Hounds Of Hell

Provenance

Stephan Welz & Co, Johannesburg, 20 April 2009, lot 330.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Polokwane Art Museum, Polokwane, Braam Kruger 1950 – 2008, 30 July to 25 August 2009.

UJ Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Braam Kruger 1950 – 2008, 2 September to 14 October 2009.

Literature

UJ Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Braam Kruger 1950 – 2008, exhibition catalogue, illustrated in colour on page 25.

“Braam Kruger dug deep into the Western art canon in his art, appropriating and/or co-opting, among others, David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801), Ruben’s The Rape of Europe (1630) and Delacroix’s Liberty on the Barricades (1830) to create a cheeky brand of postmodern art that, at times, used the past as a prism to reflect on the present.”¹ The present lot, The Hounds of Hell, draws on hundreds of existing images, notably of Cerberus, the mythological creature guarding the underworld, to intimate the dire political oppression of the disenfranchised in the South Africa of the 1980s. An irreverent Kruger gives an almost cartoonish rendering of that monstrous time in our history.

1. ArtAfrica archived review.