oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1967
Signature details: signed and dated; inscribed with the title Mirrored Image on a label on the reverse,
Exhibited: Pretoria Art Museum, Alexis Preller Retrospective, 1972, catalogue number 35/4, listed as Profile Figures.
Literature: Berman, E. (1972). Alexis Preller Retrospective. Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum, 24 October to 26 November 1972, catalogue number 132, illustrated.

(1)

91.5 x 101.5 cm

Acquired from the artist by the current owner in 1968.

Notes:

This work entitled, Profile Figures (Mirrored Image), was selected by Alexis Preller and Albert Werth, the then-director of the newly built Pretoria Art Museum, to be prominently displayed on Preller’s famous retrospective of 1972. The work was installed at the front entrance and was to be seen directly on entering the exhibition. The drama of its scale, its high key colours and science fictional qualities invite a reading of the elegant heads as being potentially confrontational, putting an edge on the beauty of the image.

Preller's career is characterised by a lifelong process of developing series of iconic images which evolve over time, a constant process of interpretation and re-interpretation which led to a refinement of forms and complex ideas. The first antecedent to this work of 1967 is a curious and enigmatic painting of 1949, entitled The Gateway. In this painting, two huge disembodied heads face each other like monumental ancestral presences, looming over a low horizon line which evokes a vast flat South African landscape. The heads seem to allude to mysterious matriarchal 'gate keepers' of some order, as they flank the decorated abstracted entrance and lapa walls of structures we associate with Ndebele mud architecture and its distinctively formal geometric painting.

Separated by twenty-two years, two similar heads dominate both these works. The facing heads each have strong jawlines and share elegant profiles, small mouths and ears, archaic extended craniums crowned with spikes and dramatic stylised tendril-like hair. The combined symmetry of the heads emphasises sameness yet difference. One face has a streamlined almond-shaped eye, archaic and aloof while the other is starkly circular, staring, more like that of a fish or reptile, and looks disarmingly directly at the viewer in a distinctly confrontational manner.

In Profile Figures (Mirrored Image) (1967), the heads have female bodies. The sculptural, cubist-like torsos are articulated by shadowed form, and draped with stylised arcs of cloth, which nevertheless reveal idealised pert breasts. The bodies are once again quotations of his earlier female figures from the Primavera of 1956, in the Sanlam collection. Their pure forms, neckbands and stance all combine to create female figures of power and beauty.

The female figures in the 1967 Profile Figures (Mirrored Image) are separated by a dramatic line down the centre of the work. Embellishments along the axis suggest a strange shadowy architectural tower-like structure, floating in the pervasive aquatic blue, but in true Preller-style, the dominant central axis is shot through by a series of characteristic vermilion arcs, enigmatically electrifying the space between the two figures, which seem strangely drawn towards one another, the sharp points of the arcs notwithstanding.

What is significant is that this work was included in the 1972 Preller Retrospective catalogue, and the prominence he gave it on the exhibition can only lead us to believe he rated this work as an important piece in his late oeuvre.

Professor Karel Nel