Johann Louw

Provenance

Everard Read, Cape Town.

Property of a Gentleman.

Notes

"Louw is part of a younger generation of South African artists who have re-engaged with figurative painting in a very robust and direct manner. Louw's figures are locked into indeterminate spaces of bleak isolation, rendered with dense, crusted pigment that magnifies and monumentalises the sense of exhausted existentialism of the work. In this painting, the dog, a symbol of companion-ship and fidelity, is reduced to a crudely rendered lump of flesh that teeters off the edge of the picture plane while the figure, almost overwhelmed by his clothing, stares into the distance."¹

¹Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, unpaginated.

Literature

Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated, cat. no. 27.