Knysna Fine Art will celebrate a 21-year-long relationship with mixed media artist Hannalie Taute with the opening of a solo exhibition of Ms Taute’s work in March, 2024.

Knysna Fine Art gave Ms Taute her first ever solo exhibition in 2003, titled ‘Siembamba – the toys are us.’ Since then, she has exhibited across the world in more than forty group exhibitions, and at eighteen solo shows in cities as far apart as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Sydney, Berlin, and others.

Her simply astonishing, eccentric and exuberant work features in private collections and in the academic collection of UNISA.

Hannalie Taute combines old photographs, rubber offcuts, sewing and embroidery to create works of art that surprise, delight, and disturb – often all at once. She draws her inspiration from her family, folk tales, and the history of the materials she works with to create whimsical pieces that reinterpret the world she inhabits.

Her eccentric and quite extraordinary pieces feature flowers embroidered onto the rubber from discarded inner tubes, abstract, mask-like faces embroidered onto rubber inlays in the place of the faces of people in old photographs, and additional elements and decorations in bright, living colour reminiscent of the patterned worldscapes of Mexican folk art.

The works for this show – titled ‘Inner sanctum’ – tell of an imagined world that’s both bizarre and amusing.

“It feels a bit like a retrospective,” she said, recalling her last solo exhibition at Knysna Fine Art, in 2015, which was titled ‘Implanted memories.’

“This one is about where I was and where I’m going.”

All the pieces on the show will incorporate rubber and embroidery (“currently my major fascination”), while some will also feature old photographs embedded with rubber patches embroidered in her characteristic, decorative style that illustrates her attraction to folk art and outsider art.

One example of the works to be shown – ‘Doodnugter’ (Dead sober) – illustrates the arum lilies that were once banned from hospitals because of their association with death, which in turn is represented by a trio of drinkers whose faces have been repaced with death masks embroidered in pale greys, blues, and greens. The piece surprises in both a macabre and a light-hearted way: it’s whimsy coming from the lilies and their brightly embroidered decoration, it’s dread fascination from the juxtaposition of the masks onto the vintage photograph.

Ms Taute said that she will be combining the opening party with a performative piece as an extension of her art. “But I don’t want to tell you too much about it, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

The exhibition will occupy the Boardroom at Knysna Fine Art, the most intimate of spaces in the gallery, and in her artist’s statement for the show, Ms Taute says that, “The means by which we make choices or set upon a given course of action is not too dissimilar to a boardroom set up. Our choices and behaviours are often influenced by various, and in some cases competing, ‘inner perspectives,’ which are put forward by the different ‘senior leadership officers’ who represent the core physical,psychological, and spiritual processes that make us who we are.”

Join her for her ‘directors meeting’ at Knysna Fine Art from March 21, and at her opening party on March 28.