Strauss & co - Wits Art Museum

WITS ARTS MUSEUM ENDOWMENT AUCTION 31 20 David Goldblatt (b.1930) The sports field, Merweville Digital print, pigment inks on 100% cotton rag paper 112 x 137,5 cm Edition 1/10 2009 Donated by the artist R90 000 – 120 000 A central figure in the history of photography from South Africa, David Goldblatt produces incisive visual critiques of the country’s social and cultural landscapes. While maintaining an aesthetic connection with his large corpus of black and white landscape photography from the 1960s and 1980s, The Sports Field belongs to Goldblatt’s more recent colour photographic projects. Work from this particular Merweville series was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in South Africa in Apartheid and After, which included photographs by Ernest Cole and Billy Monk. The Sports Field depicts the characteristic Karoo-veld landscape surrounding the Western Cape town of Merweville into which two different soccer pitches encroach. A wall segregates their unique qualities. The grass of the pitch on the inside of the wall appears alien to the landscape yet more appropriate for the sporting activity of a soccer match.  PD