Notes

Alexis Preller reached a highpoint of experimentation with his series of socalled intaglios. Beginning with three different depictions of an apple in 1969, and then focusing on nude kouroi figures and disembodied heads, these works blurred the line between painting and sculpture. Using a unique combination of fibreglass and resins to fashion forms in negative relief, and then bringing them to life with oily glazes of turquoise and shimmering fragments of gold leaf, the artist created a group of disarming and grand objets d’art, each one as flashy, enigmatic and imposing as the next.

Carefully moulded and lustrously painted in 1970, the present lot, titled Primavera, takes as its subject a floating head in strict profile. With full lips, a blunted nose, and a vacant eye painted a glinting blue, the head seems metaphysical and otherworldly. Atop the straight-combed hair and dangling, dark plaits, sits an elaborate headrest of bright coral and orange, its smooth outer rim disturbed by curved spikes or fangs. The head’s commanding shape is surrounded by an auric echo —one half in shadow, the other in light— and punctuated by circular drops.

The dominant motif of Primavera, the disembodied profile, can be traced back through a number of the artist’s most iconic paintings: the current lot is surely a scion of the much smaller, gleaming and relic-like Gold Primavera (1967); a more stark and stylised version of The Great King (1963); and very closely related to the mysterious African Head (1953). This continuous visual thread is typical of Preller’s oeuvre, and backs up what Esmé Berman argued in her introduction to the artist’s landmark retrospective at the Pretoria Art Museum in 1972: "It is essential to the full appreciation of Preller’s art to accept and understand the process of repetition, adaptation, variation and transformation which has governed its development."¹

^1. Esmé Berman (1972) Alexis Preller, Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum, page 1.

Provenance

Acquired from the artist by Carl Schmidt, thence by descent.

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Alexis Preller Retrospective, 24 October to 26 November 1972, illustrated and listed as catalogue number 171.

Literature

Johan Reinder Deichmann (1986) Die Werk van Alexis Preller 1934-1948 en 'n Catalogue Raisonné, Pretoria: University of Pretoria, catalogue number 758.

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Saxonwold: Shelf Publishers, page 372.