Andrew Verster
Durban Picasso II
About the SessionStrauss & Co is delighted to present Andrew Verster: Gorgeous and Free, a landmark timed-online auction devoted exclusively to the celebrated Durban painter, educator, critic, and activist Andrew Verster. This collection serves as a focused snapshot of a prolific career, offering new generations an opportunity to engage with an artist who was a prominent figure in the 1980s. It is a chance to explore a body of work that is deeply compelling and a tribute to the legacy of an artist of such significant contributions.
The 38 lots on offer span the full breadth of Verster's creative output. We are thrilled to present a comprehensive selection that includes his characteristic oil paintings, watercolours, a captivating sculptural door piece, and five monumental tapestries created in collaboration with Stephens Tapestry Studio. Each piece reflects a singular visual language, rich with a distinctive chromatic exuberance and an unapologetic vision.
Leading this outstanding collection is Expulsion, a four-panel tour de force from 1987. This powerful artwork, with its vividly coloured wilderness and hunched male figures, revisits the biblical expulsion from Eden, reinterpreting the narrative through the lens of queer desire. This was a profoundly courageous and dignifying gesture in apartheid South Africa. The aesthetic beauty of Verster’s work often belies the quiet but fearless political messages embedded within, demonstrating how he navigated an oppressive social landscape with subtlety and strength. His bold use of colour and intimate scenes also show a clear debt to painters like David Hockney.
This auction reaffirms Verster’s vital place within a lineage of queer South African painters, including Edward Wolfe and Alexis Preller. This catalogue delves deeper into his body of work and his place in art history, solidifying our commitment to championing significant South African artists.
ZAR 2 500
About this Item
signed, dated 76, inscribed with the title in pencil and embossed with a 'K' chopmark in the margin
Provenance
Estate Late J Jaakke.
Private Collection.
Notes
Openly gay and comfortable existing outside of the mainstream, Andrew Verster often found kinship in things that didn’t quite belong. The palm trees that line Durban beachfronts, a recurring image in his work and visible in this work and lot 2, are not native to the city. They arrived from elsewhere, took root, and became part of its visual language, just as Verster did.
Throughout his career, he found himself drawn to India. He once described having “two Indias” in his life – “Little India, the Durban that has been my home for over forty years – and the other one that I got to know recently.”1 For him, Durban was a place of overlap and contradiction, a halfway house between cultures, identities, and ways of seeing. The palm trees stood as quiet witnesses to this complexity: foreign yet familiar, decorative yet enduring.
While many artists left Durban in search of better opportunities, Verster stayed. He made a career in what he called "the backwaters," claiming space for himself in a city that, like the palms, had learned to absorb what didn’t quite fit. It was a choice rooted in pride, defiance, and a deep understanding of what it means to belong and exist differently.
1 Carol Brown (ed) (2008) Past/Present: Works by Andrew Verster from 1994-2008, exhibition catalogue, Durban: Orange Juice Designs, page 30.
More from Andrew Verster: Gorgeous and Free
