Notes

Artist's Bio

Rina Stutzer (born 1976) completed her BAFA at the University of Pretoria in 1999 and went on to complete her MAFA at the same university in 2007. After graduation, she started lecturing part-time in painting and drawing at the University of Pretoria. She works as a full-time artist, focusing on her own creative process and production, investigating sculptural form, printmaking and painting. Her work deals with ‘impermanence’ (the provisional, temporal, perishable and transitory) in both materials and process. In her recent paintings, she has been exploring ‘painting’ with acid as an ever-changing image on copper plate as well as on paper. However, during the patina and subsequent oxidisation processes (due to the acid content and its reaction to the metal), the original images continue to be altered and thus change in appearance. Similarly, through printmaking and her most recent exhibition, she explores the reduction or ghost print, pulled after the initial monotype, offering an inverted image. Through these types of methodologies, Stutzer investigates and questions ideas of permanence in contrast to the transitory nature of life. Stutzer has achieved a number of accolades, including The Bettie Cilliers-Barnard Bursary from the University of Pretoria for excellence in painting (1999) and the SASOL New Signatures Art Competition: People’s Choice Award (1999). She was awarded the first prize in the Ekurhuleni Fine Arts Award Competition (2007) and achieved a distinction in painting for her master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Pretoria in the same year. In 2012, she was awarded the Rendezvous: Focus Painting bursary. This prestigious bursary afforded her the opportunity to attend a painting residency in France at the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2013, to which she returned in 2019. In 2016, her work Pinned Transitory II/Pinned in Transition II was exhibited at Reporting from the Front, Biennale Architettura, 2016, in the South African Pavilion, in Venice, Italy. Her 2018 sculptural installation is a stainless-steel diptych of mirroring continents engaged in a dynamic visual dialogue, charged with an ever-changing present titled There is No Time Like the Present. The installation is situated at the Gateway buildings, at Mall of Africa, in Midrand. Stutzer frequents work-stays away from her studio and has attended local and international residencies. Apart from the two sojourns to the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2013 and 2022, she was invited in 2016 to attend the residency at the Nirox Sculpture Park in the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage site and in 2014 she participated in the Sydney Art Fair and was a part of 20 Stellenbosch. In 2021 she was invited to take part in the six months Tswalu Air program and residency in Tswalu, Northern Cape, which was followed by an exhibition at Everard Read Gallery. She has participated in several group and solo exhibitions since 2000 in South Africa, as well as in the UK, France, Australia, India, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Apart from her private art practice, Stutzer is a creative advisor at the collective art studio and foundry, Dionysus Sculpture Works (DSW) in Pretoria. She also holds a studio space within the DSW collective where she prints, paints and sculpts.

Artist's Statement

The inclined faceted bird motif sculpture, Pinned Transitory I/ Pinned in Transition I, shows a momentarily paused descension and investigates and questions, in a counterbalance between two counterpoints, permanence and transience. Furthermore, a metaphor of an African identity, the transitory bird form denotes an adapter, traveller or nomad. Pinned Transitory I/Pinned in Transition I, the bronze sculpture, was the preliminary study for the upscaled pop-up sculpture installation, titled Pinned Transitory II/Pinned in Transition II, which travelled and was pitched, tent-like, at various exhibition pavilions, moving from Nirox Winter Fair, to the Cool Capital DIY Guerilla Biennale (Pretoria) during 2014 and 2015, and was finally erected at Reporting from the Front, Biennale Architettura, in Venice, Italy, in 2016. The original installation was in steel, tensile material, rope, cord and tent pegs, but was renamed Pinned in Transition, after the sculpture was altered for the South African Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia. Newly reshaped, only the original armature remained which worked like an architectural web, emphasising the crisscrossing and coming together of people and thoughts. The work lightly bodied forth the literal and virtual crossroad/s at which people find themselves when interacting within new parameters. The work’s initial visualisation of nomadic movement and impermanence, had been enriched by being deconstructed, remodelled, moved to a different, foreign location, which resulted in a new layering of meaning unknown even to the artist herself.