Strauss & co - 16 October 2017, Cape Town

298 601 Cecil Skotnes SOUTH AFRICAN 1926-2009 Head and Figure Landscape, from the Brandberg Wall series executed 1993-1995 signed acrylic and pigments on panel, in the artist’s handmade frame 28,5 by 61cm; 51,5 by 84cm including frame R  –   PROVENANCE Purchased from the artist by the current owner. LITERATURE Neville Dubow, Michael Godby, Stephen Gray, Frieda Harmsen, Elizabeth Rankin and Pippa Skotnes. (1996) Cecil Skotnes ; South African Breweries, published privately in conjunction with the 1996 Cecil Skotnes Retrospective Exhibition at the South African National Gallery. Illustrated and page 115, figure 6.4 and 123, figure 6.9. Chapter 6 “One can discern a progression, a process in which figures in a landscape give rise to a refigured landscape ; a process where the landscape itself becomes a pictorial trope, a configuration of the anthropomorphic and geomorphic. From 1993 through to 1995 he worked on a series that he has designated ‘Head and Figure landscapes’. The visual traces suggested by these encompass a wide range of associations - bleached bones, rib cages, rock markings, boulders split apart. Cleft rockfaces suggest fossil markings, underlying structures. They are about time, about records, about structures that underly structures. There are shifts of nuance. Heads become boulders and boulders become headlands. Morphologically and metaphorically these are meta- landscapes, landscapes of the mind.”Neville Dubow. ©The Estate of Cecil Skotnes | DALRO