Matthew Hindley - The Five Magic Pebbles

David Krut Projects presents The Five Magic Pebbles, a series of watercolour paintings by Matthew Hindley, which were produced to illustrate the title story in the republication of Don Mattera’s The Five Magic Pebbles & other stories. The official South African launch of the book, published by Rhodeworks, will take place during the opening reception on 17 October 2015. Matthew Hindley is one of South Africa’s most recognised contemporary painters. His powerful, poetic artworks have featured in various critical and influential exhibitions around South Africa, as well as abroad. Widely regarded for painting with oil on canvas, this series of watercolour paintings is an intriguing display of a lesser-seen technique by Hindley, one that differs aesthetically, but remains rooted in his preoccupation with interweaving myth, metaphor and reality. In The Five Magic Pebbles, Mattera tells the story of an ancient African village called Kambira, whose people live in fear of the Evil One, an ugly and powerful creature who curses the village, killing its people and decimating its crops. Tarruwah, ‘The Chosen One’, embarks on a courageous but extremely treacherous journey deep into the forest, where she must fight off evil and lead her village to freedom. Hindley’s artistic approach is well suited as a visualisation of Mattera’s mythical African tales. For Hindley, the function of painting is working with mythologies; “Hindley’s paintings...all address myth, metaphor and history and handle it as artifice and spectacle” (Lloyd Pollack, 2011). The tales told by Mattera in The Five Magic Pebbles & other stories reflect the imagination that is deeply embedded within the oral histories that have passed through generations of African families, providing rich allegorical histories of the continent. While Mattera’s tales are to be enjoyed by children and adults alike, there remains a dark, moral undertone which reminds the audience of the sociocultural realities entwined with these lyrical myths. Hindley’s paintings certainly mirror the intensity of imagination that emerges when literature becomes embroiled with society and culture. Matthew Hindley’s The Five Magic Pebbles runs from 17 October until 28 November 2015 at David Krut Projects’ Montebello gallery in Cape Town, alongside his upcoming solo exhibition entitled Resurrection (Die Brennenden Wald), which opens at Everard Read’s Cape Town gallery on Thursday 29 October, 6:30pm. OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday 17 October, 11am With the launch of the book by Don Mattera http://davidkrutprojects.com