Art in Focus

Anton Kannemeyer is the gifted, white South African creator of fearlessly satiric comic books. A 40-year-old Cape Town resident, he is widely known as an editor of Bittercomix, a magazine he founded with the artist Conrad Botes in 1992. Mr. Kannemeyer’s most appealing works are comics made under the pseudonym Joe Dog, which expertly imitate the style of Hergé’s comics starring Tintin, the boy adventurer and world-roving personification of Western colonialism.

The beauty of Mr. Kannemeyer’s work is in the jarringly funny contrast between its cheerful, seemingly innocent style and its reflection of the hideous underbelly of South African politics and society. The exhibition features paintings on paper from a series in which each piece represents a letter of the alphabet. “N is for nightmare” depicts a presumably white person’s peaceful, suburban home with circular vignettes representing two black men, one brandishing a spear and the other a machete, and a black woman serving a white man’s head on a platter.