Notes

George (Jerzy Wladyslaw) Jaholkowski was born in Baku (now in Azerbaijan) in 1914. He grew up in Poland and studied Fine Art and Architecture at the University of Poland, and later also at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1936-1937). He served with distinction in the Polish and British armies and the Polish Underground during WWII, and after being demobbed, worked in London as a graphic designer, draughtsman and sculptor. In the aftermath of the war, wood, stone and bronze were difficult for a sculptor to obtain so Jaholkowski developed techniques of sculpting in metal. After a commission for the South African Tourist Corporation in London, the artist and his wife Virginia, a concert pianist, immigrated to South Africa in 1955 and settled in Cape Town. He undertook further studies under Lippy Lipshitz and Maurice van Essche at the Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town, in the late 1950s.

Jaholkowski continued to work in metal, usually copper, which was cut, bent, beaten, welded and brazed before being treated with acid to produce green, black and bronze patinas. His training as an architect is evident in the present lot where the interactions of elegant linear and curved forms, like the flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral, interact with the maze of well-considered negative space.

Literature

www.art-archives-southafrica.ch/PDFs/George_Jaholkowski_album, illustrated on page 24, catalogue number GJ 131.