3rd Mar, 2019 12:00
Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art
24
Kevin Atkinson (South Africa 1939-2007
Golden Seven
acrylic, oil and blackboard paint on canvas
Artwork date: 1976-77
Sold for R159,320
Estimated at R150,000 - R200,000
acrylic, oil and blackboard paint on canvas
Artwork date: 1976-77
(1)
168 x 167.5 cm
Notes:
A graduate of UCT, Kevin Atkinson subsequently studied under the British Surrealist printmaker Stanley Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, where he also encountered Marcel Duchamp. He was a restlessly experimental figure whose initial body of work reflects an internalisation of the dominant international trends of the 1960s and 70s. Initially, these included kinetic art, hard-edge painting and environmental art. In Scotland, while exhibiting a series of bright yellow triangles that punctuated the rolling lawns of a private estate at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival, Atkinson also had dialogues with Joseph Beuys and Jack Burnham. Between 1975 and 1977, the thinking of these two significant artist-philosophers led his art in a decidedly metaphysical and cerebral direction. Golden Seven is a drawn from the artist’s Arena series1 of paintings, drawings, etchings and lithographs of this period. Despite its esoteric content, the Arena series is now, in retrospect, becoming better understood and seen as Atkinson’s most definitive body of work. Like many other works in this series, it references Atkinson’s ubiquitous use of the symbols of the heart and the triangle. The latter is strongly indicated in Golden Seven as the mystical Pythagorean tetractys2, and is inscribed over a wedge of ultramarine blue in the lower left of the canvas. Atkinson’s mysticism also connected strongly with numerology. The number 7, which he clearly associated with the vocation of the artist, represents intuition, inner wisdom, the seeker, the thinker and a quest for Truth with a capital ‘T’.For Atkinson, his Arena series stood as evidence of a striving towards ‘consciousness’ and of his own spiritual journey. They were conceived of as ‘process’ works that he left behind him to guide others who wished to follow a similar path.
Hayden Proud
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Auction: Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art, 3rd Mar, 2019
Aspire Art Auctions set a new bar for the market in its Autumn 19 Auction in Cape Town, with a South African auction record for its cover lot.
An early work, by international star Marlene Dumas, Love Lost (1973/4) achieved R7 283 200, more than doubling its pre-sale estimate of R3 000 000. Further successful sales included a range of paintings by Alexis Preller from across his career, and new world records for work by Jane Alexander, Simphiwe Ndzube, and Moshekwa Langa. These results further establish Aspire’s growing reputation as the discerning auction house for handling contemporary South African art.
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