Day Sale: Re/Presentation of the Figure
Timed Online Auction, 4 - 20 March 2024
Re/Presentation of the Figure
About the SessionAll human bodies are shaped, fashioned and deciphered according to the prevailing cultural, social, and political order which inform the notion of the human form within a particular society.
There is an enduring presence of body images in the history of art often with entrenched visual conventions. Figuration is a powerful conceptual thread linking historical, traditional, modernist, and contemporary art in Africa. Since the early 90s the practice of art and how the body is expressed, viewed, and received entered a new paradigm. Artists broke away from 20th century conventions, challenged boundaries and interrogated what it means to be within social, class, racial, sexual and gender paradigms and explored identity within these cultural contexts.
Re/Presentation of the Figure exemplifies this conceptual thread as modern and contemporary artists express the body though painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, and woven images.
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About this Item
signed, dated 1960 and inscribed 'London' on the reverse
Notes
Albert Adams excelled at school in Cape Town and his artistic abilities were encouraged and supported by his teachers and family. He was denied access to Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, which was reserved for white students only, so he trained as a teacher and attended part-time art classes at St Peter’s school in District Six with his high school friend Peter Clarke. Adams was active in anti-apartheid student politics until he went to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1953. After winning a Bavarian State scholarship, he went to Germany to study at the University of Munich and attended summer master classes with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, Austria. One of his most significant works is the triptych South Africa (1959) now in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which is sometimes likened to Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in its depiction of the horrors of violence and oppression. Adams settled in London after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and in 1979 was appointed to the staff of the City University, London, where he taught for eighteen years.
Provenance
Acquired from the artist by the current owner, circa 1990.
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