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20thC South African Prints
Our boutique collection of South African prints currently available to purchase. -
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Charles Gassner, Abstract Portrait in Green.
Charles Gassner (1915 - 1977), Abstract Portrait in Green.
Mixed Media on paper, signed. Framed 59 x 41 cm, ZAR 8500.Charles Gassner was born in the Netherlands in 1915 and was a painter of both abstract and figurative subjects. He studied fine art in the Hague before moving to Berlin. In 1948 he left Europe for South Africa where he settled and became one of a group of talented artists working in the very distinctive South African school of representational abstraction, which later became known as the 'Isolation Years' and is regarded as one of the most important movements in South African art history.
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Larry Scully (SA 1922 - 2002)
Colour Serigraphs "Painting is for me visual music, and visual thinking. My inspiration comes from the colours, textures, forms and light of Africa..." - Larry Scully
Larry Scully was a gentle giant on the South African Art scene. At 6 ft 8 inches tall he towered above his fellows, not only in his contribution as an artist and activist, but also in his massive contribution to art education in the country. He was the first South African artist to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree for his dissertation on the Khoi-San influence on the work of Walter Battiss. He taught art at numerous institutions throughout his life; the Polly Street Art centre in JHB which was set up as one of the first art schools on the continent to encourage African artists, Pretoria Boys High where he followed in the footsteps of his mentor, Walter Battiss, he was head of Fine Arts at the Johannesburg College of Education and later became Professor of Fine Arts and Art History at the University of Stellenbosch. He was also a trustee of the National Gallery.
In the 1970's Scully refused to limit the Johannesburg Biennale to whites only as instructed by the South African government. He shut down the biennale in a highly principled action that challenged the racial discrimination being imposed by the Apartheid government on the South African arts community.
In 1973 Scully was commissioned by the Star Newspaper to paint "The Madonna and Child of Soweto" to raise money for an education fund for black South Africans. The painting was bought by Harry Oppenheimer and donated to the Regina Mundi Church in Soweto which was the site of much anti-apartheid activity from the 70's until the 1990's. Funerals of activists were held in the Church and organizations used the church for meetings. During the student uprising of 1976 students fled to Regina Mundi after police shot at them. The painting was said to have had a prophetic quality denoting the eventual victory of the struggle movement. The image of the Black Madonna also entered popular culture as an anti-apartheid slogan with thousands of t-shirts being printed and sold across South Africa during the 1970's.
Journalist Mpho Lukoto reflecting on democracy in South Africa said this of the painting:
"Perhaps one of the most poignant reminders of the past is the Black Madonna and Child of Soweto, which was painted by Laurence Scully...It struck me that in the midst of the painful memories, the painting is a symbol of the hope that, like the church itself, was in the heart of the people. I like to believe that it was that hope, that makes it possible for us to celebrate 10 years of democracy." The Star Newspaper, 2004
Scully continued to document the changing landscape of Apartheid South Africa, taking numerous photographs of District Six as it was demolished.
District Six was a colourful, inter-racial hub adjacent to the Cape Town city centre whose occupants were displaced, evicted, forcibly removed and whose homes were effectively bulldozed during the 1970's by the Apartheid regime. Our collection of Scully serigraphs document this photographic journey of District Six in lush, bold imagery and metallic surface.
Scully created images of what he called in his own words "the percussive syncopation of the city" for his paintings, murals, silkscreens and photography. Syncopation is a musical term for a note shifting to a subdivision of the beat, rather than the whole beat; a temporary displacement typically caused by stressing the weaker beat.
Our rare, limited edition colour silkscreens titled: 'A Cape Portfolio: A Tribute to the People of District Six' demonstrate Scully's obsession with syncopation in his depictions of actual displacement, his highly skilled eye for photography - a skill so advanced it was said to leave audiences of his photographic montage slide shows at the Baxter Theatre, in tears, as well as his lush, evocative use of colour as an emotional language.
The colour palette of these prints is striking in their metallic golden lustre, iridescent splashes of luminous fuchsia and blazing electric blue, all typical of Scully's "taut intensity about his use of colour" (Berman, Esmé).
Typical of Scully was his practise of exaggerating the contrast between light and dark elements in his composition to lend decorative drama to his descriptive presentations together with his vision of form in abstract terms - as interacting shapes and patterns, all of which show up in these bold, saturated silkscreens printed in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising and a major political landmark in the timeline of the anti-apartheid struggle. -
Kevin RobertsUnknown Muse II, 2001Oil on panel52 x 29 cm excluding frame.R65,000.00
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Andrew Verster
Homage to SeferisIn Ancient Greece laurel wreaths were to victors a sign of honour, today the word “laureate” signifies a noble badge of outstanding contribution. The merging of the Nobel Prize Laureate for literature in 1963 - Greek poet George Seferis and the prolific South African artist Andrew Verster (1937 - 2020) is an ode to a humanist moussaka of fluid lines, lashings of colour and romantic escapades of solitude
Verster's lush silksrceens are served sandwiched between the layers of a translucent folder that's printed with Seferis' poetry rich in it's exploration of exile, myth and nostalgia.
Both Seferis and Verster were humanists. Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it supports the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with social and planetary responsibility.
Seferis spent much of his life outside Greece in diplomatic service thus recurrent themes in his poetry are both exile and nostalgia for the Mediterranean and his birthplace, Smyrna.
Key to an understanding of much of Verster’s work is the relationship between people and landscape and how one’s psychological space imprints a particular space and vice versa.
Verster’s landscapes are primarily concerned with a setting in which human presence has been felt and with an ambience, from which man is temporarily absent. Thus a dialogue of isolation and intimacy is continually set up.
In this series both the loneliness of exile and the bouts of nostalgia experienced by Seferis are made known by the artists’ overture to cultural artefacts, symbolic Greek rituals and relics of Ancient Greece all of which reside in seemingly quiet villages, remote Greek islands and distant, desolate hills laced with volcanic rock.
The intimacy of alone time and it’s often therapeutic affects seems more relevant in the current era amidst a sea of pushing and pulling for us all to be involved in the hustle and bustle of societal life.
This series serves as reminder that our psychological states oftentimes imprint our environment and that the reverse, is also true. Sometimes it’s in the quietude of a rambling garden or at the foothills of a desolate hill or simply looking at the sea that we find ourselves feeling so alone that the intimacy of our souls is finally given reign to speak.
It is in these places that we can truly be most human by be(ing) not by do(ing) thereby maximising our own personal liberty, finding our compassion and assuming responsibility for all that is, as we write the scripts of our lives amidst the various shapes we like to call home.
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Olivia ScholnickUntitled, 'Larva Metamorphosis', 1978Oil on canvas900 x 900 mm
