Keroshin Govender: Baranasi

Overview

South African-raised, Sydney-based artist Keroshin Govender's upcoming painting series Baranasi at Gaffa Gallery delves into the complex relationship between humans and fabric.

Especially admired for his meticulous colour selection, Govender employs contemporary design processes to create artwork in traditional mediums that tell a story. He's strongly drawn to portraiture, exploring through his various subjects themes like resilience and the nobility of human suffering. With Baranasi — the follow up to his series, Paramnesia — Govender explores the emotions and diverse identities that fabric can express.

Depending on material, colour, style and fold, fabric can convey a person's nobility, virtue, undesirability or spirituality — such as in his painting Priest, in which a Hindu priest's saffron fabric references his status and holy profession. Govender invites the viewer to experience not only the story of each subject, but also the story being silently conveyed by their clothing, which he believes has an ability to "disguise, protect and seduce."

While you're at Gaffa, you can take in Dominique Merven's show, Resonance.

Image: Keroshin Govender, Andromeda, 2017, acrylic on canvas.