Brett Murray: Wild Life

Brett Murray’s darkly amusing and sometimes challenging sculptures have predominantly featured animals – not the full complement of the Big Five stalked by tourists and trophy hunters alike, but a more peculiar menagerie of creatures and other characters that serve as metaphors for all-too-human follies, rendered with the sardonic wit that has come to characterise his practice. The title of this exhibition alludes to both wildlife and a wild life – that of the satirist within the country’s political savannah – as reflected in the more than eighty sculptures on show.

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Murray’s many animals stand as allegories of our vanities and anxieties, and parables of the changing present. A dissenting voice in the nation’s body politic, he has long lampooned abuses of power and those social ills ripe for ridicule in works of concise rage and incensed symbolism. As he said in a 2012 interview with Steven Dubin: ‘Political expression’s been the monkey on my back since the 1980s.’ That there are primates in abundance in these galleries should come as no surprise.

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Murray’s uncompromising and incisive criticism of South Africa’s ruling class, so patently apparent in his two-dimensional works, remains a thematic focus in many of these sculptures, as does the artist’s sustained self-reflection. Yet where his posters, paintings and other wall-based pieces more directly court outrage, his works in the round – however provocative their image-word pairings – are tempered by their formal qualities. Regardless, they too walk a tenuous line: satire, as Murray can attest, is not without risk.

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A far cry from the conservative genre of naturalistic bronze animal studies, Murray’s sculptures quote wide-ranging visual references, from Walt Disney animations to Asian vinyl toys, Brâncuși’s polished forms and West African Baule figures. There is a pronounced unity and rounded heft to many of these works, a sense of internal pressure or volumetric fullness. Yet, for all their material weight, many of the artist’s animals appear charmingly toy-like, at times even ebullient – the refined style and polished smoothness of these often-stout objects distilling their likeness to that of cartoon. This is the primary role of the jester: to reduce and to exaggerate, clarity being necessary in rendering criticisms loud and legible. The symmetry that characterises many of these bronze and marble sculptures, their mechanical repetition across scale, medium, and finish, and the mirroring and doubling of their image further insist on their emblematic function as signs, the significance of which is revealed only by their titles.

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Across the exhibition, characters recur, sentiments change, and subjects shift. The same image, shaped in either bronze or stone, assumes different resonances; the same image, given a different title, is freighted with new meaning. Satirical barbs and brash humour find a counterpoint in the artist’s more contemplative moods. ‘Such is the paradox of images,’ Murray says. In his work, guilt and innocence oftentimes lay claim to the same object. This interplay of language and symbol, proverb and visual pun, is an abiding through line in his practice.‍

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Wild Life corrals key sculptural works from the past four decades of Murray’s prolific and controversial career, tracing the artist’s thematic and material enquiries across timelines and mediums to offer rare comparative opportunities.

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— Lucienne Bestall