Abstracted I: the pics

After a good cup of coffee at Rosetta Roastery, one of my favourite Cape Town coffee shops I introduced the theme of this artcrawl, the first of many looking at the rise of abstract art. I touched on how the revival of this mode was interlinked with the rise of design, art fairs and gentrification in the post-industrialisation age. The three artists on this 'crawl' were strongly influenced by street culture - skateboarding, graffiti and rollerblading - reading the 'street' on a pair of wheels - modern-day flaneurs in a way. We started at Paul Senyol's studio in Woodstock, where he regaled us with tales of The Bin, and painting on political posters. We then travelled to Salt River to meet the Polish born-Berlin raised Andrzej Urbanski. He showed us how he makes his complex spraypainted hard-edged works and his impressive spray-paint collection. The crawl concluded with the irreverent Paul Edmunds who attempted to challenge the 'abstract' artist label, despite the fact he admitted he came up with narratives to explain or justify work that was formally driven.