Notes

In a 2013 interview, Conrad Botes described Spanish artist Francisco Goya as ‘incredibly important for my work’ and his etching series The Disasters of War (1810–20) as a ‘major influence’.1 This three panels (from a larger series of nine) riff on Plate 39, A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men! Following in the footsteps of English artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, Conrad Botes used this famous image of three naked and mutilated men strung from a tree as a convenient frame. The central image recasts the anonymous soldiers in Goya’s original as two biblical archetypes: a horned devil and decapitated Christ. Two circular image panels overlaid onto duplicate scenes flanking the central image obscure the identity of these figures. The images contained in the circular panels invoke suburban manners, art history (René Magritte’s pipe painting of 1929) and Afrikaner nationalism (Voortrekker Monument), all stock themes in Botes’s mordant and graphic work.

Sean O’Toole

1. Vanina Géré. (2014) ‘The Bigger Picture: An Interview with Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer’, Books and Ideas, 17 April, [Online] Available at: https://booksandideas. net/The-Bigger-Picture.html