Notes

Tracey Rose came to international prominence in the early 2000s with a series of performance-based reimagining of female figures, some archetypal, others lifted from history. The current lot forms part of her film and photo project, Lucie’s Fur Version 1.1.1 (2003), which creatively and seditiously explores human origins. It was produced in the studio and on location in Johannesburg. It contains references to religion, palaeoanthropology and art history, notably Fra Angelico’s series of altarpieces depicting Archangel Gabriel conversing with Mary. This lot refers to the Annunciation of Cortona (1433-4) in Cortona, Italy. In Rose’s adaptation she references Lucifer and Lucy, the so-called “African Eve” discovered near Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, and substitutes the Edenic pairing of the gospel with two black gay lovers named Adam and Yves. “Rather than merely copying from the Old Masters, Rose radically subverts the patriarchal structures of art history, science and religion in order to question the ways in which they are inextricably intertwined with oppression,” noted one critic.¹ Curator Okwui Enwezor included another example from this edition on his New York exhibition Snap Judgments; in an accompanying essay he praised Lucie’s Fur Version 1.1.1 as Rose’s “most complex and accomplished body of work”.²

1.  Sophie Perryer. (ed.) (2004)10 Years 100 Artists, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts. Page 318.
2. Okwui Enwezor. (2006) Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, New York: ICP. Page 31.

Exhibited

Art Basel, 2017

Literature

Okwui Enwezor. (2006) Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, New York: ICP. Illustrated on pages 58-9.

Sophie Perryer. (ed.) (2004) 10 Years 100 Artists, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts. Illustrated on page 320.