The Engen Collection
Live Virtual Auction, 24 June 2025
The Engen Collection
About the SessionThe Engen Collection is a corporate collection that highlights a crucial chapter in South African art history.
Initially put together as the Mobil collection in the early 1980s, it brings to market a selection of works from a broader archive of over two hundred artworks, offering insights into the networks, pedagogies and creative resistances that shaped South African abstract art in the early 1980s. It comprises of paintings, tapestries, works on paper and photographs representing a significant corporate investment in South African contemporary art during a period of intense cultural and political transformation. The collection engages with a moment when South African artists were developing visual languages that could operate across the cultural and artistic boundaries. These artists, including Bill Ainslie, Simon Stone, Gabriel Tsolo, Judith Mason, Andrew Verster, Pippa Skotnes and Gail Altschuler, documented individual artistic development alongside the collective creation of alternative artistic practice.
The collection traces the intellectual and artistic genealogy of artists working within and against the constraints of the 80s, many of whom were influenced by the South African artist, teacher and activist Bill Ainslie and the Johannesburg Art Foundation (JAF), an institution that maintained inclusivity. Founded in 1982, JAF operated as an educational anomaly, rejecting prescribed curricula and external authority in favour of emancipatory and experimental pedagogy. Under Ainslie's direction, the Foundation fostered abstract expressionism, an art movement whose rejection of traditional representational art prioritised non-objective imagery to evoke emotion. The connections of the institution extended beyond the JAF itself, linking to the establishment of Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) and the Thupelo Workshops in Cape Town, institutions whose impact continues to shape contemporary South African art discourse.
The CEO, Mr George Roberts, said: "The Engen Collection represents a broad and vibrant range of South African artists and has been a treasured part of our company’s story for many years. As we look to the future, we believe it is time for these remarkable artworks to find new homes where they can continue to be appreciated, shared and celebrated. We believe that by releasing this collection, the artworks will find new life amongst a wider community, while inspiring new audiences by continuing to tell the story of South Africa’s creative spirit."
About this Item
signed, dated 79, numbered 19/20 and inscribed with the title in pencil in the margin
Notes
Another example from the edition is in the Pelmama Permanent Art Collection.
"And while the borders of South Africa's socio-political landscape became harsher and bleaker in the 80s, Catherine adopted a more rugged iconography: concurrent with the escalation of tyranny and resistance, his once pristine airbrush works began to make way, in the early 80s, for a cruder more cynical and aggressive style. Yet, in works produced during the late 70s, there is a foretaste of this with pencil ruptured airbrush surfaces. In Last Letters from the Wilderness-Black Man and Red Man (1978) for example, Catherine played with the Swart en Rooi gevaar motif. According to this apartheid propaganda, blacks were under the control of communists, in this work his forms display more overtly, the signs of malignant psychic lesions that were only slightly evident in his earlier airbrush works."1
1. Goodman Gallery (2000) Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, page 36.
Norman Catherine attended the East London (South Africa) Technical College Art School from 1967 to 1968 where he completed an art matric. During the 1980s he lived in Los Angeles and New York; he currently lives at Hartbeespoort Dam, North West Province.
His prodigious output has been engaging art enthusiasts since 1969, when he held his first solo exhibition in Johannesburg. He works in various media including painting, sculpture, mixed media, printmaking, wall hangings and bronze and has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. His work is included in numerous local private, museum and corporate collections as well as in the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum collections in the United States.
Catherine's art projects a dystopian vision of the socio-political landscape. History, horror, crime, conflict, psychoses and politics all serve as stimuli for his creative output, which vacillates between the macabre and the comic, between a gasp and a giggle. He conveys his cynical vision through a juxtaposition of dark and light sensibilities that veer between an internal hallucinatory realm and a literal commentary on the external world. He rebels against any dogma or rigid definition, including of his own work.
Thanks to Janet Catherine for assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.
Literature
Norman Catherine and Ramsay Mackay (1978) Last Letters from the Wilderness, Johannesburg: Joburg Records, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on the back cover.
Goodman Gallery (2000) Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on page 36, with the title Last Letters from the Wilderness I (Black Man).
R J Angel (no date) Mobil Court Art Collection: A Collection of South African Visual Art, Mobil Oil Southern Africa, illustrated in colour, unpaginated.
Provenance
The Engen Collection.
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