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

Live Virtual Auction, 26 - 28 July 2020

Monday Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 455 200
Lot 266
  • Robert Hodgins; A Little Light Class Conflict
  • Robert Hodgins; A Little Light Class Conflict
  • Robert Hodgins; A Little Light Class Conflict
  • Robert Hodgins; A Little Light Class Conflict
  • Robert Hodgins; A Little Light Class Conflict


Lot Estimate
ZAR 400 000 - 600 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 455 200

About this Item

South African 1920-2010
A Little Light Class Conflict
2003

inscribed with the artist's name, the title, the date and the medium on the reverse

oil over graphite on canvas
90 by 121cm excluding frame; 96 by 126 by 4cm including frame

Notes

Robert Hodgins’s theatrical and minimalist, A Little Light Class Conflict, is painted in a striking array of deep, bright and more muted blues set against a stark white background. It engages with a familiar subject matter: the age-old conflict between blue collar workers and industrialists, portrayed here as two somewhat ridiculous characters imbued with Hodgins’s unmistakable wry sense of humour.

He not only portrays a balding white male occupying a place of undue authority as avaricious and self-important, but diminishes him by placing him with his large round flabby face at the bottom right hand corner of the picture plane. He is portrayed as at once truculent and oddly vulnerable. As Brenda Atkinson so succinctly writes, ‘Hodgins loves the armoury of the suit, its apparently impregnable defence of the soft flesh underneath – the concealment of the flaccid by the virile’.1

Looming large and dominating the painting is a blue-collar worker hanging on to a bright red overhead beam. He insults the boss with the words ‘fat, smug capitalist bastard’. The unconvincing retort ‘Bug Awf!’ penned in red is both conceited and pitiable. Atkinson remarks that ‘Robert Hodgins knows that image and text function powerfully as mutually invested entities’ and here Hodgins’s artful use of word and image results in a humorous and comical interrogation of A Little Light Class Conflict.2

1. Brenda Atkinson (2002) ‘New Loves, Old Affairs’ in Brenda Atkinson, Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg, pages 14/15.

2. Ibid, page 14.

View all Robert Hodgins lots for sale in this auction


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