While the exhibition will also showcase a broader range of the ‘missing’ African Modernists, whose work was neglected for political or social reasons, a special focus will be on modern and contemporary womxn and non-binary artists led by Pondo Smoker, 1929, an important work unseen for decades by renowned modernist painter, Irma Stern. Estimates for private sale works range from £4,000 to £600,000. 

Alongside Stern the exhibition features other works by artists including Maggie Laubser, Bertha Everard, Gladys Mgudlandlu and Bertina Lopes as well as contemporary artists, Kate Gottgens, Georgina Gratrix, Turiya Magadlela, Mary Sibande, Lisa Brice, Amanda Mushate and Helent Teede. Many of these award-winning artists have appeared in high-profile international exhibitions this year. Laubser, Mahlangu, Mgudlandlu and Stern all appear in curator Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale and also in 2024, Mahlangu, Muholi and Siopis have been the subject of career surveys at museums in Cape Town, London and Athens respectively. Teede was an inaugural fellow of the Tracey Emin Artist Residency. 

Irma Stern, Pondo Smoker, 1929 

LOOKING TOWARDS FREEDOM – Womxn Artists from Africa will be highlighted by the late Irma Stern’s Pondo Smoker, 1929, unseen for decades and three additional museum-quality works, all available for private sale. These works, executed across two decades – 1929 to 1949 – reflect the intimacy between Stern and her subjects. Captured in daring swirls of paint and vivid colour, the figures are arresting, immediate and beautiful. The four paintings chart the artist’s audacious and career-defining travels to Pondoland, Congo and Zanzibar. 

Dating from Stern’s earlier, high-expressionist phase, Pondo Smoker shows the influence of her German tuition and friendship with Max Pechstein. Throughout the 1920s, Stern travelled widely across Southern Africa, by car, including to modern day Eswatini, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. 

Irma Stern, Arab Man, 1939 

An aristocratic personality, Stern frequently portrayed elites, from Cape Town’s privileged Jews to Rwandan royalty. Yet this portrait depicts an unnamed Arab linked to Zanzibar’s centuries-old Omani overseers. Of her two work trips to Zanzibar; this portrait dates from the first visit in 1939. Stern’s paintings from Zanzibar are her most prized works at auction with Qatar’s Orientalist Museum having acquired Stern’s Arab Priest, 1945, for £3 million at auction in 2011. 

Irma Stern, Congolese Woman, 1946 

Acquired from the artist in Cape Town, in 1947, and first traded in 2007, this work dates from Stern’s second work trip to Belgium Congo in 1946 and likely portrays a subject linked to the royal court of Rwanda’s dominant Tutsi elite. 

Irma Stern, Indian Girl, Zanzibar, 1949 

Linked to the second work trip to Zanzibar in 1945, Stern, writing in 1948 about Zanzibar, describes in great detail the lavishly detailed garments and jewellery worn by the island’s Indian women. She further describes, in fond terms, the groups of Indian women she encountered, describing them as “animated and magnified flowers” 

Ruth Everard-Haden 

A member of the closely-knit Everard-King family of painters – or Everard Group – Ruth Everard Haden’s modernist style owes much to her early roaming. After studying music, literature and art in Cape Town, in 1921, she briefly enrolled in London’s Slade School of Art before settling in Paris, where lived from 1923 and 1926. After her marriage in 1929 she settled on a farm in South Africa’s northeastern province of Mpumalanga, pursuing painting and horse breeding. Ruth is best known for her landscape paintings, first exhibiting in South Africa during the early 1930s. Two important works St. Tropez, and Riverlands Stoep, are included in the show. 

Georgina Gratrix 

80s Mom, 2013, is an important portrait depicting the artist’s mother with multiple eyes and misaligned mouths was prominently displayed in Gratrix’s 2021 early-career survey at Norval Foundation, Cape Town, alongside a similarly cubistic portrait of her father. This work was singled-out by critics for Gratrix’s use of “misrepresentation” to portray a familiar subject. 

Mary Sibande 

Clothed in the skin of righteousness, 2022 depicts four snarling dogs in sheep’s clothing tended by a shepherd-like figure was the subject of a performative lecture by Sibande at artist William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg, in 2023. 

The colours have symbolic associations: blue is linked with labour (in particular the garments worn by domestic workers); purple is associated with royalty, but also political resistance in South Africa; and red connotes anger. The dogs were inspired by a bronze statue in Barberton, Mpumalanga, where Sibande was born; it depicts Jock, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, hero of Sir James Percy FitzPatrick’s 1907 autobiographical novel Jock of the Bushveld. 

For more information, please contact: ArtClubLondon@strauss.co.za 

www.straussart.co.za 

About Strauss & Co

Strauss & Co is the leading art auction house in Africa, specializing in modern and contemporary art, design, wine and jewellery. With a focus on African and international art, Strauss & Co caters to art enthusiasts at all price levels through its curated mix of live auctions, single-artist sales, thematic spotlight presentations and popular monthly online sales. Private treaty services are also available. The company actively champions artists, designers and wine producers from Africa and supports various education and community engagement programmes. It hosts year-round exhibitions in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and Stellenbosch. 

PRIVATE TOUR

Join Strauss & Co’s Head Art Specialist, Dr Alastair Meredith for a private tour of the exhibition.

Tuesday, 8 October 2024 from 12pm