Image: David Krut Projects, New York
David Krut Arts will present Murray James Turpin’s new exhibition 'Between Memory and the Material' with an opening reception on Thursday, August 13, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The show is set for David Krut Gallery at 151 Jan Smuts Avenue in Parkwood, Johannesburg, and the invitation materials say secure parking is available at the Woolworths Centre Parking Area at the corner of Wells and Jan Smuts Avenue, with Uber recommended as an alternative.
The exhibition is built around a body of work Turpin developed through collage, printmaking, monotype, spray paint, and gold leaf. According to the gallery’s announcement, the project reflects on memory, materiality, and the shifting visual culture of South Africa in the years before digital media became dominant. It also explores how images accumulate meaning over time and how hand-made processes can recover moments that might otherwise disappear into the flow of digital media.
A central part of the project is an archive Turpin assembled over nearly two decades. The gallery says that between 2002 and 2020 he collected South African and international magazines devoted to art, design, music, fashion, and popular culture. These publications are described as documenting a formative period when the optimism of South Africa’s young democracy intersected with rapid globalisation and the beginnings of the digital age. The source material says the magazines were never part of an official canon, but circulated in hair salons, music stores, design studios, and on city pavements, forming a parallel visual language.
Turpin’s working method begins by cutting, layering, and reconfiguring the printed pages through collage. The gallery describes a process that moves from abundance of imagery, typography, and colour toward reduction, with minimalism functioning as distillation rather than austerity. In the exhibition text, this reduction is framed as a way of revealing how fragments of image and memory can continue to carry personal and collective histories.
The project also developed through collaboration with the David Krut Workshop and master printer Sbongiseni Khulu. The gallery states that unique collages were translated into pronto plate prints, allowing the cut-paper compositions to reappear as line, texture, and printed mark. Monotype introduced variation and unpredictability, while hand-applied spray paint recalls the energy of the youth cultures represented in the source material. Gold leaf was used on selected fragments to create points of value, reverence, and reflection.
The gallery’s text places emphasis on analogue process not as nostalgia, but as a way of slowing down and engaging physically with images. It presents 'Between Memory and the Material' as a meditation on archive and artwork, reproduction and originality, excess and restraint. A companion blog post on David Krut Projects, titled 'Blue Archive: MJ Turpin’s collaboration with the David Krut Workshop,' adds that 2026 marks Turpin’s first collaboration with the workshop and identifies him as a South African contemporary artist, gallerist, and curator based in Johannesburg. The exhibition opens at David Krut Gallery, Johannesburg, on August 13 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
