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
each signed and dated 85 on the reverse
Notes
"The early paintings were made by pouring the paint onto stitched canvases and to a certain extent allowing the seams to dictate its flow. I enjoyed the sensations and atmospheres that
colour evokes in contrast to the physical edges and geometrical divisions. The gestural paintings heralded an ongoing performance after the quiet. I continue to be excited by the tensions
created between disparate elements and I record, examine and celebrate my preoccupations. I try to reconcile hesitations, repetitions, associations, references, ambiguities and contradictions is probably analogues to acknowledging, often with great insistence and feeling, various possibilities of meaning."-Jo Smail, January 19861
Jo Smail is a contemporary artist born in Durban, South Africa and educated in her home country before relocating to the United States. From 1988 to 2017, she taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she is now Professor Emeritus of Fine Art.
Smail is internationally recognised for her paintings, drawings, collages and prints, which are characterised by layers of material accumulation, erasure and transformation. Her work is deeply informed by personal history, particularly her recovery from a stroke in 2000 and the loss of her studio in a fire in 1995.
She has exhibited widely across the globe and her work has been featured in major publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, and The Washington Post. Her works are held in prominent collections such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, the University of the Witwatersrand and the South African National Gallery.
Important collaborations include one with William Kentridge on the exhibition New Beginnings at Axis Gallery in New York (2006). She is also a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant awarded in 1996. Smail is represented by Goya Contemporary in the United States.
1. Correspondence with Goya Contemporary, 2025.
Thanks to Goya Contemporary for assisting in the cataloguing of this lot.
Provenance
The Engen Collection.
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