Important South African and International Art

Live Auction, 5 June 2017

Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 625 240
Lot 261
  • Norman Catherine; Predator


Lot Estimate
ZAR 550 000 - 700 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 625 240

About this Item

South African 1949-
Predator

signed and dated 1993

oil on canvas
58 by 88cm excluding frame

Notes

Predatory monsters are integral to Norman Catherine's output. This lot, portraying an anthropomorphic reptile in police uniform, is part of an evolutionary line of surreal animal-human hybrids that date back to the mid-1970s, a period of inventive experiment with painting, sculpture and performance for the artist. Predator (1975), an airbrush painting depicting a realistically described young man in swimsuit with a bird of prey's head, sees Catherine use the mediated human figure to both evoke, surprise and convey existential unease.

After 1976, Catherine's work began to reflect a more explicit engagement with, and critical stance towards, South Africa's social and political realities. His shift from airbrush to oil in the 1980s saw him move from a precisionist style to a looser, less academic approach in his descriptions of the human figure. Energetic and frenzied, his luridly coloured paintings and sculptures from this period are characterised by a graphic, comic-book whimsy. Where Catherine's earlier descriptions of animal-human hybrids were firmly humanoid, his new creatures were more beastly and brutish.

Catherine's idiosyncratic bestiary includes menacing cats, fire-breathing crocodiles and monstrous policemen with sharp teeth, snake tongues and peaked hats. The central figure in this lot is a progeny of the animalistic policemen that featured in a portfolio of six hand-coloured drypoint etchings entitled States of Emergency (1988). Commenting on this portfolio in 2011, Catherine linked his grotesquely stunted policeman character to 'the state of maniacal frenzy and bloodthirsty, animalistic behaviour of the Special Branch Police, who would stop at nothing to keep the status quo. Their demonic grins with forked/snake tongues speak of duplicity and deceitfulness.'1

Catherine's paintings from the early 1990s, the period of this lot, are characterised by attitudes of consolidation, repetition and renewal. While grounded in the deep uncertainties of the political transition of 1990-94, Catherine nonetheless sought to depict more than just the degraded realities of life in South Africa. As critic Ashraf Jamal notes: 'Catherine's art is never merely a vehicle for commentary.'2 Alongside his early-1990s studies of secretive meetings and malicious male figures, Catherine also made paintings that were 'free of irony and agitation,' that were 'introspective, meditative and infused with religious symbolism'.3

The rondavel structure in this lot recurs in works from this period. But it is the monstrous rhino-horned predator who dominates this composition, which is further marked by its anxious red ground. The meaning of this unavoidable protagonist in Catherine's work is thoughtfully parsed by Jamal: 'If we are less than human as J.M. Coetzee has stated, if monstrousness is the very foundation of South African experience, then it is not surprising that Catherine should forego a limited and deceptively transparent realist aesthetic for one richly populated with bizarre and monstrous variations.'4

David Bowie, a noted collector of Catherine, saw in the artist's mature work affinities to art from West Africa and Mexico. By distinction, Jamal sees in Catherine's monstrous figures a debt to classical Egyptian art, but qualifies this reading by adding: 'though Egyptian art is a key influence, Catherine's repertory does not amount to an equivalent integrated mythology. Rather, his is an inspired and degraded bestiary; a secular late-modern art of profanation and de-sanctification.'5

  1. Norman Catherine, blog post for exhibition Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 22 July 2011.
  2. Ashraf Jamal (2001). Norman Catherine and the Art of Terror. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal, page 18.
  3. Hazel Friedman (2000). Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, page 113.
  4. Jamal, op.cit., page 12.
  5. Ibid.

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