Notes

Wim Botha won the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art award in 2005. The exhibition, titled A Premonition of War, opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, 2005 and travelled to six major museums and galleries throughout South Africa. This sculpture, Scapegoat, was part of the exhibition, displayed as it is seen here or as part of a larger installation with ornately framed landscapes created from puzzle pieces.

Botha has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Helgaard Steyn Prize for sculpture (2013); the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2005); the first Tollman Award (2003); he was named festival artist at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in 2003; and won the prize for best artwork at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in 2001.

His recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013) and the Sasol Art Museum, Stellenbosch as the Stellenbosch University Wordfest Artist for 2013. His work has been included in Imaginary Fact: South African Art and the Archive, the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); The Rainbow Nation, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2012); the Göteborg Biennial, Sweden (2011); Memories of the Future: The Olbricht Collection, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2011); the 11th Triennale für Kleinplastik, Fellbach, Germany (2010); Peekaboo: Current South Africa, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Cape ‘07 in Cape Town (2007); Olvida Quien Soy - Erase me from who I am, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2006) and the seventh edition of Dak'Art, the Dakar Biennale (2006).
Botha describes his work as follows: "In my work there is seldom a distinction to be drawn between the prominence of the concept and that of the medium. I work with materials central to mass consumerist applications that are subsequently transformed in essence and meaning to a point at which material and concept becomes integrally interdependent. The works take the form of sculptural installations. I appropriate well-known, sometimes trite and over-saturated subject matter which, coupled with traditional shaping and technological elements, become the nucleus of a series of references around the inherent implication of the subject.”¹

In the gallery catalogue produced for Botha’s Standard Bank Award exhibition, Liese van der Watt discusses Scapegoat: “At the centre of Premonition of War stands Scapegoat, a life-size figure in burnt African hardwood. While the posture invokes Christ on the cross, Botha literalises the title by sculpting a hybrid goat figure with horns and pointed ears, referring to the satyr across the room, but also to popular renditions of the devil. It is a powerful visual confluence that seems to suggest that the scapegoats of official narratives, of history and religion, are martyrs, heroes and gods of another, less absolute kind.”²

¹ Wim Botha quoted on http://www.artthrob.co.za/03apr/artbio.html
² Van der Watt, Liese. ‘The opposite of everyday: Wim Botha’s acts of translation’. In Perryer, Sophie. (ed.) (2005) Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Art Award for Visual Art 2005, Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Pages 10-11.

Exhibited

Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005 travelling exhibition, June 2005 - July 2006.

Literature

Van der Watt, Liese. ‘The opposite of everyday: Wim Botha’s acts of translation’. In Perryer, Sophie (ed.) (2005) Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Art Award for Visual Art 2005, Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Illustrated on page 11.