jelutong and metal

Artwork date: 2008
Signature details: accompanied by Peter Schütz, Terrestrial Things, 2007, woodcut, signed, dated, numbered 6/30 and inscribed with the title in pencil in the margin, 35.5 x 24 cm
Exhibited: Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Peter Schütz: An Eye on the World, 9 June to 16 August 2015
Literature: Nettleton, Prof. A. ed. (2015). Peter Schütz: An Eye on the World. Johannesburg: Wits Art Museum, colour illustration on p.79

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134 x 30 x 46 cm

Acquired from the artist. Schütz passed away before completing this work

Notes:

These four works by well-respected German-born South African sculptor Peter Schütz are fine representative examples of different parts of his oeuvre, all realised in the artist’s preferred finely-grained and beautifully organic jelutong wood.

Found chair sculpture from (year?) embodies the artist’s quirky, ironic and yet meticulous approach to the transformation of everyday objects. The chair’s legs are set into frames resembling calipers, the simple visual pun being sustained convincingly by the astonishing precision of the sculptor’s craft – the cloth casually strewn on the chairback, despite being part of the carving, takes on a soft and textured character.

Paper Madonna takes its place among a group of works made close to the artist’s death from cancer in 2008. It is a fine example of his focus on the power of ritual and the noumenal, or spiritual, world. Schütz was notably interested in the intertwining of myth, religion and cultural icons in European and African traditions, often in his later work.

The hybrid character of this Madonna figure is present also in the important piece Goddess of Transformation from 2008. Its graceful and yet tortured spiral, and its rich and earthy tones gesture to the mystery and pain of spiritual change, and the connection of the spirit realm to the earth and to nature. The figure radiates, in its regal and deified bearing, the knowledge of this connection, something which enduringly fascinated the artist.

The final, triumphant piece on auction is African Daphne incomplete. This magnificent figure speaks eloquently to the hybrid ‘natural supernaturalism’ Schütz was renowned for, as well as embodying his quiet wit. Fittingly, the artist’s literary source for the figure is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the water nymph Daphne is transformed into a radiantly beautiful tree. Schütz’s Daphne is not only beautifully transformed back into the natural world, but transposed from ancient Greece to Africa.

James Sey