Details

Title

Bus Ride

Artist/Maker

Kay Hassan (South African, born 1956)

Date

1996

Medium

Paper

Dimensions

Triptych: (left panel): 52 x 42 inches Image/Plate (middle panel): 63 x 82 inches Image/Plate (right panel): 68 x 43 inches

Credit

Purchase with High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund and funds from Patricia Blanchet and Ed Bradley, Eugene and Norrene Duffy, and Pamola Powell and Guy Lescault

Accession #

2005.197

On View

Currently not on view

This large-scale paper “construction,” the word the artist chooses to describe this work, is made from shredded billboard posters. Hassan’s subjects are often everyday people, and his use of torn paper to make art reflects his sense of social conscience. As South African artist Sue Williamson observes of Hassan’s work, “This recycling, the rawness and the roughness of the technique, the free form of the constructions unbounded by rectilinear framing and adhered directly to the wall seems wholly appropriate for these depictions of a shifting society.” The heroic-sized, colossal busts of the two figures on the left seem caught in a daydream, with profiles tilting upward and their heads in the clouds. On the far right, an introspective figure sits isolated wearing a logo-style jacket brandished with letters fractured from the word “COSMOPOLITAN.” At the center are two figures in intimate conversation and cloaked in warm, dusky shadows.

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