Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970-2023 review

Whitechapel Gallery, London
From post-pop art to late-flowering expressionism, the South African artist is one of his country’s most significant, and this huge survey shows off his extraordinary range

Gavin Jantjes – pronounced Yanchez – is not a name on many people’s lips, although he should be. Born in Cape Town in 1948, the year the apartheid regime first devastated South Africa, he is one of the country’s most significant artists. But a lifetime’s exile, moving between Germany, Norway and England, and shifting between several different roles as art historian, writer, educator and curator, have perhaps obscured his singular qualities as an artist. The Whitechapel’s huge survey aims to change that.

It opens with a fierce yet subtle painting, in which two historic works of art float in a limbo of glorious midnight blue space. One is an African mask, the other the central figure from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, based on just such a mask. They are linked by a ghostly white line, somewhere between umbilical cord and breath, as if one were keeping the other alive. Both sets of eyes are upon us; but those of the Fang mask, ever so slightly angled, have an ironic tilt.