Alexis Preller: Surreal Discovery
Cromwell Place, London | 5 – 10 March 2024 | 11am – 4.30pm
Strauss & Co will host our first official London private sale and loan exhibition dedicated to Alexis Preller in March. To be staged at Cromwell Place and open to the public from 5 to 10 March, the show comes hot on the heels of the artist’s retrospective at the Norval Foundation. It is the first time works by Alexis Preller will be celebrated in London, even though the South African artist trained at the Westminster School of Art. For all enquiries please email kate@straussart.co.za.
Available for Private Sale
Price on Request
Alexis Preller | The Lobster
Alexis Preller | The Shells
Alexis Preller | Head of a Young King
On Loan
About
Alexis Preller
South African, 1911-1975
Pretoria-born artist Alexis Preller studied art in London at the Westminster School of Art and expanded his knowledge of art and art history by reading voraciously and travelling widely in Europe and Africa. He studied Egyptian, ancient Greek, Etruscan, early Renaissance and southern and central African art and culture, in particular, and created an art that was of his own place and time rather than a continuation of either traditional European practice or avant-garde Modernism. He visited Ndebele settlements near Pretoria in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the ‘Mapogga’ women in their distinctive traditional costume and the colourful geometric wall paintings that decorated the homesteads appear in his work from this time. His work became progressively more abstract in later years, informed by his interest in space travel and discovery, and his focus shifted from the local and the African to encompass the universal.
