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.