Cecil Skotnes: a private view – Pippa Skotnes & Thomas Cartwright

Curated by Pippa Skotnes and Thomas Cartwright, 2008, at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg. The installation focused on the life and work of South African artist Cecil Skotnes, showing, as part of the exhibition, work from the Skotnes family archive collected over fifty years by Thelma Skotnes.

The exhibition included Cecil Skotnes’s prints and drawings, portfolios, works of art on paper, tapestries and objects and images from the Skotnes home. For over fifty years, Thelma Skotnes acted as family archivist extraordinaire, carefully filing all correspondence both written (a carbon copy) and received, and creating scrapbooks of newspaper articles, reviews of exhibitions, invitations and related telegrams. A selection of these were displayed on the exhibition, offering an insight into the local art world of the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition was installed first at the South African National Gallery with a curatorial team that included Cara van der Westhuizen, Joe Dolby, and Paul Weinberg, and then at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.