Strauss & co - 16 February 2019, Cape Town

124 99 Johann Louw SOUTH AFRICAN 1965– Two Men Against Wall signed, dated 95 and inscribed ‘Woodstock’ on the reverse oil on canvas 60,5 by 170 cm R100 000 – 120 000 PROVENANCE Purchased by the current owner from the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery, Cape Town, November 1996. EXHIBITED Sanlam Art Gallery, Bellville, Johann Louw: A Mid-Career Retrospective , 19 September to 2 November 2007. Travelled to: Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria; Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein and SASOL Art Museum, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, 2008–2009. LITERATURE Stefan Hundt (ed.) (2007) Johann Louw , Cape Town: Sanlam Life Insurance Ltd. Illustrated in colour on pages 26 and 27. ITEM NOTES Following the completion of his Masters degree, Louw departed from Neo-expressionism as a visual vocabulary toward more simplified, monumental compositions rendered in a monochromatic palette. Painted in 1997 during the turbu- lent early period of South Africa’s new democracy, this diptych is part of a powerful body of work featuring men in dramatically compressed and psychologically charged interiors, tempting some to read into its socio-political undertones. ‘The use of a palette, almost entirely reduced to shades of gray, dominates Louw’s painting in the middle to latter part of the 1990s … The reduced palette and amorphous interior spaces inhabited exclusively by men create an atmosphere of conspiratorial foreboding.’ 1 1. Stefan Hundt. (2007) Johann Louw, Cape Town: Koerikai Document Solutions. Page 6.