Notes

According to Norman Catherine’s biographer, Hazel Friedman, the artist’s second solo exhibition included ‘surreal landscapes with strange phallic plants and dismembered body parts … It was at this second Goodman Gallery solo show that Catherine first exhibited customised fibreglass shop window mannequins, rendered in bright colours, and his legendary Tapticles (taps with testicles).’¹ The psychosexual theatre of surrealism was clearly an influence, notably René Magritte. Following in the wake of pop art and photorealism, the early 1970s however witnessed renewed interest in realist figure painting and sculpture. Hyperrealism, as the movement was dubbed, privileged the inauthentic, ‘the simulation of something which never really existed,’ as philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it.² Catherine’s sculpture is noteworthy for its polished lacquer scrotum; the finish mimics the sheen of everyday consumer objects. Later replicas of this work, for example those produced by Workhorse Bronze Foundry in 2016, are entirely presented in metal.

Sean O’Toole

1. Hazel Friedman. (2000) Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions. Page 26.
2. Jean Baudrillard. (1981) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Page 45.

Literature

Hazel Friedman. (2000) Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions. Another example illustrated in colour on page 16.

cf. Natalie Knight. (2017) The Big Picture: An Art-O-Biography, Johannesburg: Batya Bricker. A similar example illustrated on page 94.