Literature

(1977) Giuseppe Cattaneo: Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Gertrude Posel Gallery University of Witwatersrand, 19 April to 25 May, illustrated in black and white on page 14.

Exhibited

Gertrude Posel Gallery University of Witwatersrand, Giuseppe Cattaneo: Retrospective Exhibition, 19 April to 25 May 1977.

Notes

“The title, derived from Marino Marini’s work, defines the subject as a Pomona or earth-mother-goddess. Here she is African rather than Mediterranean. Set in a desert landscape of scorched earth, she … faces the golden disc. She is at once both figure and rock. Curiously, in antiquity a sacred stone was sometimes seen as the image of a ‘Great Mother’, e.g., the Black Stone of Pessinus. The Magna Mater is an image of the fertilized earth. The form literally swells out of the surface with the fullness of pregnancy. The work is technically one of the most sophisticated the artist had attempted so far. Plastic metal was cast so that the relief projects some sixteen cms. from the matrix.”

R.T. Doepel