17th Jul, 2017 17:00
Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art
133
Edoardo Villa (Italy/South Africa 1915-2011)
Homage to Isaac Witkin
painted steel on a steel base
Artwork date: 1989
Signature details: signed
Exhibited: Pretoria Art Museum, Villa Skotnes 25 Years, 3 August – 3 September 1989, colour illustration in the exhibition catalogue p.14. Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Villa Skotnes 25 Years, 7–28 October 1989, colour illustration in the exhibition catalogue p.14.
Sold for R198,940
Estimated at R300,000 - R400,000
painted steel on a steel base
Artwork date: 1989
Signature details: signed
Exhibited: Pretoria Art Museum, Villa Skotnes 25 Years, 3 August – 3 September 1989, colour illustration in the exhibition catalogue p.14. Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Villa Skotnes 25 Years, 7–28 October 1989, colour illustration in the exhibition catalogue p.14.
(1)
185 x 35 x 35 cm including base
Notes:
Edoardo Villa’s reputation as South Africa’s foremost modern sculptor, and indeed his influence in international circles, goes before him. His death at the age of 95 in 2011 brought to an end an extraordinarily prolific and inventive creative career, comprising well over one hundred solo and group exhibitions, and a huge treasure trove of work. His membership, with Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Kumalo and others, of the Amadlozi group in the 1960s is no accident. Villa was guided, as were others in the group, by a consistent desire to bend Western European avant-gardist ideas of form and material to an Africanised way of thinking and figuring. Thus, the obvious lineages of Henry Moore and an ‘international style’ of steel sculpture in the second half of the 20th century, while clearly present in Villa’s style, are subsumed in favour of a particular kind of monumentality and symmetricality, that is indisputably African.Homage to Isaac Witkin, produced in 1989, has many of these qualities – it has much in common with later work in Villa’s oeuvre, particularly the quirky and brightly painted vertical figures. Its totemic, anthropomorphic character is undoubtedly within his Africanised oeuvre, and bears little relation to the more angular and formally experimental work, first in fibreglass and wood and later in bronze, of the subject of the homage, influential Anglo-American sculptor Isaac Witkin. Witkin was of course born in Johannesburg, leaving in his youth to study and live in London. He was instrumental as a part of the so-called ‘New Generation’ of British sculptors in the 1960s, who were influenced by Pop Art and a more experimental formalism that Villa himself would have been drawn to. Witkin, who died in 2006, would undoubtedly have appreciated the homage.
James Sey
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Auction: Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art, 17th Jul, 2017
Aspire Art Auctions’ second Johannesburg sale offered a selection of some of the best works produced by local and international artists available on the local market. Offerings included Cameroonian-born, Belgium-based, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Chilean, Eugenio Dittborn, and South Africans, William Kentridge, Kendell Geers, Louis Maqhubela, Cecil Skotnes, Maggie Laubser, Irma Stern, and Mohau Modisakeng, amongst others.
The sale was led by an international auction record of R1 200 320 achieved for a drawing, Children under Apartheid, by exiled South African artist Dumile Feni, as well as the successful sale of top international lot Golden Mask by renowned performance artist Marina Abramović.
Viewing
Friday 14 July 2017 | 10 am – 7 pm
Saturday 15 July 2017 | 10 am – 5 pm
Sunday 16 July 2017 | 10 am – 4 pm
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