photo collages on paper
Artwork date: 2002/3
Signature details: each signed and dated
Sold for R967,300
Estimated at R500,000 - R800,000
Condition Report
The overall condition of each collage is good. Floated to the backing mount, not laid down, cockling, minor surface dirt and creasing.
Please note, we are not qualified conservators and these reports give our opinion as to the general condition of the works. We advise that bidders view the lots in person to satisfy themselves with the condition of prospective purchases.
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.
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Logistics
While we endeavour to assist our Clients as much as possible, we require artwork(s) to be delivered and/or collected from our premises by the Client. In instances where a Client is unable to deliver or collect artwork(s), Aspire staff is available to assist in this process by outsourcing the services to one of our preferred Service Providers. The cost for this will be for the Client’s account, with an additional Handling Fee of 15% charged on top of the Service Provider’s invoice.
Aspire Art provides inter-company transfer services for its Clients between Johannesburg and Cape Town branches. These are based on the size of the artwork(s), and charged as follows:
Small (≤60x90x10 cm): R480
Medium (≤90x120x15 cm): R960
Large (≤120x150x20 cm): R1,440
Over-size: Special quote
Should artwork(s) be collected or delivered to/from Clients by Aspire Art directly, the following charges will apply:
Collection/delivery ≤20km: R400
Collection/delivery 20km>R800≤50km
Collection/delivery >50km: Special quote
Packaging
A flat fee of R100 will be added to the invoice for packaging of unframed works on paper.
International Collectors Shipping Package
For collectors based outside South Africa who purchase regularly from Aspire Art’s auctions in South Africa, it does not make sense to ship artworks individually or per auction and pay shipping every time you buy another work. Consequently, we have developed a special collectors’ shipping package to assist in reducing shipping costs and the constant demands of logistics arrangements.
For buyers from outside South Africa, we will keep the artworks you have purchased in storage during the year and then ship all the works you have acquired during the year together, so the shipping costs are reduced. At the end of the annual period, we will source various quotes to get you the best price, and ship all your artworks to your desired address at once.
Aspire Art will arrange suitable storage during, and cost-effective shipping at the end, of the annual period.
Collections
Collections are by appointment, with 24-hours’ notice
Clients are requested to contact the relevant office and inform Aspire Art of which artwork(s) they would like to collect, and allow a 24-hour window for Aspire Art’s logistics department to retrieve the artwork(s) and prepare them for collection.
Handling Fee
Aspire Art charges a 15% Handling Fee on all Logistics, Framing, Restoration and Conservation arranged by Aspire.