Cecil Skotnes (South Africa 1926-2009)
Three figures

carved, incised and painted wood panel

Signature details: signed top right
Exchange Rates*: USD 8 399 – 10 799
GBP 6 296 – 8 095
EURO 7 234 – 9 301

(1)

61 x 91.5 x 5.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Although trained as a painter, Cecil Skotnes was distinguished by his willingness to continually experiment across media. While he drew inspiration from European modernists such as Cézanne and Braque, he often credited his fascination with woodcut printing to an encounter in the 1950s with the work of German printmaker, Rudolph Scharpf. This discovery proved pivotal, initiating a lifelong engagement with the woodblock that would become one of the defining features of his practice.

As his understanding of printmaking evolved, Skotnes became increasingly interested in the expressive possibilities of the block itself. Rather than treating it merely as a vehicle for producing an image, he transformed the carved wood into the artwork, allowing the substrate to become an active and integral part of the composition. Skotnes’ wood blocks began to take on the characteristics of sculpture – with their undulating ridges, areas of solids and ribbed striations – while remaining pure in their successful two-dimensional formal relationships in terms of positive and negative space. In this way, the artist’s works offer a synthesis between art and craft, where one informs the other.

Likely produced during the 1960s, this work belongs to a formative period of experimentation when Skotnes was developing the carved and incised panel as a distinct artistic language. Created during his years teaching at the Polly Street Art Centre, the composition retains the strongly graphic qualities of his earlier woodcuts, where stylised figures and forms emerge through bold linear carving and dramatic contrasts of light and dark. Here, elongated figures and vessel-like shapes are dispersed across the surface in a carefully orchestrated arrangement, their carved contours generating a sense of rhythm and movement while drawing attention to the material presence of the wood itself. Before the introduction of the richer colour palettes and more painterly surfaces that would characterise works of the 1970s, pieces from this period reveal an artist at a pinnacle of formal exploration, testing the boundaries between printmaking, painting and sculpture.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, Norval Foundation, Cape Town.; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.; Royal Belgian Library, Brussels.; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and Schlesinger Organisation, London.