Call and Response I

Brett Murray was born in Pretoria in 1961 and studied at the University of Cape Town, where he was awarded his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1988 with distinction. The title of his dissertation is A Group of Satirical Sculptures Examining Social and Political Paradoxes in the South African Context. As an undergraduate, he won many prestigious awards, scholarships and bursaries. From 1991 to 1994, he established the sculpture department at the University of Stellenbosch.

Murray has since exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad. In 1999 he co-founded, with other artists and cultural practitioners, Public Eye, a section 27 company that manages and initiates art projects in the public arena to develop a more significant profile for public art in Cape Town.

He has won many art commissions and competitions throughout his career and was nominated as the Standard ank Young Artist for 2002. He has had many solo exhiitions since his career started. Murray's work is housed in numerous South African and International pulic and private collections.

For Call and Response I, Murray used the intaglio medium. The term intaglio (with a silent g and the Italian word for incised) indicates a printing technique that results in a matrix containing pigmented ink below the surface. In other words, that which is engraved, etched or scratched in a metal plate to form grooves and pits to hold pigmented ink below the surface of the metal. To mske the work, marks were etched into a copper plate. The word “etching” comes from a Dutch word which means “to eat”. The word etching implies the use of acid corroding a metal plate. How the acid interacts with the metal plate gives the image its character, and how the metal plate is prepared determines how the acid will interact with it.