Strauss & co - 16 October 2017, Cape Town

300 603 Erik Laubscher SOUTH AFRICAN 1927-2013 Evening Landscape signed and dated 66 oil on board 121 by 159,5cm R  –   PROVENANCE Acquired from the artist by the current owner’s father. In 1970 the prolific author and critic, Stephen Gray, wrote an appreciation of Erik Laubscher for the journal Lantern in which he described this Paris-trained painter as “one of South Africa’s leading abstract landscape artists”. Laubscher, noted Gray, “is at his best when capturing disappearing spaciousness and distance. His eye and the clear Cape light resolve planes of land down to essentials; the colouring, though not the content, is virtually psychedelic.”This was still a relatively novel insight in 1970. A decade earlier, in 1961, when Laubscher was still best known for works portraying interlocking abstract forms, he described his work as “essentially concerned with movement, volume, tension – the juxtaposition of forms.”By the time he painted Evening Landscape in 1966 Laubscher had rejected this austerity in favour of making abstracted horizontal studies of the undulating topography of the Swartland and Overberg regions. His planes of colour, some visibly overpainted, record the hard borders of human presence and industry. In a 1965 interview appearing in the Cape Times Laubscher described how his treatment of landscape was still informed by a two-dimensional understanding of pictorial space: “The moment you use perspective your eye travels to a certain point and there it stops and the painting becomes static. I am more concerned with expressing infinite space.”As Gray noted, this meant trees, animals, fences and human figures were not welcome: “There can be no obstacle to the direct experiencing of the landscape into the raw.” * All quotes from Stephen Gray, Erik Laubscher and Landscape , Lantern, March 1970, pages 12-20.