Notes

This artwork was part of a series of colour pastel and charcoal drawings created by Diane Victor during her UNESCO residency in Vienna. The body of work was produced as a direct response to the time spent in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) and other museums during her stay. Many of the works in the KHM have rather graphic violent content, yet they are received by crowds of admiring viewers, who seem to ignore or embrace the content. Victor became interested in not only the visual seduction of colour but also how technical skill, grand scale, and seductive surfaces seemed to mask or camouflage the extreme violence of the images on show. This subversive pictorial practice has a strong tradition in Viennese culture.

The present lot was part of the series she made for an exhibition at the Schillerplatz Academy in Vienna. It was a response to her interaction with the subversive underbelly of Viennese society. A society embracing its complex and damaged post-war history. The image is a combination of child-like play staged in a sinister setting, where things have gone awry. Deviancy, bondage and pain seem at home in this environment. Animals and humans are intermingled, and the humans play an animal-like game the subtle flesh tones of the bodies set off against the looseness and darkness of the interior. Scars, bruises and allusions to abuse are perpetuated in the figures. The dreamlike or perhaps nightmarish scene looks like something out of a Fellini movie or from the writings of the Marquis de Sad. There is an undercurrent of unease that pervades. Activities are implied or suggested but are not directly depicted or named.

The present lot was part of one of the last series that Victor worked in colour and pastel before she settled on charcoal, ash, smoke and stains as preferred mediums and was shown in South Africa at the KwaZulu-Natal Society of the Arts and later at the Association for Visual Arts in Cape Town in the late nineties.

Gordon Froud, 2024.

Exhibited

Akademie der Bildende Kunste, Schillerplatz, Vienna, Solo Exhibition, 1999.

KwaZulu-Natal Society of the Arts, Durban, Donaldson, Diedericks, Victor, 1999.

Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town, Vitiate: Vestiges, Volition, 1999.