Drawings

As far as my upbringing and education were concerned, I was always an artist. After graduating from the Johannesburg School for Art Ballet & Music, circumstances led me adrift. Still, the urge to make art quietly persisted throughout my life, and my studio became a deeply private place. In 2019, some of my drawings were exhibited at the gallery of my friend Marta Moriarty in Madrid. Despite their warm reception, I returned from Spain to the comforts of home, absorbed by the growth of NIROX and its offspring across the Kromdraai Valley. Both Marta and my wife, Manthe, were impatient with my ‘distractions’ and my reticence to show my work. Their relentless support was forcefully endorsed by a visit to my studio from Diana Vives and Douglas Gimberg, during their artist’s residency at Nirox. Their incisive response to the work was reassuring, and their enthusiasm to curate a show in the Water Pavilion was convincing. While cautious about ‘exhibiting in my own backyard’, I gave in to these confluences, guided by the vision of a future in which I accept myself as an artist - confident in the work, impervious to external context, and embracing the support of my family, friends, and fellow artists.

Benji Liebmann

This small exhibition presents works from Benji Liebmann’s prolific private studio at Nirox, which we visited during our residency here. We were deeply surprised and moved by the remarkable body of work he has quietly created over the years. Perhaps it is this solitary practice, pursued with both discipline and freedom, that has shaped his maturity and singular style as an artist. Most of the works on display are drawn from his ongoing series of cloud drawings. Quiet yet dramatic, these images emerge and dissolve through a process of mark-making and erasure that mirrors the cycles by which clouds gather and disperse, and how life ebbs and flows. As the eye drifts across these seemingly familiar cloudscapes, it is arrested by mysterious moments, barely there in between delicate shadings, as our imagination lingers on the threshold of comprehension. What at first seems ordinary becomes charged with sensual intensity: we perceive the subtle flux of immaterial and intimate forms with an insight almost as veiled as our visceral intuition that we are a part of an animate world. It is this sensitive conjuring of an embodied connection between us and the land - deeply felt by the artist, who grew up here in the Highveld - that creates an individualised encounter with the work and endures as an emotional experience.

Diana Vives & Douglas Gimberg

Captured by : Paul Trieb