The Space Above Your Head:Gavin Jantjes @ Whitechapel Art Gallery.

In the Zulu language, the word 'zulu' means 'the space above your head'. That's something I didn't know before I attended Gavin Jantjes:To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970-2023 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery yesterday. It wasn't the only thing I learnt there but perhaps the most important thing I took away with me is just what a great artist Jantjes was - and still is.

The Korabra Series:Untitled No.3 (1986)

Born in South Africa (in Cape Town's District Six) in 1948, Jantjes now lives in the UK (in Witney, Oxfordshire) and the Whitechapel's show traces his career from his very early paintings to stuff made just last year. All of it is very good. Some if it is nothing short of excellent. Jantjes' youth in Cape Town coincided with the early years of apartheid and, as you'd hope and imagine, he was strongly opposed to it.

Early works may not be overtly political but they are political. Even though he'd left South Africa for Hamburg in 1970 he still took a huge interest in the terrible things that were happening in his home country. He even became a founding member of the German anti-apartheid movement and was offered political asylum in that country in 1973.

People back in South Africa couldn't see his work or at least not see it in the way he intended them to. Because he was censored. One of the events that most affected him was the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 in which black students in Soweto township protested against the forced introduction of Afrikaans, seen by many as the language of the oppressor, into schools. They were met with extreme police brutality and at least 176 people (possibly over 700) were killed and thousands injured.

Jantjes created the below work in response to that lethal crime. It's a powerful piece. Strong geometric shapes, eye catching primary colours, and some very suspicious character - possibly one of the assailants - in shades and a trilby, escaping the scene through a door as the bright red victims fall or lie.

Amaxesha Wesikolo ne Sintsuku (School Days and Nights) (1977)

Dancers (1977)

The Korabra Series:Untitled No.5 (1986)

The Korabra Series:Untitled No.7 (1986)

The Korabra Series:Untitled No.2 (1986)

It seems to me that Jantjes linked African politics to African history (which would, also in my thinking, be the correct thing to do) and as such he made works that related to African dance rituals, costume, architecture, and maritime exploits. At time there is a surrealist and macabre twist. Are those statues or are they the bodies of hanged slaves? Is that person stealing a television, simply carrying one, or perhaps mutating into one?

The below untitled work (from The Zulu Series, 1984-1990) considers Picasso's stealing (or 'borrowing') from African art and throws it right back at him, To the right of the picture we can see the female figure from Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon but Jantjes has added an image of an actual African mask (like the one that inspired Picasso) as if to say you can't just steal African art without paying respect to it. In a 1982 speech in Gaborone, Botswana, Jantjes championed the centrality of African art in a global understanding of contemporary visual culture. That may seem obvious now but in 1989, and certainly in 1907, much less so.

The Zulu Series:Untitled (1989)

Homesickness & Blindman's Paradise (1982)

The Korabra Series:Untitled No.6 (1986)

Jantjes wasn't just interested in African history and African politics but also the 'cosmic realm' of African heritage and belief systems relating to both the sky and female creativity. He made sky charts that reimagined European designated astronomical constellations with mythological imagery of indigenous African people and, in 1988's Half the Sky - inspired by the Chinese proverb "women hold up half the sky", he changed the names of the constellations to those of women who had made a significant contribution to the fight against apartheid. These included Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Miriam Makeba.

The Zulu Series:Half the Sky (1988)

Vaal (1987)

The Zulu Series:Untitled (1989)

He was interested in what happened in the skies, the heavens if you must, as he was what happened on the land. 1987's Vaal (an Afrikaans word meaning drab, dull, or grey that was given to a river in the north of the country) shows a frontier landscape of border disputes that continue to this day while a 1989 untitled work from The Zulu Series shows, across four panels, a snake that mirrors lightning and the communication between heaven and Earth. The large ceramic egg at the base of the piece represents the beginning of creation.

Jantjes' screenprints veered far more towards the political. Critiques of both apartheid and other colonial regimes across the African continent (and even into the Americas) incorporate photographs, newspaper cuttings, drawings, and found texts by anti-colonial intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. 1976's City Late was made while Jantjes was living in London and takes inspiration from the pop art collages of Richard Hamilton whilst tackling far thornier and more important subjects than Hamilton's work did.

The First Real AmeriKan Target (1974)

City Late (1976)

Freedom Hunters (1977)

Tamu's Magic Square (1974)

Exoticism (1974)

It Is Our Peoples (1974)

It Is Our Peoples (from 1974) takes Amilcar Cabral as its focal point. Cabral was the leader of the armed struggle for Guinea-Bissau's independence from Portugal but was assassinated, aged 48, just before he could become the nation's first president. It's one of a series of works that Jantjes made that celebrates the independence movements of Africa and commemorates some of the key figures in those movements.

For Mozambique celebrates both the country and Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane (1920-1969), president and founding member of FRELIMO (the Mozambican Liberation Front) whose assassination remains unsolved to this day, For Algeria features Frantz Fanon, and For Ghana pays tribute to Kwame Nkrumah (whom I've written about fairly recently) and the Organisation of African Unity. The large red cockerel was Nkrumah's election campaign symbol.

For Mozambique (1975)

For Algeria (1975)

For Ghana (1978)

Colonial Ghost (1980)

Having stopped painting, at least professionally, for a while (focusing on working as a curator in British, German and Norwegian museums) Jantjes returned a few years back but his focus had shifted from politics, history, and the cosmic realm to abstraction. Although, to be fair, some of them do look like they belong in the cosmic realm.

At most other exhibitions I attend these paintings would be among the highlights but so strong was Jantjes earlier work that these don't quite hit the mark. They're still great though. Wispy, peaceful, I felt as if I could lie on a beanbag, falling half-asleep, looking at these. Maybe listening to some Alice Coltrane or Keith Hudson's Pick a Dub (in lieu of not being particularly au fait with African ambient music) while doing so.

Which seems to be almost what Jantjes intended. He spoke about wanting these works to engage viewers in 'a shared meditation' and though I didn't share my 'meditation' when looking at them (it was very much a solo mission) a part of me wished I had been able to. Who knows. You may be the person I had in mind when it comes to sharing that meditation.

The Exogenic Series (Aqua):Untitled No.1 (2017)

The Exogenic Series (Aqua):Untitled No.9 (2017)

The Witney Series:Untitled No.III (2021)

These later works (some of which reminded me, a little, of parts of Frank Bowling's oeuvre) could be seascapes (the word 'aqua' is quite a big clue there), they could be skyscapes, or they could be heavenly imaginings. Of course, they could just be random abstractions that appealed to Jantjes at the time and were painted entirely on a whim. That's fine because they're really rather lovely and Jantjes had, for decades, put in the hard yards making impassioned and positive work that both addressed and helped inspire the struggle for African independence.

It speaks of a positivity about the future that he no longer feels he needs to make those kind of works. The older works are still there and they're still powerful. They are now, for the most part, historical artefacts rather than contributions towards contemporary political discourse. Problems, of course, still exist in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa but for the most part the yoke of colonialism has been thrown off. It's only right, in that respect, that Jantjes too should break free from his own shackles and free himself ever more as an artist. What a great exhibition.

The Kirstenbosch Series:Untitled (2023)

The Witney Series:Untitled BB (2022)