Notes

This large print triptych offers a fine example of Diane Victor’s experimental and iterative approach to printmaking. Writing in the artist’s 2008 monograph, art historian Elizabeth Rankin details how experimentation has enabled Victor to refine her processes and create works combining multiple procedures. Trinity Fetish was printed with new plates, although the work nonetheless draws on an extensive repertoire of personal iconography. The woman in XXX (central print) is adapted from Victor’s etching and lithograph Falling from Grace (1994), albeit now inverted and naked but for a single high-laced boot and wolf skin, which fuses with her hair. ‘A heavily embossed triple XXX … is placed centrally against delicate blind printing, which emerges from the fissure created by splitting the wolf-woman plate. Forming a shape like Moses’s burning bush, these embossed flames lap a bulging black shape that sags ominously into the upper register, creating a tenuous link between the two etched images.’ The chair in Mercy Seat (right print) is a variant of a chair with phallic twisted columns appearing in the etching What’s Bred in the Bone Comes Out in the Flesh (1995). Straight Dress II (left print) is an update of Straight Dress I (1996). ‘The fabric is even more sensuous than in the earlier version, as Victor had discovered that applying sprayed aquatint over a heavily bitten softground achieved increased lustre, the textured softground surface shining through where she burnished highlights into the aquatint,’ writes Rankin. Commenting on the blackness of the images, Rankin states that this effect is ‘heightened by their isolated placement as iconic shaped plates printed on very large sheets of paper. But it is not a vacant surface. The dress and chair are centred amongst scattered embossed forms that extend across the format and bleed over the edges. In the middle print of the triptych, this arrangement is reversed.’ Rankin likens Victor’s habit of presenting images that spill out of the boundaries of their format to techniques employed by eighteenth-century Italian printmaker, Giovanni Piranesi. 

All quotes Elizabeth Rankin and Karen von Veh (2008) Diane Victor, Johannesburg: David Krut, page 22.

Provenance

Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 13 October 2014, lot 676.

The Tasso Foundation Collection of Important South African Art assembled by the Late Giulio Bertrand of Morgenster Estate.

Literature

Elizabeth Rankin and Karen von Veh (2008) Diane Victor, Johannesburg: David Krut, page 22, illustrated on page 20 and 21.