31st Oct, 2016 20:00
Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art
65
Robert Hodgins (United Kingdom 1920-2010)
Studies of Buddies
oil on canvas
Artwork date: 1997
Signature details: signed, dated, insribed with the artist's name. the title and medium on the reverse
Sold for R341,040
Estimated at R300,000 - R500,000
oil on canvas
Artwork date: 1997
Signature details: signed, dated, insribed with the artist's name. the title and medium on the reverse
(1)
60 x 70 cm
Acquired from the artist.
Notes:
Like so much of his art, Robert Hodgins’s Studies of Buddies (1997) was made at the interface between real life on one side, and his consumption of culture – high, popular and low in more or less equal measures – on the other. What is actually depicted is of the order of a weld, a fusing effected by violent, paradoxical sparking between polarities.
The first pair of “buddies” are what you might call semaphore louts. Physiognomies blurred, hollow-eyed, phalluses to the fore, they have no interrelationship. They have only street solidarity; hands are all high fives and arcane hip-hop gestures, their fingers electrically disembodied.
We know them from the television as we know them from the street, and we also know the polo-necked buddy intellectuals, set slightly back in space, all but sucked in and out of each other by the intensity of their privately interrogatory interactions.
Hodgins is the insightful chronicler of our milieu. But he is also playful. In Studies of Buddies he pulls off a feat of pictorial prestidigitation – transposing, in metaphor, the material reality of a road into the sky. Stars read in the painting like cat’s eyes; the moon is subjected to purposeful geometry.
Buddies is bravura Hodgins, an artist of insight and wit, at the height of his powers, and revelling in the almost Zen fit between the skills of his hand and the skills of his mind. It is also Hodgins at his most sympathetic, observing the solitary wannabe buddy at the right, excluded from the male bonding and display all around him. Soft, childlike and plump, lips puckered and cherry red he is the essence of unrequitement, and, in all probability, a figure drawn rather from the artist’s own memories of the hungers of youth.
Ivor Powell
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Auction: Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art, 31st Oct, 2016
The line-up for our inaugural sale included an extraordinary selection of art. Works ranged from JH Pierneef’s breathtaking Karoo near Hofmeyer, painted in 1930, to Dan Halter’s 2006, ultraviolet light, Pefection.
Sculptures varied from Edoardo Villa’s acknowledgment of French artist, Aristide Maillol to Wim Botha’s heads that draw on classical and contemporary sources and Ed Young’s cheeky nude self-portrait. Also included were impressive photographs by award-winners, David Goldblatt and Pieter Hugo.
The auction set an impressive standard, with an outstanding sell-through rate of over 75% across 121 lots. The top lot of the sale was Alexis Preller’s exceptional Profile Figures (Mirrored Image), selling for over R7-million. Record sales were achieved for Villa, Goldblatt, and Hugo, amongst others.
Viewing
Friday 28 October 2016 | 10 am – 5 pm
Saturday 28 October 2016 | 10 am – 5 pm
Sunday 28 October 2016 | 10 am – 4 pm
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