OPENING 13 AUGUST FROM 17:30 TO 19:30
DAVID KRUT ARTS, 151 JAN SMUTS AVENUE PARKWOOD
PARKING AVAILABLE AT THE WOOLWORTHS CENTRE PARKING AREA; CORNER OF WELLS AND JAN SMUTS AVENUE
David Krut Arts is pleased to present Between Memory and the Material, a new body of work by Murray James Turpin. Through collage, printmaking, monotype, spray paint, and gold leaf, the exhibition reflects on memory, materiality, and the shifting visual culture of South Africa in the years before digital media became dominant.
The exhibition emerges from an archive Turpin assembled over almost two decades. Between 2002 and 2020, he collected South African and international magazines devoted to art, design, music, fashion, and popular culture. These publications document a formative period when the optimism of South Africa’s young democracy intersected with rapid globalisation and the beginnings of a digital age. Their pages captured the aspirations, contradictions, and evolving identities of a generation negotiating new ways of seeing itself and the world.
Working directly into this archive, Turpin cuts, layers, and reconfigures the printed pages through collage. His process begins with an abundance of imagery, typography, and colour before gradually reducing each composition to its essential elements. In these works, minimalism becomes an act of distillation rather than austerity—revealing how fragments of image and memory can continue to carry the weight of personal and collective histories.
The project evolved further through collaboration with the David Krut Workshop working with Sbongiseni Khulu. Unique collages were translated into pronto plate prints, allowing the immediacy of the cut paper compositions to re-emerge as line, texture, and printed mark. Monotype introduced variation and unpredictability, ensuring that each impression retained its own unique character. Hand-applied spray paint recalls the improvisational energy of the youth cultures represented in the source material, while the use of gold leaf transforms selected fragments into quiet sites of value, reverence, and reflection.
Throughout the exhibition, analogue processes are celebrated not simply as nostalgic alternatives to digital technologies, but as methods of slowing down, editing, and engaging physically with images. By revisiting printed matter at a moment when so much contemporary visual culture exists only on screens, Turpin invites viewers to reconsider the tactile experience of looking, collecting, and remembering.
Between Memory and the Material explores the relationship between archive and artwork, reproduction and originality, excess and restraint. It offers a meditation on how images accumulate meaning over time, and how the act of making by hand can recover moments that might otherwise disappear within the endless flow of digital media.