2nd Jun, 2019 9:00
Modern & Contemporary Art
30
Sam Nhlengethwa (South Africa 1955-)
Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties (a suite of 30 photo collages)
photo collages on paper
Artwork date: 2002/3
Signature details: each signed and dated
Sold for R967,300
Estimated at R500,000 - R800,000
photo collages on paper
Artwork date: 2002/3
Signature details: each signed and dated
(30)
approximately 23 x 35 cm each
Notes:
If the aim behind early collage art was to undercut the rules that defined a normative modern picture plane and its attendant market valuations, for artists like Romare Bearden and later Sam Nhlengethwa, the medium also offered a complementary form that paralleled the fractured, if heterogeneous, reality of black social life. Nhlengethwa’s work has an unrelenting inclination towards history, its fragility, and indeed temporal archaism; in the face of an always lurking amnesia. This isn’t to reduce his work to a sort of visual ledger, but to consider its archival proclivities, in which history is simultaneously memorialized, reconstructed, and sublimated. Here, historicizing and the collage medium aren’t just complementary forms of perceiving, but of fashioning a visual schema that is always already self-consciously open, fallible, and patched.Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties (2003) presents a series of mixed media works — inflected by his iconic collage touch — which reconstruct the urban worlds of the first two decades of Apartheid South Africa. These thirty pieces define the urban social reality via their depiction of an everyday life in which the spectacular and the mundane occur in tandem and not in isolation from each other. They depict congested urban street life, decrepit household interiors, recreational spaces, routinised police profiling, and so on; in no particular order. The sheer over-presence of black figures in the cities, despite apartheid’s interdictory logic informed by a historical ban on black visibility in public spaces, reconstructs apartheid’s sense of urbanity quite considerably. What one writer misdiagnosed in Nhlengethwa’s art as “spin-doctoring grotesquerie”[i], is in fact an expression of this disinclination towards characterising history through a straightforward, if not unspectacular, narrative discourse. Nhlengethwa’s sneak-peek into these decades engineers a complicated and indeed fraught time and space negotiated by differently positioned bodies, forces us to imagine apartheid urban life, once more, against the grain, which is to say, not benignly or unproblematically.
Athi Mongezeleli Joja
Sources:
[i]Jamal, A. (2017) Sam Nhlengethwa: Tribute, in In The World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art. Milano: Skira. p. 232.
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Auction: Modern & Contemporary Art, 2nd Jun, 2019
Aspire Art Auctions presented a focused and insightfully compiled selection of top-quality modern and contemporary art in their latest sale in Johannesburg.
The company’s commitment to innovation led to a bold and signature move in this sale, which featured a special section dedicated to photography. The medium has been traditionally strong among South African artists but has been without a proper focus in the local auction market. The ground-breaking segment featured a wide range of the most important South African photographers, including Pieter Hugo, David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, and Zanele Muholi. In addition, the sale starred a number of the market’s big signatures – Alexis Preller J.H. Pierneef, Gerard Sekoto, and Maggie Laubser and top contemporary artists including, Diane Victor, and Wim Botha.
HIGHLIGHTS
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