SELF PORTRAIT

Worldart Gallery, in association with Lizamore & Associates, presents a solo exhibition by Benon Lutaaya; Self Portrait. This is Lutaaya’s second solo exhibition and his first in Cape Town.

In this particular body of work, Lutaaya continues his fascination with the subject of portraiture. His approach remains very personal, a self portrait inspired by his own personal day to day life experiences. “My life is a canvas. And for this exhibition, the canvas represents my life. This is a definition of my own personal space and identity in the world and how that has been formed and shaped and manipulated, sometimes torn, sometimes glued as portrayed by his creative process” explains the artist.

His technique reveals layers of constant manipulation, exploration and approximations in the application of the medium he opts to use to construct his forms through collage. These layers are purposefully interspersed with elements of intervention and disturbance, which acts as a blur to fixed ideas, and raise important questions about the way identity is constructed. Lutaaya finds the waste paper material used in his collage work attractive, in particular by what he perceives as an element of humanity in it. The artist draws from his own personal suffering and the successful integration of these emotions into his creative process serves as a constant reminder that there’s more to life, and that suffering is simply one of its punctuations and never a foregone conclusion about destiny.

The exhibition opens on 29 December 2014 and ends on 29 January 2015 at Worldart, 54 Church Street, Cape Town.