Bruce ARNOTT (1938 – 2018)
Head 3: Soothseeker
2001
bronze
edition 1/3
size Unknown
BIOGRAPHY
Sculptor, researcher, educator, curator and designer Bruce Murray Arnott Bruce was born in the village of Highflats in the Ixopo district of KwaZulu-Natal. He attended Treverton Preparatory School and Michaelhouse Diocesan College in KZN, matriculating in 1955. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1961 with an MA in Fine Art. He also studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
He worked at the South African National Gallery (now Iziko SANG), where, in 1970, he was promoted to the position of Assistant Director.
In 1972 he resigned and left the city with his family to subsistence farm in Underberg in the foothills of the Drakensberg, where he continued to make sculptures modelled in local clay and cast in lead.
It was here that Numinous Beast, the large sculpture situated in the front of the Iziko SANG was initiated, influenced by the San rock art of the Drakensberg, to which Arnott had been introduced as a child.
From 1978 to 2003, he taught at the University of Cape Town where he was a Professor of Fine Art, Director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and was a University Life Fellow and Emeritus Professor.
He continued to practise as a sculptor, participating in many group exhibitions nationally and three solo exhibitions in Cape Town. Although there was little opportunity for South African artists to exhibit abroad during the apartheid years of the 1970s and 1980s, Arnott’s sculptures, often full of irony and subtle but astute social commentary, were selected for a few key curated international exhibitions.
It was during the 1980s and the 1990s that he produced many of his large public commissions, situated in most major cities in South Africa.
In 2004, Arnott produced a series of drawings and sculptures for his solo exhibition Dreamtime: Signs and Portents (2004) shown at the Irma Stern Museum. From 2005 until shortly before his death in 2018, Arnott continued to work on existing editions and completed his last series of bronzes, titled Conjuria – a culmination and synthesis of ideas and themes developed over a lifetime. Earlier works reflect trance-related imagery in San and Celtic art and link with the ambiguity and sleight of hand in this last series.
Conjuria was exhibited at the Iona wine farm in 2012. Paradox & Metaphrase, a retrospective exhibition of key smaller works and a few new sculptures, was exhibited at Iona in 2013.