Evening Sale
Live Virtual Auction, 12 November 2024
Evening Sale
About this Item
signed; inscribed with the artist's name and the title on a Karen McKerron Fine Art Gallery label adhered to the reverse
Exhibited
Karen McKerron Fine Art Gallery, Bryanston, 1998.
Notes
"The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent (Figure 1) is a series of component artworks made in 1998 by South African painter Judith Mason in honour of freedom fighter Phila Ndwandwe. Ndwandwe had been part of uMkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the African National Congress [ANC]) and was kidnapped in 1988 by the apartheid security police and executed after refusing to become an informant. Ndwandwe’s remains were among the first to be exhumed through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and hers became one particularly poignant story of the power of recovering ‘truth’, the fundamental goal of the commission. Mason made an extensive body of work in homage to Ndwandwe that was exhibited in 1998 at the Karen McKerron Gallery, Johannesburg, and the Chelsea Gallery, Cape Town. The most prominent of these works, The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent (1998), colloquially known as the ‘Blue Dress’, is now held in the Constitutional Court Art Collection, Johannesburg, and prominently displayed in the gallery of the architecturally rich Court building. The work comprises two paintings and an actual dress made of blue plastic bags. Each of the paintings features the disembodied dress as it floats towards the viewer from a barren landscape. In the first painting, the dress hovers in front of a series of layered honeycomb wire fences, behind which a hyena tears at a slivered remnant of the blue plastic. In the second painting, the fence recedes further into the distance, and the hyena begins to pass through, following the ghostly dress towards a series of burning braziers and a tealight candle in an enamel mug."
Stacey Vorster