Provenance

Robert Sherwood Design, Cape Town.

Property of a Collector.

Notes

Secret Life features a portrait of the artist's mother while she was still alive. Lot 73, titled Somnium, depicts her mother again, this time being created after her passing. The relationship between the two portraits becomes clear as the present lot depicts her mother clearly, as if she was actively sitting for her portrait, while the later is “intimately described and later obscured, effaced in a Gaussian blur”¹, creating the striking visual of a sense of a memory imperfectly recalled.

^1. Lucienne Bestall (2021) WHATIFTHEWORLD, The Great Lulllllll exhibition statement , online, https://www.whatiftheworld.com/exhibition/the-great-lull/#somnium, accessed 12 August 2024.