Notes

In 2002 Brett Murray was the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in the visual art category. This trio of bronze figures formed part of his award show, entitled White Like Me. In his new work Murray attempted to “define an often discombobulated sense of identity, post 1994”.¹ His three, nearly identical painted figures are discussed at length by critic Ivor Powell in the exhibition catalogue.² Their design references the proportions and formal volumes of West and Central African tribal art as diffused into the tourist market. The bright pink denotes their race, whiteness being a central theme of Murray’s exhibition. Each has a distended, orb-like head and is bereft of facial characteristics. “In one way the image has an almost morbid or pathological quality, the sense of an unhealthy mutation, and one that supplants the human visage – what above all we relate to in the work of art – with something that is mute in the face of physiognomic interrogation,” noted Powell. “In another way, the specific disruption of the figure suggests no interpretative closure.” The spheres could reference many things, or simply nothing. Powell described these ambiguous figures as the presiding gods of Murray’s exhibition.

1. Brett Murray. (2013) Brett Murray, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Page 123.

2. Ivor Powell, Exploding Heads: Brett Murray and the Aesthetics of Whiteness, in Brett Murray, White Like Me, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts, 2002. Pages 8-10.

Exhibited

Exhibited: White Like Me, Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, Pietermaritzburg, Durban, Bloemfontein, Cape Town and Johannesburg, 2002-2003.

Literature

Brett Murray. (2002) White Like Me, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts. Illustrated on pages 18-19.

Brett Murray. (2013) Brett Murray, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Illustrated on pages 122, 126-7.

Sophie Perryer. (2004) 10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing. Illustrated in colour on page 263.
Emilio Maurice. (2009) Standard Bank Young Artists: 25, A retrospective exhibition, Johannesburg: The Standard Bank of South Africa Limited. Illustrated in colour on page 72.