Notes

Aleksanders Klopcanovs and his wife Elma Vestman immigrated to South Africa in the late 1940s. After working at the Linnware potteries for a while they started their own business, Kalahari Studio, in Bramley, Johannesburg. They made functional ceramic items as well as decorative and fine art pieces such as tiles, plaques, wall plates and sculpture. Vestman oversaw production processes, quality control and product development and the couple shared the design and decoration responsibilities. The studio contributed significantly to the technical development of ceramics in South Africa, and scholar Wendy Gers is of the opinion that it was ‘the first, and arguably the only, local pottery to successfully synthesise an indigenised South African content with international modernist design trends of the 1950s’.¹ Klopcanovs also directed his energies into a parallel career as painter of figural compositions and landscapes. He participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in South Africa between 1961 and 1973 and sold paintings in Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. Two of Klopcanovs’s paintings are in the Museum of Modem Art (MOMA), New York.

1. Wendy Gers (2015) Scorched Earth: 100 Years of Southern African Potteries, Johannesburg: Jacana, page 156.