Barend de Wet was a groundbreaking South African artist whose radical, three-decade career inspired a burgeoning generation of emerging artists as global attention turned to South African art in the 1990s. Smac Gallery worked extensively with de Wet, presenting numerous exhibitions and publications on his work. While his practice was multifaceted and refused categorisation, this exhibition focuses on one specific aspect: his small-scale welded steel sculptures and reliefs, aiming to highlight his singular sculptural skills.

To understand these works, one must grasp de Wet’s overarching anti-elitist, democratic philosophy. He believed in basic truths like “Art is life” and proposed that anyone can be an artist and anything can be art. For him, the "art world" was not an exclusive realm but a metaphysical space entered only by genuine intention. This refusal to conform to a polarized art ecosystem led him to critique its hypocrisy, a theme directly addressed in exhibitions like “Insincere objects with insincere titles”.

De Wet was a true maximalist whose work incorporated everything, ironically including minimalism. Though averse to labels, his philosophy aligned with movements like Dada and Fluxus which blurred art and life. His career ran parallel to international pioneers like Mike Keley and Rikrit Tiravanija, with whom he shared a DIY ethos. His practice was also deeply intertextual; he tipped his hat to artistic icons like Duchamp and Yves Klein (referencing the latter with his own signature colour, BDWG green) while subtly mocking the canon, believing artists should not take themselves too seriously.

This exhibition isolates a central tenet of his work: Accidentalism. This approach celebrates the unexpected and the beauty of chance, chalenging traditional artistic control. De Wet created environments for randomness to flourish, often making pieces from the off-cuts of other works. He would incorporate ‘scrap’ intuitively or through performative acts, like throwing steel over his shoulder and welding the pieces where they landed. He constructed his “figurative” sculptures in a stream-of-consciousness manner, stopping at random moments. The resulting forms, often stacked and intertwined until indecipherable, upend formal notions. This “Hobbyist” mindset of losing oneself in the process of welding, bee-keeping, or yo-yoing was central to his work/play ethos.

The exhibition features over 30 objects from across three decades, al united by an ultra-contemporary aesthetic. The visual appeal is heightened by an innovative use of colour, a focus of his later period. The shapes are ambiguous and unconventional, creating a clear tension between the rough edges of the material and the soft, floating forms. One could describe the exhibition as a poststructuralist playground that generates an uncanny sense of fun and the nonsensical.

Time now allows a new perspective on his oeuvre. A clear, undeniable aesthetic emerges, contradicting the idea that his work was merely anti-aesthetic, unless we now accept anti-aesthetics as its own aesthetic. An otherworldly je ne sais quoi permeates the room as the sculptures interact like living creatures. Each small work acts as a synecdoche, embodying the artist himself. To end with a cliché he would enjoy subverting: within these “Accidentalist Weldings,” the artist is powerfully present (apologies Marina Abramović).