The Kim Sacks Gallery was established in 1986. It moved in 1998 to it's present home in the centre of Johannesburg's fashionable "Gallery Strip" in Parkwood. The building has been designed and built in traditional "Adobe" style.
What is available at the gallery within a Contempory context is a mixture of rural creativity, fine-craft, cutting edge urban design, folk art and anything that is unable to be defined by the above descriptions of Contemporary creativity.
Kim works with and represents a multitude of Southern African rural and urban crafts-people. People who exhibit internationally and who are defined as "Designers" as well as people who make Contemporary products, of sublime quality, using traditional techniques. Some of these makers reside in very remote areas of the continent and alternatively there are others who live and create magical objects in the middle of dense urban sprawl. For Kim, what matters is their Creativity, what emerges from re-cycling, constructing and re-defining form and function, and also what it means to be living in Africa at the current time. All this is what inspires Kim endlessly. Creativity with no bounds. Resourcefulness that comes from having less, rather than more. The fact that Kim is a craftsperson herself and an educator, as well as a patron and a gallery owner, is a good basis for a successful venue to exhibit and promote the best of Southern African Design and Fine Craft.
The gallery is a building with a number of display spaces attached to a central exhibition space. What this means to our guests, is that at any given time, there is more than one individual exhibit to see. The peripheral spaces are changing displays of the Artists and Makers we represent, on an ongoing basis, exhibiting their current pieces. There is a ceramic room, a space which houses a huge selection of textiles, contemporary and Tribal, another section which is a mixture of Old Tribal pieces of furniture, baskets and Artifacts, and a jewellery case with old tribal and contemporary silver pieces.
In Winter we have an area with a blazing log fire, where visitors drink copious cups of hot beverages and get involved in whatever conversations happen to be happening around the table... or find quietness paging through a book from our library.
In the Summer, there is the terrace, at the back of the gallery, which gives one the distinct feeling that one is in some very far off, remote place, filled with African pots, and hand-made furniture, fishing-baskets, lots of plants and a sense of total tranquility. There is even Internet access on this terrace, where visitors can sip tea from hand-made cups and either relax and take a moment to savor the quietness or to answer a pressing e-mail.
There is also a small section of the gallery dedicated to Books, Catalogues, Music and Greeting Cards, Gift Wrap and other unusual things that are not available at larger more commercial outlets .
Hours:
Monday – Friday 9.00am – 6.00pm
Call gallery to confirm we are there. Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm Sunday 10.30am - 2.30pm (phone gallery to confirm that it is actually open) Public holidays: 10am - 2pm
