Flash Art
Michael Stevenson Gallery
Cape Town

Walter Oltmann at Michael Stevenson
November 2004
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Influenced by southern African weaving, Walter Oltmann uses wire to create fascinating sculptures. His work refers to the way contemporary Africans combine traditional craft-based techniques with nontraditional subject matter and materials. Using a grid-like structure, Oltmann builds complicated relief sculptures that express psychological and physical connections to southern African landscape and history.

The pieces are simultaneously stunning and frightening. A larger than life, headless, aluminum wire figure, with prongs projecting from its extremities, suggests the armored conquistadores whose combat enabled European colonization, also recalling the hard shell of an insect’s larvae. A huge bug on a “pillow” attracts and repels, its shape and woven textures gorgeous, its claws dangerous. More intimately, a brass-wire bed hangs on a wall, complete with pillow and slippers. The bed looks like a quilt, with woven squares pieced together.

Oltmann is a professor at the University of the Witwaterstrand in Johannesburg, where conceptual and political art is prevalent. His work, however, suggests the handmade – the obsessively well crafted object and the traditional artifact. While Otmann’s references to craft and tradition are accessible, his sculptures’ subjects are peculiar and hermetic. His procedure is intuitive, without the use of preparatory drawings. These works’ beauty and complexity invite the viewer into a deeper contemplation of their contradictory implications.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.