Notes

Collected Images was produced for a prominent collector of Sub-Saharan art with whom Karel Nel was acquainted. The unusual compositional style, a grid of nine containers, directly quotes Alexis Preller’s 1952 oil on canvas, Collected Images. Nel, an accomplished draughtsman and noted scholar of Preller, co-authored with Esmé Berman an important book on the artist. A description for Preller’s precursor work offers his composition as a “kind of filing system” for his iconography.¹ Artists Joseph Cornell and René Magritte also employed this form of visual choreography. While the objects in the composition are linked to the original owner, they also speak to Nel’s biography and interests as an artist. The item at top left is a rare Zulu fertility child figure. In 1998, Nel, an expert in indigenous art and cultural artefacts, co-curated the exhibition Evocations of the Child. The exhibition assembled a representative selection of these anthropomorphic objects from the southern African region and included thirteen important pieces from the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as well as this object. The item below the child figure is a Chokwe birdcage from Angola. The architectural qualities of this work dialogue with the two depictions of Tsonga headrests, as well as the Cape Dutch dog kennel. Nel refers to many of the objects as containers: “The tortoise shell in the central image is a housing for a living being. Preller spoke of the skull as the architecture of consciousness. While the skull images allude to Preller, they also refer to an image of a skull in the collection.”² The dialogue between specificity and non-specificity is central to this work. The one container that has no obvious object in it references a constellation of stars over Southern Africa, a theme that continues to preoccupy the artist. The composition features additional metallic and bronze dust overlaid onto the pastel drawing. Nel’s signature technique involves drawing pastel on bonded fibre in which his figuration is juxtaposed with abstract gestural marks. The process is ultimately one of layering, his aim being to achieve more than mere description, but rather a “considered mapping” of his interior world as a thinker and maker.³

^1. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Alexis Preller: Collected Images, Johannesburg: Shelf, page 125.
^2. Interview with Karel Nel, 26 August 2016.
^3. Elizabeth Burroughs (2015) in Karel Nel, Observe, London: Art First, page 15.

Provenance

Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 10 October 2016, lot 262.