Notes

This lot offers a distilled sense of Conrad Botes’s early sculptural practice. In 1999, Botes, a co-founder of the occasional comic and ‘zine Bitterkomix, initiated a collaboration with Brett Murray on a series of sculptural wall lamps. The rockabilly characters featured in the Boogie Lights series drew on Botes’s noir comic-book style. Emboldened by the lights’ success, in the early 2000s Botes began making painted wood sculptures that loosely quoted the style of West African colon statues. The central feature of this lot is an icon shrine with decorated, hinged doors enclosing a bathetic devil- Christ figure. The shrine is flanked by three steel cut-outs in the style of the Boogie Lights. Manufactured by Murray, they depict a heart and two gender-distinct cartoon interpretations of Richard Drew’s widely circulated 2001 photo of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in New York.

Sean O’Toole

Post-sale note: although inconclusively dated 2002 and 2003 in various sources, it bears noting that the work was actually made prior to September 11.

Exhibited

Studio d'Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Conrad Botes, 10 April to 26 May 2002. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue, unpaginated.

Literature

Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes. (2006) The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Illustrated in colour on page 210.