WHEN IT’S HOT OUT AND YOU WANNA HAVE A GOOD TIME

GROUP EXHIBITION

Salon Ninety One is thrilled to present its first show of 2021, When it’s hot out and you wanna have a good time.

This all female-collection is inspired by the heat and freedom of long, colourful summer days, balmy evenings, and the strange summer we now find ourselves in; a summer which has seen restrictions on festivities, curfews, and the closure of many of South Africa’s beaches.

When temperatures soar above 29 degrees, we become lethargic about our responsibilities and the allure of leisure becomes almost too much to bear; sitting on the beach, surfing, sunbathing, a friendly game of tennis, going to pool-parties, sun-downers, the welcome gust of air-conditioner as you walk into cool museums or galleries in foreign cities, outings with friends, the tang of salt on your skin after a swim in the ocean, and other activities which seem so much more vibrant in the heat of summer. This colourful, quirky, and playful exhibition is a wistful yearning for a long, hot, normal, summer – where a good time can be had at any moment.

When it’s hot out and you wanna have a good time features the very latest works by Berry Meyer, Emma Nourse, Lené Ehlers, Jessica Bosworth Smith, Marolize Southwood, and Tara Deacon. Berry Meyer constructs detailed, and delicate collage works, which combine disparate and discarded paper artefacts to develop thoughtful and arresting narratives on time, nostalgia, race, sexuality, and popular culture. Emma Nourse works with thick oils applied to paper and canvas to render flower arrangements and still lifes which seem to melt and reconstitute over and over again on the picture plane. Lené Ehlers creates intricate abstract and wild botanical shapes in paint, collage and mixed media to explore themes of journey and self-rediscovery. Through the depiction of highly patterned and detailed scenes in bright, flat, colour, Jessica Bosworth Smith expresses her desire to capture fantastical inner worlds which pay homage to her new-found sense of place. Marolize Southwood’s work demonstrates her deep fascination with the human condition and our proclivity to construct our own reality using bold, joyful, and textured brushwork. And Tara Deacon’s playful and bright paintings explore the often-overlooked moments of daily life, where her love of solid colour and simplified shapes give expression to the beauty in the mundane.