Lace Curtains Elizabeth Bay

Notes

Keith Alexander’s paintings are at once hyperrealist and deeply poetic, suffused with a stillness that transforms Namibian architecture and landscape into meditations on time, decay, and human presence. The present lot and Hohenzollern (lot 344), exemplify the artist’s ability to render the built environment with meticulous fidelity while infusing it with a surreal, almost metaphysical aura.

In the present lot, Alexander turns his gaze to the abandoned mining town on the Namibian coastline. The foreground is dominated by a derelict house, its brick façade eroded so that the
remaining lattice of openings resembles a delicate curtain of lace, hence the title. A sand dune has risen against the wall like a buttress, both natural reclamation and architectural support, while the skeletal remnants of other buildings linger in the distance: a chimney here, a fragment of wall there. Painted in 1986, the work belongs to Alexander’s celebrated series of Elizabeth Bay scenes, where the desert’s slow encroachment becomes a metaphor for impermanence and the fragile traces of human ambition. The precision of the detail, the texture of sand, the bleached masonry, the silent collapse, renders the uncanny beauty of dereliction.

By contrast, Hohenzollern (lot 344) shifts the setting to Swakopmund, where the eponymous German colonial building rises with an air of improbable grandeur against a stark, pared-down
landscape. The only other architectural note is a slim building edge at the left margin, serving as a framing device. Four ornate lampposts punctuate the space, while a dirt road, bordered by the faint geometry of sidewalks, leads the eye toward the Hohenzollern’s façade. The stillness of the scene is unsettled by two presences: a lone gemsbok, turning with tentative alertness toward the viewer, and the ghostly silhouette of a human figure in the right foreground, visible only as a shadow cast from an unseen doorway. These inclusions introduce a charged ambiguity: human presence is both absent and implied, while the gemsbok embodies a watchful, non-human witness.

Together, the two lots reveal Alexander’s distinctive fusion of hyperrealism and surrealism. Every architectural detail, every grain of sand, is painted with near-photographic clarity, yet the effect is dreamlike, even hallucinatory. In the present lot, the erosion of buildings speaks of history’s dissolution, of the desert reclaiming the traces of industry. In Hohenzollern (lot 344), the
intact monumentality of colonial architecture stands in spectral isolation, made stranger by the interplay of animal, shadow, and empty space. In both, Alexander interrogates the passage of
time: what endures, what disappears, and what remains as memory or ghost.

Namibia provided Alexander with a subject matter unlike any other. Its vast desert landscapes, its mining towns swallowed by dunes, and its architectural relics of German colonialism all lent
themselves to the artist’s exploration of silence, abandonment, and surreal juxtapositions. These two paintings, though separated by six years, demonstrate his singular ability to turn realism into reverie: to show us the world as it is, and simultaneously as a haunting vision of what it means to inhabit place, history, and time.

David Robbins (2000) Keith Alexander: The Artist in Retrospect, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball

(2022) Keith Alexanders dreamscape paintings go on auction, The Citizen, online, accessed 21 August 2025.