Important South African and International Art, Decorative Arts & Jewellery

Live Auction, 16 October 2017

Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 102 312
Lot 601
  • Cecil Skotnes; Head and Figure Landscape, from the Brandberg Wall series


Lot Estimate
ZAR 70 000 - 90 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 102 312

About this Item

South African 1926-2009
Head and Figure Landscape, from the Brandberg Wall series
executed 1993-1995

signed

acrylic and pigments on panel, in the artist's handmade frame
28,5 by 61cm; 51,5 by 84cm including frame

Provenance

Purchased from the artist by the current owner.

Literature

Neville Dubow, Michael Godby, Stephen Gray, Frieda Harmsen, Elizabeth Rankin and Pippa Skotnes. (1996) Cecil Skotnes; South African Breweries, published privately in conjunction with the 1996 Cecil Skotnes Retrospective Exhibition at the South African National Gallery. Illustrated and page 115, figure 6.4 and 123, figure 6.9.

Chapter 6

"One can discern a progression, a process in which figures in a landscape give rise to a refigured landscape; a process where the landscape itself becomes a pictorial trope, a configuration of the anthropomorphic and geomorphic. From 1993 through to 1995 he worked on a series that he has designated 'Head and Figure landscapes'.

The visual traces suggested by these encompass a wide range of associations - bleached bones, rib cages, rock markings, boulders split apart. Cleft rockfaces suggest fossil markings, underlying structures. They are about time, about records, about structures that underly structures. There are shifts of nuance. Heads become boulders and boulders become headlands. Morphologically and metaphorically these are meta-landscapes, landscapes of the mind." Neville Dubow.

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