Strauss & co - 16 February 2019, Cape Town

121 96 Conrad Botes and Brett Murray SOUTH AFRICAN 1969– AND 1961– The Voodoo 2001 signed twice with the artist’s initials ‘CB’ painted wooden sculpture, reverse glass painting, metal and plastic wall lights 150 by 150 cm, approximately (5) R80 000 – 120 000 EXHIBITED Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Conrad Botes , 10 April to 26 May 2002. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue, unpaginated. LITERATURE Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes. (2006) The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook , Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Illustrated in colour on page 210. ITEM NOTES This lot offers a distilled sense of Conrad Botes’s early sculptural prac- tice. In 1999, Botes, a co-founder of the occasional comic and ‘zine Bitterkomix , initiated a collabora- tion with Brett Murray on a series of sculptural wall lamps. The rockabilly characters featured in the Boogie Lights series drew on Botes’s noir comic-book style. Emboldened by the lights’ success, in the early 2000s Botes began making painted wood sculptures that loosely quoted the style of West African colon stat- ues. The central feature of this lot is an icon shrine with decorated, hinged doors enclosing a bathetic devil-Christ figure. The shrine is flanked by three steel cut-outs in the style of the Boogie Lights. Manufactured by Murray, they depict a heart and two gender-distinct cartoon interpretations of Richard Drew’s widely circulated 2001 photo of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in New York. Sean O’Toole TWO VIEWS OF LOT 96