By Michael Coulson

When I used to write regular reviews of Gauteng art shows, I spent an inordinate amount of time driving along Pretoria’s interminable Charles St, visiting an assortment of galleries whose shortlivedness (if there is such a word) may have been related to the fact that they all seemed to
specialise in purple mountains and orange skies.

Then, amazingly, in 2005 it all changed: a new venue appeared, in an expensively but tastefully remodelled house, that showed genuinely challenging and original modern art.

If you haven’t already guessed, it was the Fried Gallery, run by the formidable Elfriede Dreyer.

And it still exists, even if the downturn in the art market and the other demands on Dreyer’s time have forced a rethink of how it operates. Dreyer also often ponders on how the gallery would
have done had it been sited in Jo’burg or Cape Town, which may have been more receptive to her
approach, but says she hasn’t come to any conclusion.

It can’t be ideal to run a gallery by remote control, so Dreyer has decided to cut back the days Fried opens to Friday to Sunday. And while she wants to maintain the strong educational focus the
gallery has developed, and continue to encourage school visits, courses will also be restricted to
Saturdays only.

Dreyer admits that she considered closing down, but describes this restructuring as a compromise that will keep the gallery going, but free up more time for herself.

Exhibition policy poses a dilemma. She says that in recent shows, it’s been the established artists, not the most affordable, who’ve sold best. So while she still wants to showcase emerging artists, they’ll have to be the best of breed. As she says, there's no point in being cutting-edge
or avant garde if you don't sell. A gallery's priority may not be commercial, but you have to sell to survive.

The first show under the new policy, opening in February, will be a group of female artists, under the title Bodies in Transition. Other elements of the new policy include a longer run – five weeks instead of three – and she plans to produce digital catalogues.

Dreyer was a force in the art world long before she opened Fried, as one of SA’s leading art historians, despite being, in the art context, a slow developer. She first studied language and
philosophy at Pretoria, only completing her first degree in art through Unisa at the age of 35. By this stage contemporaries like Penny Siopis were established artists, and though she regrets that they had a head start, she feels that the interdisciplinary approach developed by her study path had its compensations.

Her first academic appointment, at Unisa, was in the theory of fine art, and though she’s interested in creating art and best known as an art historian, she considers herself primarily as a theoretician – a field she says many academics don’t want to teach – concerned also with how art overlaps into other areas, like media studies and technology. She took a course in multimedia at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, encouraged by Unisa, which was developing an undergraduate course in multimedia studied. This has been so successful that Unisa now has roughly the same number of undergraduates in multimedia and fine art.

In 1997, after negotiations with outside candidates collapsed, she unexpectedly and somewhat reluctantly found herself asked to take over as head of the department of visual arts & art
history at Unisa, for a four-year spell. "I almost disappeared from the art scene and became an administrator." That expired in 2001, and then in 2003 she moved to the University of Pretoria as a full-time associate professor. The house in Charles St was bought as an investment, and what was originally intended to be a relatively small exhibition space specialising in contemporary art like Topsy just grew and grew.

Given that academia, which was itself steadily becoming more demanding, has always been her priority, the gallery was simply becoming all-devouring. Of course, the fact that the art market
had, in her own word, "imploded", while increasingly buyers are going direct to artists, were also factors.

If the hoped-for more time for self materialises, one thing she wants to get back to is creating
her own art. She exhibited quite widely as a student, and later in a Jo'burg Biennale and one of the Kebbles, as well as participating in three or four group shows a year until that crucial year 1997. She produced mixed-media paintings, collages, and used found objects.

Since then, academic and commercial pressures have left little time to create, though she admits
to feeling "quite chuffed" that she sold a few works in Fried's latest group show.

Multiple roles are not uncommon in the art world, especially in a relatively small community like
SA. But few have made such a broad impact as Dreyer, and if her career right now is in a sense at a crossroads, you can bet that however it develops, she will remain a force to be reckoned with.