andrew putter: african hospitality

Following on from Hottentots Holland: Flora Capensis, Andrew Putter again makes use of the past to construct images of how we might live together in the future.

Putter focuses on the ‘Wild Coast’ of South Africa in his new series of portraits. Many Europeans were shipwrecked along this coast in the 1600s and 1700s. Most fled or perished, but a handful were taken in by local Xhosa-speaking communities. Some of these European castaways formed deep ties with their African hosts, learning the language, marrying into the tribe, and dying as Africans. ‘Bessie’, for example, was a six-year-old British girl who washed up on the Mpondoland coast in the early 1700s, married a chief and became a great Xhosa queen.

Putter’s portrayal of these real characters is clearly fictional yet he is careful to work within the space of the historically possible. Many of the adornments (both African and European) that appear on the models were sourced from important collections, and the choices of hairstyles, fabrics, flowers and plants were the result of research, collaboration and consultation with experts.

The series takes its name from a painting titled African Hospitality. Painted in 1790 by George Morland, the work shows castaways from the Grosvenor (an English ship wrecked on the Wild Coast in 1782) being rescued by the native Mpondo. The survivors in Putter’s works are drawn from three historical wrecks – the earliest being the Portuguese Nossa Senhora de Belem in the mid-1600s, the latest the Grosvenor.

Putter draws equally on the cultural histories of Europe and Africa in these works. Although the adornments and landscape are largely south-east African, the poses, compositions and lighting are heavily indebted to 18th-century English painting. Putter proposes that it is not inevitable for one culture to thrive at the expense of another, but that it is possible for new forms to emerge through the interplay of dissimilar cultures. Indeed, he shows that this interplay is already present in colonial history, gently reminding purists that everything is always already a mixture.

Andrew Putter’s African Hospitality is shown as a part of
Summer 2009/10: Projects
26 November 2009 – 16 January 2010
Michael Stevenson Gallery
Buchanan Building
160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock
7925 Cape Town
South Africa
+27 21 462 1500