Modern and Contemporary Art from Africa
Timed Online Auction, 13 - 28 February 2023
Modern and Contemporary Art from Africa
About the SessionIncluding Property of Collectors and The Harry Kantor Collection.
Harry Kantor (1934-2019), a Capetonian, moved to Harare in the late 1950s. He supported local art institutions such as the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and Gallery Delta, serving as Chairman of both institutions. He promoted Zimbabwe's artists globally and amassed over 300 works, including European and indigenous African painters, Victorian and Chinese pieces. His collection includes significant roots of early Zimbabwean painting. Five paintings from his collection are on display at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Arts' exhibition "When We See Us", featuring African figurative art.
Lots 51-62 can be viewed on our current Timed Online Auction, and lot 75 in our Curatorial Voices Auction, both taking place on the 28th of February.
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
About this Item
signed; signed, inscribed with the title, medium, and artist's address on the reverse on the artist's original mount
Notes
Peter Clarke was born in Simon’s Town, in the Western Cape, and after leaving school he worked in the docks from 1944. In 1956, after a three-month visit to Tesseslaarsdal, in the Overberg region, he decided to become a full-time artist.
He studied etching at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1961, as a short-term student under a special permit; as a ‘coloured’ student he was not permitted under apartheid regulations to study full-time at a ‘white’ institution. He also studied at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 1962/3, and participated in a course on printmaking at the Atelier Nord in Oslo, in 1978.
In 1967, during the apartheid era, Clarke and his family were forcibly moved under the Group Areas Act of 1950 and relocated to the bleak new, ironically-named township of Ocean View, where for more than 20 years he ran an art workshop for underprivileged children. He was a prolific artist, and during a career spanning more than six decades, he worked tirelessly as an artist, poet, and author in a broad spectrum of media – painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, and his distinctive hand-made artist’s books. His work deals with repression, poverty, and dispossession, but the incisive social commentary is tempered by the overriding sense of a celebration of life.
In 2013 a major retrospective of Clarke’s work was presented by the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, accompanied by the comprehensive publication on his life and work, Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke, by Phillipa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin (2011).
Local and international honours awarded to the artist include Honorary Life Membership of the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles (1983); the Order of Ikhamanga (2005) awarded to South Africans who have excelled in the fields of art and culture; and the Arts and Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement award (2010).
Provenance
Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 16 October 2017, lot 501.
Property of Collectors.
Other lots that might interest you
