Notes

This small, delicate drawing from 1935, most likely made in Pretoria shortly after the artist’s return from London’s Westminster School of Art, marks the earliest known appearance of an angelic form in Alexis Preller’s oeuvre. This is particularly significant as it was a motif to which the artist would consistently return throughout his career. The same angel appears in the war-time Revelation (1945), for instance, with its nude, winged and lava-pink body floating across the sky towards a falling paratrooper. It appears again quite spectacularly in the artist’s gesso and intaglio series of enormous, disembodied heads from the late 1960s and early 1970s. A memorable example is the recently sold Space Angel (1971), with its aquiline profile, almond-shaped eye, sharp, golden incisors, and green, gleaming half-skull.