Main Street, Port Elizabeth

Provenance

Russell Kaplan Auctioneers, Randburg, 30 July 2022, lot 4595.

Strauss & Co, Online, 18 September 2023, lot 20.

Notes

“There is a quality of coldness and reticence in some of Karstel's paintings, a quality rendered proficiently and gracefully through interplay between things realistic and abstract. Take for example his photographs of South Africa's major urban centres depicting street scenes of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth. In paintings such as Main Street, Port Elizabeth, we detect a sense of absence or disappearance of the evidence of materiality in the fading architectural structures and urban streets. As such, the depicted cities have become mysterious. In a review of this exhibition, Andrew Lamprecht reflectively analysed Karstel's cityscapes as follows: 'Formal elements-massive urban structures represented through small fragmented brushstrokes in gorgeous deep golden hues invest the canvases with an ambivalent and somewhat melancholic air: It is as if Karstel wishes to rewrite the grey seemingly neutral fin-de-siècle photographic archives of a century ago with a post-colonial context at the turn of a new century.'"¹

^1. Marelize van Zyl (ed) (2009) Anton Karstel: Paintings and Photographic Installations (1989-2009), exhibition catalogue, Stellenbosch: SMAC, page 31.