Notes

Like many motifs in Alexis Preller’s work, the bull appears in different guises and in different contexts in works decades apart. At times it is a recognisable African Nguni bull (for example in The Herd Boy (1949) and The Small White Bull (1953), bulky, humped and muscular with an impressive set of horns and a bevy of egrets in attendance. At other times, the animal is stylised to the point of becoming a decorative cypher rather than a flesh-and-blood animal (for example in The Bull (1956) and Ritual Bull (1962), sold at Strauss in October 2010 and March 2018, respectively). In the present lot the animals are almost origami, paper fold-outs, beautifully patterned, with African masks for faces and huge implausible sickle-shaped horns. Hovering morning glory blooms replace the birds in Preller’s other less surreal compositions.

Both styles of representation ‘allude to the sacred nature and centrality of the bull to the value system of the herders of the southern and eastern African seaboard. Amongst these groups these ceremonial and monumental animals are seen to be connected to the symbolic and ancestral world. The white Nguni cattle in particular are associated and much revered within the royal clans of KwaZulu-Natal … [T]his symbolic animal … cosmologically resonates beyond its local context and as far back as the bull cults of Minos of Crete and of the earliest archaeological sites of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey’.¹ 

1. Karel Nel (2018) ‘Ritual Bull’, catalogue text, lot 590, Cape Town: Strauss & Co, 5 March.