31st Oct, 2016 20:00
Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art
27
Robert Hodgins (United Kingdom 1920-2010)
The Weather in the Streets
oil on canvas
Artwork date: 1991
Signature details: signed, dated, inscribed with the artist's name, the title and medium on the reverse
Sold for R1,250,480
Estimated at R1,200,000 - R1,800,000
oil on canvas
Artwork date: 1991
Signature details: signed, dated, inscribed with the artist's name, the title and medium on the reverse
(4)
91 x 122 cm, in four panels
Notes:
There is a game of signs at the heart of The Weather in the Streets (1991) that opens into more profound spaces of reflection, and underlines the richness and complexity of Robert Hodgins’s art.
In 1991, the year after Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison, three years before South Africa’s great transition to democracy, what lurks in the plasticity of Hodgins’s paint is a jostle, a virtual gridlock of impulse and image, as evidenced in the four vibrant, if hectic, panels making up The Weather in the Streets.
Look at the chevrons in the top left hand panel for instance. Seen abstractly, these evoke a characteristically urban-African decorative aesthetic. Then you see the yellow-on-black chevron in the right hand top panel. Here the design operates, unambiguously within the conventionalised semiotics of the road sign, to indicate an upcoming curve. And suddenly, what were more or less unspecific daubings and brush marks in the top left panel – part of Hodgins’ (ironic) funky Afro-urban symphony – resolve into suggestions of road markings and of traffic seen from a bird’s eye view.
Nor does the ambiguity stop there. Dotted across the surface of the painting, Hodgins has painted arrows of the kind that – confidently, brooking no discussion whatever – direct you on the street. Only these particular arrows – look, for instance at the panel at bottom right, at least one of the heads, in an extraordinarily frantic push-me-pull-you conglomerate figure, is confronted with a series of arrows telling him to go… well, in traffic that presses in on all sides, nowhere at all.
The weather in the street will not be fine, nor mild. There are to be sure, nightmares on Hodgins’s street. And yet, there is also redemption, a wise echo of the exuberant translation by Piet Mondrian in his “boogie woogie” paintings of the frenetic rhythms of New York’s Manhattan.
In Hodgins, most strikingly at top left, the rhythms, the colours and the shapes, especially as given in the top left panel, are those of Africa, moving to claim and to transform the cities, the traffic, the bustle and the history of the Witwatersrand.
Ivor Powell
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Auction: Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art, 31st Oct, 2016
The line-up for our inaugural sale included an extraordinary selection of art. Works ranged from JH Pierneef’s breathtaking Karoo near Hofmeyer, painted in 1930, to Dan Halter’s 2006, ultraviolet light, Pefection.
Sculptures varied from Edoardo Villa’s acknowledgment of French artist, Aristide Maillol to Wim Botha’s heads that draw on classical and contemporary sources and Ed Young’s cheeky nude self-portrait. Also included were impressive photographs by award-winners, David Goldblatt and Pieter Hugo.
The auction set an impressive standard, with an outstanding sell-through rate of over 75% across 121 lots. The top lot of the sale was Alexis Preller’s exceptional Profile Figures (Mirrored Image), selling for over R7-million. Record sales were achieved for Villa, Goldblatt, and Hugo, amongst others.
Viewing
Friday 28 October 2016 | 10 am – 5 pm
Saturday 28 October 2016 | 10 am – 5 pm
Sunday 28 October 2016 | 10 am – 4 pm
HIGHLIGHTS
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