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 1994 and inscribed with the title
Notes
In The Engen Bestiary, Judith Mason draws on the ancient tradition of the bestiary to create a deeply personal and symbolic suite of nine pencil drawings, of which seven feature on this sale (lots 61, 62, 63, 65, 79, 80 and 81). Commissioned for the Engen collection, this unique body of work pairs animal and human imagery in poetic, but unsettling ways. Each page features a singular figure: a ram, a pangolin, a caracal, a giraffe, a monkey and a snake, rendered with exquisite precision and a quiet psychological charge.
A bestiary, historically, is a medieval compendium of animals, real, mythical, or imagined, each accompanied by allegorical interpretations and moral lessons. These illuminated manuscripts were not simply zoological records; they were vehicles for storytelling, teaching and spiritual reflection. In Mason's hands, this tradition is reimagined for a contemporary context.
Several works in the Engen Bestiary blur the line between species and self: a raptor dissolves into a human head, a snake coils protectively or menacingly around a figure and a caged bird forms the torso of a person. These hybrid forms suggest themes of entrapment, metamorphosis and the tension between instinct and consciousness. Mason's pencil marks are delicate yet deliberate, her symbolism layered and elusive. In this bestiary, animals are not just observed -they are absorbed, internalised and made to speak to the complexities of the human condition. The result is a lyrical yet haunting meditation on identity, wildness and the body as both vessel and cage.
Judith Mason, born Judith Seelander Menge in 1938, was a South African artist who worked in oil, pencil, printmaking and mixed media. In 1960, she was awarded a BA Degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Her oeuvre spans various art mediums - from printmaking to drawings to mixed media to oil paintings. She drew inspiration for her artworks from sources like politics, history, poetry and mythology and imbued them with richly symbolic imagery. Mason's first solo exhibition was held at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg in 1964. In 1966, she was chosen as one of the artists to represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale and was included in the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1971 and Art Basel, Miami in 2009. Throughout her career she taught art at the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art and at the Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, Italy. As a testament to her enduring legacy, her works are held in many important local and international collections such as the South African National Gallery, the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and The Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Provenance
The Engen Collection.
Other lots that might interest you
