Notes

In 1998 painter Marlene Dumas received the triennial David Röell Prize from the Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund and shared her windfall with the South African National Gallery. The public museum used the money to initiate a residency and exhibition programme, Fresh, to platform seven young South African artists. They included Moshekwa Langa. Produced during his Fresh residency (January – February 2002), this lot was also included in his exhibition in the SANG Annexe. “It is interesting stylistically that Langa chooses here to ‘go back to beginning’ by revisioning the mode of production he was experimenting with when he first emerged into the public eye in South Africa in the 1990s,” noted critic Tracy Murinik in an accompanying catalogue.¹ Langa’s collages combining text and image remain a central pillar of his practice and an important marker of his biographical method. The unusual juxtapositions of people (Mary J Blige, Lauren Bacall), places (Mount Everest, Seshego) and things (Google, Castle Lager) in this lot corroborates Langa’s characterisation of these works as “nonfactual, nonlinear account of what interests me”.²

1.  Moshekwa Langa (2003) Fresh: Moshekwa Langa. Cape Town, South African National Gallery, page 18.

2.  Achim Drucks (2018) ‘Stream of Consciousness: Moshekwa Langa’s Poetic Mind Maps’, in Deutsche Bank ArtMag, No. 103, September.

Provenance

Art Benefit: Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, Cape Town, 14 February 2009, lot 18.

Private Collection.

Literature

Moshekwa Langa, Tracy Murinik, Emma Bedford, South African National Gallery (2003) Moshekwa Langa: Fresh (South African National Gallery), exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: South African National Gallery, illustrated in black and white on page 7.

Colin Richards (2008) 'Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art', in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (eds), Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Durham & London: Duke University Press, reference in text on page 272.

Linda Givon (2009) Art Benefit: Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, auction catalogue, Cape Town: The Children's Hospital Trust, illustrated in colour on page 23.

Moshekwa Langa (2014) Moshekwa Langa: Der eifersüchtige Liebhaber / The Jealous Lover,  Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, illustrated in colour on pages 38-39.