depiction represents the physical real in fictive form.
 
In the body of work on Matrix the idea of an ‘Other’ space is presented:  Simulated, embodied, dynamic and different to the experienced, physical real.  The idea of matrix is presented as a construction, a space or a place, and as fictional.  On one hand, it could be virtual space that human cyborgs inhabit; on the other hand it could be any other kind of ‘world’, dream or condition; or it could even embody utopian space.  Sometimes a constructed matrix seems so real that it becomes intertwined with the physical real. It is constituted by relationships, wishes, emotions and connections; it is volatile and can change from moment to moment.  New matrixes are constantly birthed, since human beings continue to create these within the physical boundaries of time.”