Return of the Big Five - Pioneer modernists headline Cape Town Auction Week

14 Mar 2025

CAPE TOWN – Strauss & Co is pleased to share details for Cape Town Auction Week (Mon, 31 March –Wed, 2 April 2025), five specialist sales encompassing collectable modern and contemporary art, furniture, silverware, jewellery and watches. Leading this curated programme is Strauss & Co’s flagship live-virtual Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale (1 April 2025, 7pm), which will present discerning collectors with an opportunity to bid on museum-grade works by celebrated modernists J.H. Pierneef, Alexis Preller and Irma Stern, as well as rare pieces by black modernists Gladys Mgudlandlu, George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto.

“The first of Strauss & Co’s four flagship auctions for 2025, Cape Town Auction Week will present collectors with a rich trove of art and design collectables,” says Kayleen Wrigley, Head of Sale, Strauss & Co. “The programme includes Strauss & Co’s inaugural standalone watch sale, two timed online sales of decorative arts and jewellery, as well as our much-anticipated Evening and Day Sales of modern and contemporary art.”

“The catalogue for the Evening Sale includes a superb consignment of paintings by pioneering modernists Maggie Laubser, J.H. Pierneef, Alexis Preller, Gerard Sekoto, and Irma Stern. Their bold formal experiments helped redefine painting in early twentieth-century South Africa, laying the groundwork for Gladys Mgudlandlu and Robert Hodgins, painterly innovators who form a bridge to contemporary painters like Georgina Gratrix, John Meyer, and Penny Siopis. All these important painters are represented in the Evening Sale. We are especially pleased to present works by Gratrix, Mgudlandlu and Preller with superb museum provenance.”

Alexis Preller’s Adam and Eve (estimate R7 – 8 million), a masterful 1955 painting featured in every survey exhibition devoted to the artist since 1972, headlines the premier Evening Sale. Most recently, it was included in Preller’s retrospective at Norval Foundation in 2024. Painted in 1946, Irma Stern’s A Still Life of Anthuriums in a Blue Jar, Fruit and Book (estimate R4 – 6 million) from the Louis & Mavis Shill Collection derives from her golden period. Two oils by J.H. Pierneef, depicting marine landscapes at Hermanus and Knysna, are directly linked to his career-defining Johannesburg Station Panels commission, completed in 1932.

The diversity of modernist painters in the Evening Sale extends from the impressionists Gregoire Boonzaier, Hugo Naudé and Pieter Wenning, the post-war innovators Walter Battiss, Erik Laubscher, Alfred Krenz and Cecil Skotnes and cohort of neo-realists including Keith Alexander, John Meyer and Neil Rodger.

Highlights include two landscapes from 1989: Erik Laubscher’s large, faceted Drought Namibia (estimate R800 000 – 1 000 000) and Keith Alexander’s surrealistic Apocalypse (estimate R 500 000 – 700 000). Painted in 1970, Gladys Mgudlandlu’s mystical gouache Mules Grazing (estimate R90 000 – 120 000) appeared in her 2003 retrospective. John Meyer’s large, undated oil Jonkershoek (estimate R1.4 – 1.8 million) underscores the durability of the landscape genre after Pierneef.

A bounty of works by William Kentridge leads the contemporary art selection, including a late 1980s drawing of a dancing couple (estimate R2 – 3 million) and the 2016 bronze Shadow Figure II (estimate R1.5 – 2 million), depicting a portly figure. Additional highlights include paintings by Georgina Gratrix, Deborah Poynton and Kwezi Owusu-Ankomah, as well as photographs by David Goldblatt, Zanele Muholi and Simphiwe Ndzube.

Painted in 2013, Georgina Gratrix’s important autobiographical painting 80s Mom (estimate R250 000 – 350 000) appeared in her 2021 survey at Norval Foundation. Penny Siopis’s pastel drawing Quail (estimate R200 000 – 300 000) was created in Paris in 1986.

The exciting programme for Cape Town Auction Week encompasses two timed-online sales, Jewellery: The Classics Edition and March Interiors, a standalone timed-online sale of collectable timepieces, Watches Through the Decades -1950s to 1990s, and two sales of art, including the live-virtual Modern and Contemporary Art: Evening Sale (1 April 2025, 7pm) at Strauss & Co’s salesroom in Brickfield Canvas, Woodstock, Cape Town.

Events

Cape Town Auction Week is complemented by a lively schedule of public events:

Sunday, 30 March 2025: 
9:30am ​Family Day with Leigh Leyde