Barend de Wet
There is to much of de Wet’s work an admirable spontaneity; as if ideas, occurring to the artist, were soon after realised as artworks with neither doubt nor delay. Such is Untitled, in which de Wet wrapped everything in his studio in foil. The question here is not why, but rather why not. Why not! (This appears to have been de Wet’s guiding motto in all things.) Rendered unfamiliar in foil, each object became a formal proposition, a study in the incidentally abstract. Untitled was first made in 2013 for Housewarming, an exhibition of resident artists at Atlantic House, Maitland. It was remade the following year as a more permanent installation (de Wet had, in the meantime, restored his studio to its original function).
b.1956, Boksburg; d.2017, Western Cape
“For many,” Kathryn Smith wrote in her monograph on the artist, “Barend de Wet exists as myth.” And indeed, in offering a short overview of his artistic pursuits, it is hard to resist his mythology. Perhaps it is enough to say that de Wet was an artist of rare agility and generosity. To his mind, all things deserved the attention more often reserved for art’s actions and objects. To some, de Wet’s work was too inconsistent, his interests too disparate, yet such criticisms only overlook the enthusiasm essential to his practice. He believed, he told the critic Sean O’Toole, in “an idea of art as an inquisitive practice composed of many interconnected things: art as knitting, sculpting, performance, painting, even cooking.” De Wet is today remembered as many things – a sculptor, a nudist, yo-yo champion, fire-eater, beekeeper and bodybuilder – but, above all, an individual deeply immersed in considerations of form and process (in life as in art).
