Stewart Gallery is pleased to announce Lost and Found, an exhibition of selected works from Garth Claassen's most recent work.

For over twenty-five years, I have had the good fortune to work in a long unfinished space at The College of Idaho. It has track lighting but no ceiling, bare concrete floors, and unpainted drywall that stretches uninterrupted for almost thirty yards. It was surely intended to provide space for nine offices, but none was ever built.

The long stretch of drywall has been my drawing board, providing me with enough surface area to display multiple works in progress. Over the years it became pockmarked with thousands of pushpin holes and streaks, dribbles, and blotches of paint. Because I work directly on the walls, often on paper, Tyvek, or Dura-lar, the texture of these marks, plus that of the drywall tape, become evident in the surface of my work. I encourage this by scraping the surfaces of my pieces as I work. I love the fact that dribbles or blobs of dried paint from previous painting sessions would become vertical lines or irregular marks in later works. It felt like something lost had been found.

I will soon be leaving that wonderful space, and while I would love to take the walls with me, I don’t think the College would approve, so I decided to make a series of mixed-media pieces that brings in those wonderful textures and plays on the theme of a palimpsest of marks and images. I did this by photographing the walls, printing those photos out, and collaging them to small wooden panels, and sometimes to sheets of Dura-Lar.

I have also kept pocket sketchbooks since the 1980s, and occasionally I browse through them. It is always interesting to see the kind of artist one was in one’s twenties, and how that changed over the decades. Sometimes I would come across drawings that I had forgotten all about. So, as part of this current series, I scanned and printed out selected earlier drawings, and even images of earlier paintings, and collaged these onto my work. In some cases, a drawing from the 1980s would rub shoulders with one from only a year or two ago. Sketching has always generated ideas for new work thematic and compositional studies, for example. In my Lost-and-Found works, old sketches become part of new work. In a way, the new work becomes a kind of sketchbook in its own right.

In addition to collage, I have been exploring the possibilities of acrylic light model-ling paste. I like to spread a film of it over collaged images using a plaster spatula of the kind that one might use to even out taped drywall seams. If I do it right, the paste-covered collage elements emerge in ghostly way through the thin film of paste. I also like to mix the paste with paint and spread it over selected areas of the panels. Usually my work is satirical, but these panels were made as a reflection on artistic process and work made over decades. Of course, some of the collaged images are of satirical works, often ones that deal with barriers of a political and psycho-social nature, so the satire is never entirely absent.

(Garth Claassen)

Garth Claassen studied art at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. His focus was on ceramic sculpture, examples of which are in the University’s collection, Pietermaritzburg’s Tatham Art Gallery, the Durban Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery, Cape Town. In 1982 Claassen was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study art history at Indiana University in Bloomington, graduating in 1991 with a doctorate in the history of modern art. During this period, he continued to make ceramic sculpture, and mixed-media abstract collages. In 1989 he returned to South Africa and taught at the University of Natal and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he began to focus more on drawing. In1994 Claassen joined The College of Idaho. He taught art history, life drawing, and painting. Claassen retired in 2023. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the University of Durban, Westville in Durban, South Africa, the University of Natal, Law Library in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, the Boise Art Museum in Boise, Idaho, and numerous private collections.