Seated Nude

Provenance

Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 9 November 2021, lot 297, with the title Woman in a Landscape.

Notes

In Robert Hodgins Seated Nude a solitary female nude figure occupies the centre of the canvas, suspended within an ambiguous setting of luminous turquoise and pale blue. The flattened horizon line and compressed pictorial space evoke both interior and exterior simultaneously, creating a stage-like setting characteristic of many of his paintings. He ingeniously draws attention to the torso of the woman with the black outline of the chair as a picture within a picture.

In works depicting seated female nudes, Robert Hodgins strips away conventional notions of beauty or sensuality. The seated pose, traditionally associated with repose and often idealising the human form, it becomes in his hands something far more ambiguous, introspective, uneasy or even confrontational. The figure appears isolated, vulnerable and exposed as embodiments of emotional and existential unease.

Even in apparent stillness, his figures possess a charged theatricality, as though caught between exposure and concealment.