Notes

Accompanied by a signed catalogue produced by Goodman Gallery. 

Born in Johannesburg, but forever a son of Durban, Andrew Verster remains one of the country’s most versatile and underappreciated artists. Having trained at the Camberwell School of Art in London in the late 1950s, and thereafter at Reading University, he went on to hold teaching posts at the University of Durban-Westville and Durban Technikon. In 1976 – that tumultuous year in South African history – he turned to painting fulltime. Examples from his near-sixty-year career are gloriously diverse: hazy, searing hot beach scenes; neon-tattooed body silhouettes; monotone erotica; macho, Richard Hamilton-esque pop collages; carefully incised, Indian-inspired still-lifes; and, of course, luscious and electric-hued visions of dense, semi-tropical flora. While Verster always considered himself a painter first and foremost, he worked across various media with some ease and extraordinary success. Yes, he sculpted and he wrote, but he also designed large-scale tapestries, opera costumes and theatre sets; he even envisioned stained glass windows, decorative doors and chandeliers. Importantly, he was always alive to an artwork’s space, its context, and its audience. A willingness to take on site-specific commissions led to several remarkable works: banners for the first official ANC Conference within South Africa in 1991; tapestries for the Reserve Bank and Rhodes House; not to mention the architectural flourishes at the Brenthurst Library and the Constitutional Court. He also decorated more private spaces. The current lot, a magnificent and riotous tangle of vegetation – vast, transportive and bursting with colour – is surely the most impressive of these to have been unfixed and brought to market. Measuring over 6m in length, and more than 2m high, this multi-panelled mural provided a spectacular backdrop to the late Judge Alan and Brenda Magid’s upper-floor dining room in Berea, Durban. The sections were measured up to fit perfectly across the longest wall of the room, while the artist’s instinct for scale and harmony determined the length, movement and luminosity of the vines, stems and leaves. Besides his outstanding legal career, the esteemed patron, Judge Magid, was a keen historian, trustee of the KZN Performing Arts Trust, and an admirer of Verster’s work. After taking silk in 1981, Magid made headlines when, in 1987, he was granted by the courts unprecedented permission to interview Nelson Mandela as a witness in the defence of 13 ANC activists. With the experience gained through the Apartheid years, by the early 1990s, Magid was more aware than most of the paradisical promise of a new South Africa, as well as its abiding fragility. The commission coincided with a particularly coherent and decorative phase in the artist’s career – now often referred to as the Fragile Paradise period – that was characterised by sinuous plant forms and dazzling colour. Related works were exhibited across three consecutive shows: Swamps, Hillsides and Islands (Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 1990), Fragile Paradise (NSA Gallery, Durban, 1990) and Hotlands (Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg 1993). Commenting in the introduction to one of his catalogues, Verster summed up his feelings at the time:

'My aim … was to find a metaphor in the marks of paint for my feelings, to create an energetic and beautiful world which would be like no other I’d seen. The words ‘Fragile Paradise’ touched a raw nerve, they evoke so many things that I feel are happening now, the new energy in this part of the world – and elsewhere – so many possibilities in ourselves, yet always the potential for destruction, finding paradise or losing it … about remote Edens that had forever remained the same, but which today are threatened …'

Provenance

Commissioned circa 1994 by Judge Alan Magid and Brenda Magid.

Estate Late Judge Alan Magid and Brenda Magid.