Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art and South African Fine Wine

Live Virtual Auction, 26 - 28 July 2020

Monday Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 47 796
Lot 246
  • Olaf Bisschoff; Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon
  • Olaf Bisschoff; Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon
  • Olaf Bisschoff; Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon
  • Olaf Bisschoff; Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon
  • Olaf Bisschoff; Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon


Lot Estimate
ZAR 30 000 - 50 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 47 796

About this Item

South African 1976-
Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon
2020

signed, dated 2020 and inscribed with 'Picasso' on the reverse

oil on board
99 by 99cm excluding frame; 104 by 104 by 4cm including frame

Notes

In this work, the artist refers to Pablo Picasso's famous painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which is widely regarded as having changed the course of art practice and ushered in the possibility of total abstraction. The large oil on canvas is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has been more studied, more emulated and more derided than almost any other work in art history.

This series of works is a celebration rather than a statement of the fact that there is ‘nothing new’ to be made art-wise. Falling squarely into the modernist revival, these paintings test already used images in another painted setting. The works function in an idiom of painting that has been re-hashed before, and certainly will be again.

The artist attempts homage to modernist abstract painting and appropriates well-known art work titles, giving the series of works a certain ‘back to school’ flavour. Out-of-place-objects are introduced into ‘painted out-of-place’ landscapes: sometimes the landscape is completely eliminated to make way for expressions of pure form and colour. Colour use and a sense of 'automatic' composition are at the forefront.1

1. Adapted from the artist’s statement, 2020.

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