Notes

The large engraved and painted panels Conversations (lot 63) and Coastal Gathering (lot 64), made more than 25 years apart, expose Cecil Skotnes’ preoccupation with the human figure and reflect both continuity and change in his work over time. The two youthful figures of the earlier panel, bathed in the light of the highveld and the colours of its oxidic soils, are engaged in animated conversation, speaking to both the heart and the head. The figures, one woman, one man, are painted in acrylic but mixed with powdered pigments directly mined from the earth. They are drawn together, freed from anything around them, luminous and tender. In the later panel, the figures become more abstract. They are crowded together, huddled, less in the landscape than a part of it. They are entombed, ancestral, as if the very soil is anthropic. Some are spectral. They appear to stand at the edge of the continent. The coast was a place of encounters, between travellers and those they encountered. It is also a place of longing and Skotnes’ final home. These figures are embraced by the land but gaze out at the sea and the unimaginable things that lie beyond it.

—Pippa Skotnes, 2022

Provenance

Die Kunskamer, Cape Town, 2007.

The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.

Exhibited

Welgemeend Art Month, Cape Town, Herken/Verken: Paying Homage to Die Kunskamer, the gallery that changed the course of South African Art, 5 to 31 August 2022.