Provenance

Mr and Mrs H Berman.

Thence by descent.

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Cecily Sash Retrospective 1954–1974, listed as no. 12 in the exhibition catalogue.

Literature

Cecily Sash studied at the Witwatersrand Technical College Art School initially, and later at the Chelsea Polytechnic and Camberwell School of Art. Sash was as a founding member of the well-known
Amadlozi Group, and taught art at both high school and university levels before moving to Wales in the 1970s due to the uncertainties of the South African political scene at the time. Her early work in South Africa took on what she terms an ‘indigenous’ quality, which potentially refers to the way she saw and thought about things within the Transvaal landscape and the unfolding way of life. Sash noted that
the intense South African sunlight often bleaches the colour from things and in her early bird paintings and still lifes she used primarily monochromatic tones with hues that edged between cold and warm.
The present lot, completed in 1955, is one of these muted still lifes. The suspended fish, which would have had glossy scales and the chili peppers in deep reds or greens, have all been stripped of colour
and rendered angularly, along with a two-handled vessel and hanging garlic.

Sash’s work has an incredible strength in its deft and unfussy execution, which is jarred by scratches in the paintwork, adding a vibrating, tenuous energy to the overall image. Heather Martienssen noted that Sash maintains a ‘ruthless visual analysis’ in her paintings and ‘seizes upon the essential ethos – the weakness, the vulnerability of common objects’, which is the case with the simple still life of the present lot, filtered through a measured and ultimately, quite refined, thought process.