Written by Sue Williamson, one of South Africa's most influential art critics and editors and herself a leading international artist, South African Art Now offers historical context and in-depth analysis of a wide variety of South African art genres and mediums, from painting and sculpture to photography, from performance and traditional craft-making to video. The book spans four decades, from early political art in the 1960s (during the Apartheid years) to the thought-provoking works with universal themes that grabbed the international art market's interest a generation later. Major South African artists include some of the world's most well-known names, from Marlene Dumas, William Kentridge, and Gerard Sekoto, to up-and-coming art stars such as Robin Rhode, Nicholas Hlobo, and Mustafa Maluka.
Nobel laureate and South Africa-based novelist Nadine Gordimer contributes a moving foreward, and some of the world's leading art critics, including Okwui Enwezor and RoseLee Goldberg, offer insightful essays that place the works included into a truly international context. With South African art quickly becoming an area that is receiving much attention at auctions and art fairs around the globe, South African Art Now is a rare combination of an art-historical must-read and a sumptuous contemporary design book.
