Perspectives on Africa
Live Virtual Auction, 17 February 2025
Perspectives on Africa
About the SessionStrauss & Co is pleased to present Perspectives on Africa, a sale that explores the complexity, beauty, and fluidity of perspectives through African art and works by artists with strong ties to the continent. The sale coalesces the rich and varied connections between Africa and its artistic expressions, presenting works that span figuration, landscape, and abstraction, inviting collectors to engage with powerful narratives emerging from Africa's evolving perspectives. The works reflect layered meanings, both as a method of representing depth and dimension as a way of framing our understanding of the world. Work by Contemporary artists reflects on the historical foundations of Modernist artists, exploring themes such as identity, belonging, urbanisation, and re-encounters with tradition, while the sale transitions to Modernist interpretations of Africa, exploring the complexity of colonial encounters, post-independence aspirations, and indigenous practices. Building on Strauss & Co’s commitment to developing a strong local photography market, the sale includes an artist focus on the work of social documentarian Paul Alberts, whose images captured poignant narratives of everyday life, particularly in Cape Town. These works sit alongside David Goldblatt and Zanele Muholi, whose visceral images explore themes of identity, social justice and the multifaceted realities of African life.
About this Item
signed, dated 2021 and inscribed with the title on the reverse
Provenance
SMAC Gallery, Cape Town.
Private Collection.
Notes
Gratrix paints from the inside out. Her work is centred on the act of gathering. As the artist explains, ‘it’s a whole world I need to pull in.’1
Drawing inspiration from the vast expanse of mass media, she curates and reimagines fragments of contemporary life. Through a process of selection, cutting, mapping, linking, and combining, she creates images that are distinctly her own, blending the traditions of still life and portrait painting. While painting can often be serious, for Gratrix, it becomes a way to merge collective moments with her personal experiences.
Her works are vibrantly coloured, characterised by bold expression, and her surfaces loaded with thick and vivid layers of paint.
Still Life with Flowers (Lot 110) features a vase with plumped-up blooms, while a drooping blossom on the right side and a lone cigarette butt rest nearby. The present lot illustrates Gratrix’s gestural oils and has a sculptural quality, with parts extending beyond the edges of the
canvas, creating a dynamic interplay between sculpture and painting.
Grumpy Bride, executed in watercolour, presents a distorted figure with vibrant fleshy red tones and cool blue hair, complemented by a sharply downturned crimson mouth. The distortion and contrasting colours are haunting and captivating. The present lot somewhat echoes Nine Weeks, a 63 panel series of portraits which touched on the artist’s psyche as the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown unfolded,2 revealing
the complex interplay between the personal and collective moment. The artist’s muses are often people familiar to her, and she paints their portraits in ways that reflect her interior world, challenging traditional conventions by moving beyond depictions of likeness.
As a South African artist embracing the European traditions and scholarship of painting and the genres of still life and portraiture, she debunks and reinterprets conventions. Her works are rich with layers of experience, emotion, and perspective – a constant dance between
attraction and repulsion, beauty, and chaos.
1. The Norval Foundation (2021) The Reunion: Georgina Gratrix, YouTube (online video), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_o7WEgfYpI, accessed 15 January 2025.
2. Anya Brilus (2021) ArtThrob, More Than Just a 3D Portrait, online, https://artthrob.co.za/2021/09/03/more-than-just-a-3d-portrait-georgina-gratrixs-the-reunion/, accessed 15 January 2025.
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