acrylic on canvas

Artwork date: circa 1976
Signature details: signed and inscribed with the the artist's name, date, the title, medium and dimensions on the reverse
Exhibited: IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 'Plato's Cave: The Legacy of Kevin Aktinson', 10 September 2013 to 9 February 2014.; The New Church, Cape Town, 'Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart', 2 December 2014 to 25 April 2015.; SMAC Gallery, Stellenbosch, 'Abstract South African Art: Revisited', 9 June to 1 August 2011.
Literature: O’Toole, S. (2015) The New Church Museum, The online edition of Artforum International Magazine. Artforum. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/picks/thinking-feeling-head-heart-49870 (Accessed: February 14, 2023).

(1)

168 x 168 x 2 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

SMAC Gallery, Stellenbosch.

Kevin and Patricia Atkinson Trust.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Kevin Atkinson is a major figure in the story of South African art, art history and art education. He was born in Cape Town and, apart from short and frequent sojourns abroad, was based in the city for his entire career. He studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where he later became a legendary teacher, inspiring generations of artists, including Lisa Brice, Marlene Dumas and Kate Gottgens amongst others. He fully engaged his South African context, but he was also a confirmed internationalist, who responded intelligently to the plurality of ideas and styles that characterised international contemporary art. He was a restlessly experimental artist, whose artistic output reflects an internalisation of the dominant international trends of the 1960s and 1970s.

Atkinson admired, met and maintained contact with artist-philosophers Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, as well as with eminent writers such as Jack Burnham. His remarkable oeuvre, which encompasses painting, drawing, print-making, sculpture, environments and performance, is the expression of an artist who, in his own words, was “in time, on time, all the time”.[1]

Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart, produced in 1967, is a seminal painting from the artist’s Arena series^[i], which is considered Atkinson's most definitive body of work. In the pursuit of his metaphysical concerns, Atkinson had begun to use gesture, archetypal symbols and handwritten words. Paint was applied to animated, scratchy effect to energise the surface. Esoteric diagrams were thus charged with human energy, while colour was radically reduced to blacks, greys and whites, with the odd symbolic flash of gold or ultramarine blue. Here, ultramarine blue – Atkinson’s nod to the precedent of Yves Klein – is a signifier of spiritual purity, infinity, the heavens; water, sky and air.[2]

This painting, like many other works in this series, references Atkinson’s ubiquitous use of the symbols of the heart and the triangle. Art historian Hayden Proud explains: “The latter is strongly indicated in his work as the mystical, triangular Pythagorean tetractys[ii]. For Atkinson, his Arena series (like this striking painting) stood as evidence of a striving towards 'consciousness' and of his spiritual journey. They were conceived of as 'process' works that he left behind him to guide others who wished to follow a similar path”.[3]

Text by Marelize van Zyl

1. Kevin Atkinson in his studio with Walter Battiss circa late 1970's
2. Kevin Atkinson circa late 1970's

[1] Martin, M. (2022). Kevin Atkinson. Exhibition pamphlet. Investec Cape Town Art Fair, SMAC Gallery.

[2] Proud, H. (2019). Kevin Atkinson. Golden Seven in Historic, Modern and Contemporary Art (auction catalogue), Cape Town, 3 March 2019.

[3] Ibid

[i] In the 1970s, Atkinson had been much taken with the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist notion of painting as a ‘performative act’, and as the result or ‘byproduct’ of ‘process in motion’. The American art critic Harold Rosenberg’s concept of the canvas as ‘an arena in which to act’ was taken up by Atkinson, and the word ‘arena’ was frequently inscribed or stencilled onto his canvases and prints in the Arena series.

[ii] A mystical symbol associated with planetary movements, the seasons and music, the Tetractys (Greek: τετρακτύς) is a triangular figure consisting of ten points arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row, which is the geometrical representation of the fourth triangular number.

COLLECTOR'S NOTES:

In 2022, a book on the artist’s work, Kevin Atkinson. Art and Life, written by Marilyn Matin, was published.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local collections, notably, the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and South African Reserve Bank, Pretoria.