19th century, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Decorative Arts, Jewellery and Wine

Live Virtual Auction, 10 - 11 May 2020

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Paintings Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 398 300
Lot 613
  • Norman Catherine; Red Rubber Neck Too
  • Norman Catherine; Red Rubber Neck Too
  • Norman Catherine; Red Rubber Neck Too
  • Norman Catherine; Red Rubber Neck Too
  • Norman Catherine; Red Rubber Neck Too


Lot Estimate
ZAR 300 000 - 500 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 398 300

About this Item

South African 1949-
Red Rubber Neck Too
2006

signed; inscribed with the artist's name, title and date on a Goodman Gallery label adhered to the reverse

oil on canvas
150 by 120cm excluding frame; 155 by 125,5 by 7cm including frame

Notes

Rubber Neck Too was reproduced on the Goodman Gallery, Norman Catherine, 2006 exhibition poster.

 

Throughout his many stylistic evolutions and creative detours as an artist, Norman Catherine has remained true to the human figure. Whether dismembered or restrained, deracinated or knotted, his human subjects also endure – sometimes with the help of bandages and here sutures. This optimism is central to negotiating Catherine’s vivid panoply of characters. The contorted figure in a dapper yellow suit depicted in this lot traces his origins back to a series of psychologically themed paintings from the mid-1980s that portrayed spindly male characters with elongated limbs. In the subsequent decade these anxious and wounded Caucasian figures took on a more bulky physique, first in a series of paintings of menacing men in tight-fitting suits, and later in the 1990s in a series of diminutive sculptures that provided the template for the artist’s current, mature practice. Versions of this elastic man are discernable in works such as Who Do Voodoo (1995), a sculptural assembly of small, hand-painted fetish idols. Whether working on canvas or three-dimensionally Catherine’s interest is in capturing the many “characteristics and pathologies of human nature,”1 including here the all too human habit of rubbernecking – or rudely gawking – which Catherine’s energetic work thoroughly invites.

 

  1. Hazel Friedman (2000) Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, page 123

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2006.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

The Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Norman Catherine, 16 September to 7 October 2006.

View all Norman Catherine lots for sale in this auction



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