3rd Nov, 2019 10:00
Modern & Contemporary Art
8
Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmangankato Helen Sebidi (South Africa 1943-)
Lost Human Life
oil on canvas
Artwork date: 2007
Signature details: signed and dated bottom left
Sold for R455,200
Estimated at R400,000 - R600,000
oil on canvas
Artwork date: 2007
Signature details: signed and dated bottom left
(1)
110.5 x 94 cm
Notes:
Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmangankato Helen Sebidi, known as Helen Sebidi, is an elder stateswoman of South African art, and an important figure among black modernist painters of the late twentieth century. Born in 1943 in a rural area outside of Tshwane, she committed herself to art practice and teaching from the 1980s onward, becoming the first black woman to win the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1989. Numerous other awards have come her way, as she began, from that time, to be more widely exhibited locally and internationally. These include a national Order of Ikhamanga in 2004, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arts and Culture Trust in 2011. She recently held a major retrospective of her work at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town.Her upbringing in a rural area remains an important influence in Sebidi’s work. Her early focus in her painting on realist depictions of rural life among black South Africans not only honours her own family and traditions, but acts as an important medium through which connections to a vanishing, largely oral, rural culture and way of life can be maintained. Sebidi of course experienced this first hand in her childhood, dropping out of school early and being forced to move to the city to take domestic work to earn a living. Returning to her grandmother’s village to take care of her convinced Sebidi of the importance and spirituality of the rural way of life she came from.As in this piece, Sebidi’s art often demonstrates, in its depictions of imagined rural scenes and dreamlike African cosmologies, a way of seeing a pre-Christian and pre-colonial Africa. Despite the tragic scene being depicted, the work is notable for the matriarchal, or at least female, nature of its protagonists, with the implication of women’s spiritual and ritual power in this mythical African tableau. The work demonstrates Sebidi’s highly distinctive style, with the colour juxtapositions, symbolism and stippled, pointillist technique all very evident.
James Sey
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Auction: Modern & Contemporary Art, 3rd Nov, 2019
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