Warren Maroon / Latest release – and the first for 2026!
If you attended the Cape Town Art Fair last year, you’ll remember Warren Maroon’s arresting solo booth, Between us, presented by Everard Read.
His work strikes an enviable balance between relatability and unease. Familiar materials and objects invite the viewer closer, but tension quickly becomes apparent as one considers the intricacies and dualities of the structures at play – in the immediate, intimate, charged viewing space, as well as in the wider vicinities beyond gallery walls.
These dissonances are beautifully encapsulated in Maroon’s recent collaboration with us, titled Cut from the same cloth. While the artwork explores his themes around inequality and the tensions between delicacy and turbulence, beauty and struggle, the screen print also echoes the mediums of his wider practice: For example, the background was created with actual lace, spray-painted so that it stiffened and became sculptural in nature, then used as a stencil for exposure directly onto the screen. The result is a striking diptych, and this original screen print is limited to just 15 prints.
About the artwork: Cut from the same cloth
Below, Maroon shares his thoughts behind the artwork:
Cut from the same cloth offers the viewer two realities; the first, “WHITE MONEY BLACK POWER”, is a relatable, familiar phrase reflecting how global power structures currently operate, and for me also connects with themes of identity, memory and fortitude among lived experiences of African artists. The viewer easily places themselves at either end of this statement.
The inverse print offers a new reality and creates a sense of dissonance. “BLACK MONEY WHITE POWER” begs the questions: What is black money? What does black money look like? And in this context, what exactly is white power? Is it still an authoritarian sense of power? The viewer is caught between the two prints and the dissonance created, struggling to find moral equilibrium.
Lace as a material further complicates the reading; once associated with nobility and royalty, it determined class but was later devalued through industrial reproduction, which stripped it of its value, making it a common and affordable household material. Lace became thus a way for working-class households to beautify their spaces, and in this context then acts as the perfect bridge between the economic divide.
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For further reading, here’s a great review of Maroon’s work on Artthrob.