Notes

Accompanied by a Stevenson Gallery certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

The fractured bronze sculpture at the centre of this lot was first exhibited in Wim Botha’s untitled 2016 solo exhibition in Cape Town. The exhibition featured several paintings, various discrete sculptures, of which this was one of eight in black, as well as a multi-part installation composed of elements in wood, bronze and treated glass. The splintered form of this lot reiterates a formal device Botha introduced in a 2015 exhibition, the centrepiece of which was a radically splintered version of Michelangelo’s first Pietà. Botha creates the ruptured surface of his splintered bronzes by first modelling the works in polystyrene and then altering their proportions with a chainsaw and wire cutter. Botha used the same process to construct this bronze. Although not entirely legible, the iconography of this bronze refers to the Grecian myth of Leda and the Swan. Botha previously worked with this troubling classical legend, which mingles power, eroticism and sexual violation, in a 2005 work, a ceiling-hung version of Leda and the Swan, its composite parts made out of bone meal and epoxy resin.

After acquiring this bronze, the seller commissioned Botha to add the additional glass elements, which are coated with dichronic filters. The updated work retains its original integrity, albeit now encompassing references to the artist’s interest in light and refraction. This interest was fully explored in the artist’s 2018-19 mid-career survey exhibition at Norval Foundation. An edition of the present lot (in its updated form) featured in that exhibition’s main work, Studies for the Garden of Earthly Delights (2018), an enormous, multi-part installation composed of an amalgam of historical works by the artist. Critic Tim Leibbrandt described the installation as “utterly gorgeous” and “a thorough encapsulation of everything that Botha has been working towards in recent years”.¹

1. Tim Leibbrandt (2019) “Intrinsic Field: Wim Botha’s Heliostat,” Artthrob, February: https://artthrob.co.za/2019/02/12/intrinsic-field-wim-bothas-heliostat/

Provenance

Stevenson, Cape Town.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Stevenson, Cape Town, Wim Botha, 13 October to 3 December 2016, another cast from this edition exhibited.

Norval Foundation, Cape Town, Heliostat: Wim Botha, 29 September 2018 to 21 January 2019, another cast from this edition with a similar glass installation was exhibited.

Literature

Robin Kirsten (ed) (2019) Heliostat: Wim Botha, Cape Town: Norval Foundation, another cast from this edition illustrated on pages 105 and in Heliostat installation views pages 112- 114 and the front cover of the catalogue.