Strauss & co - 13 November 2017, Johannesburg

329 377 Helen Sebidi SOUTH AFRICAN 1943– The Traditional Lovers signed; signed, dated 2013/14 and inscribed with the title on the reverse oil on canvas 115,5 by 66,5 cm R150 000 – 200 000 A beneficiary of a Fulbright scholarship, and the winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1989, Helen Sebidi is best known for her dazzling surfaces built up in globular, high-relief impasto. The present example shows tender, intertwined lovers, lost in each other’s gaze, surrounded on all sides by an expanse of water, but seemingly joyful and safe. More often than not drawing on traditional rural life and mythology, Sebidi’s work was recently and prominently represented at South Africa: The Art of a Nation at the British Museum in London.