Gothic inspired embroidery

Johan Conradie

"Voices"

Hand-stitched silk embroidery and Swarovski crystals on digital print on paper

103 x 144cm (2014)

Working in various media ranging from oil painting, digital photography to embroidery, Johan Conradie’s highly complex visual surfaces of mostly Gothic architectural elements and baroque sensibilities, merge the three dimensional-space of digital photography with that of hand-stitched embroidery. His digital-generated prints on paper meet direct traces of the artist’s hand through his meticulously hand-stitched embroidery. In the age of digital revolution the artist questions the concept of reality and what is it worth on its own. This is reflected in both his painting and his digitally engendered worlds. Executed with doubts – fuelled by the modern experience of reality, these works gleam with a baroque intensity that occupies a liminal zone, somewhere between digital space and that of material surface splendour. The works engage masculinity and femininity, the ornamental and the conceptual, tradition and technology, mimicry and invention, and abstraction and representation. Ultimately, his work fuses two conceptually gendered worlds, exploiting the tensions between the digital print on paper and that of actual stitching through the photographic print.