19/06/2025 General News, Live Auctions, Insights
Aspire Art is pleased to present an exceptional group of works on paper by some of South Africa’s most important Black modernists. Paper has long played a vital role in the history of art: easily portable, immediate, and responsive to the moment. For many artists, working on paper offered a more accessible and intimate means of expression, allowing them to respond directly to their surroundings, often capturing fleeting emotions or lived experiences that might not have been realised in large, formal studio works. There is a rawness to works on paper – less rehearsed, more spontaneous, and arguably more emotionally charged – offering collectors an intimate encounter with the artist’s hand. These works also provide an important entry point into collecting major names at a more accessible price point, while retaining all the historic and emotional resonance of their larger, more polished counterparts.
Lot 68 | Untitled (Toiling Couple) | R 1 000 000 - 1 500 000
In Toiling Couple, Dumile Feni’s vigorous charcoal lines expand across a monumental sheet, transforming paper into a vast stage of emotional gravity. In a departure from his smaller sketchbook pages, this large-scale drawing is fully realised, its scale heightening the sense of shared endurance and quiet strength between the two figures. Made during a pivotal period before his exile, Feni’s works on paper allowed for direct, immediate engagement with the psychological weight of Black South African life under apartheid. The rawness of charcoal on paper, unfiltered by layers of paint, gives the work a heightened intimacy, its bold, looping strokes carrying both tension and compassion, preserving a charged, transitional moment in Feni’s career.
Lot 64: George Pemba | Old Man Drinking Umqombothi | R 100 000 - 200 000
George Pemba’s early watercolours reveal the artist’s tender attentiveness to his sitters. In Old Man Drinking Umqombothi (1935), painted while still a young artist, Pemba records the quiet dignity of an elderly man lost in thought. Paper offered Pemba an accessible and intimate medium, perfect for observing and preserving the nuances of daily life. Long before he turned to oils, these early portraits on paper became vital studies of character and culture – portable documents of South African communities rarely afforded such careful representation which demonstrate Pemba’s exceptional eye for humanity.
Lot 63 | Peter Clarke |Pole Jumping | R 200 000 - 300 000
Throughout his career, Peter Clarke turned to works on paper to chronicle both personal reflection and collective experience. Whether through linocuts, drawings, delicate watercolours or vibrant gouaches, Clarke captured the subtleties of Cape Town’s changing social fabric. Paper allowed him to respond nimbly to his surroundings, often producing works that feel like visual diaries: immediate, observant, and deeply humane.
TOP: Lot 67 | Gerard Sekoto | Township scene | R220 000 - 300 000
BOTTOM: Lot 66 | Gerard Sekoto |Going home | R200 000 - 300 000
Even in exile, Gerard Sekoto’s drawings and paintings on paper remained tethered to his memories of South African life. In Going Home (1971), executed in Paris after his travels in Senegal, the daily fatigue of workers travelling long distances is rendered with aching familiarity. Township scene, softly hued in pinks, purples and yellows, captures the rhythm of ordinary lives; not a staged outsider’s view, but recalled lived experience. Executing his works on paper provided Sekoto with a portable vessel of memory to carry his South African world with him, and to preserve this reality, even far from home. His township scene, softly lit in pinks, purples, and warm yellows, recalls the rhythms of daily life not as an outsider’s view but as lived experience.
Auction
25 June 2025 at 7pm
Viewing:
19 - 25 June 2025
Monday – Friday: 8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Saturday: 8:30 am – 2:00 pm
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