Strauss & co - 5 March 2018, Cape Town

200 498 498 Julius Mfethe SOUTH AFRICAN 1956- Chicken and Duck, two branded with the artist’s initials carved wood height: 4,5cm; height: 7cm (2) R  –   PROVENANCE A gift from the artist to the current owner’s mother. 499 Julius Mfethe SOUTH AFRICAN 1956- Baboons, two branded with the artist’s initials carved wood height: 5,7cm; height: 4,2cm (2) R  –   PROVENANCE A gift from the artist to the current owner’s mother. Julius Mfethe was born of Mpondo parents who hailed from Dedeni in Lusikisiki, north of Port St Johns on the Kwa-Zulu Natal coast. Coming from a family of highly skilled craftsman, Mfethe’s father and two brothers were grass weavers. Like so many of his generation Mfethe was a migrant labourer who found employment on the platinum belt in Rustenburg where he worked as a ‘shisa boy’who was responsible for laying charges of dynamite. It was here that he started carving his small wooden sculptures modelled after those of his mentor, Enoch Mantebana, who used to sell his work on the pont in Port St Johns. Returning to Kwa-Zulu in 1975 he took up sculpting full-time, becoming acclaimed for his realistic, anatomically correct renderings of domestic animals and Mpondo people in scenes from everyday life. 499 As Juliet Armstrong notes, “His method of construction was interesting and meticulous, using the simplest of tools. His skills with accurate proportion, gesture, stance, and anatomical refinement were so practised as to become intuitive”. 1 Armstrong met Mfethe in the early 2000s whilst on a field trip to Port St Johns, where they became instant friends. For the remainder of his life, Mfethe would visit Armstrong in Pietermaritzburg with prolonged stays in the cottage of her home at 40 Ridge Road. These two lots were produced over the course of 2007 and 2008, during one of these visits where he would sit and carve in the shade of a giant camphor tree in the garden. 1. Juliet Armstrong (2008-05-15). Julius Mfethe: Obituary. Pietermaritzburg, The Witness .