Walter Oltmann | ARMOUR & LACE: A Bestiary | 2022
ARMOUR & LACE: A Bestiary presents new works by Walter Oltmann comprising wire sculptures, wall hangings, drawings, prints and paintings. In these works Oltmann explores dynamics between humans, animals and plants, highlighting features of armour, protection and disguise. By introducing defensive characteristics such as bristles, quills and thorns as well as engaging with interspecies protective strategies of mimicry, deception and aposematism, he teases the borders between human and nonhuman, presence and absence, fantastic and real.
Hierarchical exchanges between species raise questions around domination, vulnerability and control and allow for an imagining of alternative ways of being. Drawing on the genre of the bestiary (a compendium of allegorical fables about animals both real and imagined used for moral instruction), Oltmann creates a magical world inhabited by a variety of armoured suits next to armoured animals such as the Sungazer lizard (Smaug Giganteus) and the African pangolin (Smutsia Temminckii).
Such works bring attention to the plight of critically endangered species and the impact of climate change. As a collection of descriptions and interpretations of animals, the bestiary affords a cross-species framework where observation and imagination combine to open up fresh perspectives of and with, other living beings. It presents a fantastic imaginary world where borders between the human and non-human become permeable.
Artworks
About
Walter Oltmann
Walter Oltmann (b. 1960, Rustenburg, North-West Province, South Africa) has an extensive record of creative work produced since the early 1980s, including a number of public commissions. Since the 1980s, he has developed an interest in the relationship between fine art and craft. In his own practice he employs hand-fabricated processes of making and has researched wire craft traditions in southern Africa. In his works, Oltmann makes connections to domestic textile practices and explores such forms of making in evoking fragility and the passage of time. He often combines aspects of decorative ornament with subject matter that seems somewhat contradictory or disturbing in relation to handcrafted embellishment. His sculptural works are executed by way of weaving in wire and using handcrafting methods that reference African and Western traditions of weaving. He is deeply interested in the influence of craft traditions in contemporary South African art.
He obtained a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (1981), and an MA Fine Arts degree (1985) and PhD in Fine Arts degree (2017) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg – where he worked as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Fine Arts.
In 2001, Oltmann was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts. His solo exhibition which followed travelled throughout South Africa. In 2014, the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg hosted his solo show In the Weave which profiled three decades of the artist’s work.
Oltmann received the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s Extraordinary Award for Sculpture for 2022, enabling him to produce an extensive body of work, undertaken in the Villa-Legodi workshop at NIROX Sculpture Park where the works were also publicly shown. A book on his work titled In Time will be published shortly.
In his PhD thesis titled In The Weave: Textile-based Modes of Making and the Vocabulary of Handcraft in Selected Contemporary Artworks from South Africa, Oltmann examines how and to what ends contemporary artists working in South Africa have chosen to engage in practices that are common to textile-based handcraft traditions of weaving, stitching and tying. His focus is on how these artists have understood manual work and its philosophy, and how conceptualization in their creative practice is accessed through the physical act of repetitive making by hand, based particularly on those traditional textile craft practices associated with weaving.
Collections include: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Norval Foundation, Cape Town and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.
Oltmann lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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