Strauss & co - 16 February 2019, Cape Town

36 22 Berni Searle SOUTH AFRICAN 1964– Flight, from the Seeking Refuge series signed, dated 2008 and numbered ED 2/5 in pencil in the margin archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper image size: 102 by 144 cm; sheet size: 112 by 154 cm R30 000 – 50 000 FOR LOTS 22–24 EXHIBITED Stevenson, Cape Town, Berni Searle: Recent Work, 4 September to 11 October 2008. National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa curated by Karen Milbourne, 22 April 2013 to 5 January 2014. Searle’s video Seeking Refuge was on this exhibition. Photo credit: Tony Meintjes. LITERATURE Virginia MacKenny. (2013) ‘Land Matters’, Art South Africa , vol.11, No. 4, Winter. Page 44. ITEM NOTES In the Seeking Refuge series: ‘Berni Searle does not take the viewer to a place that one can com- pletely recognise. The specificity of the location is often too surreal to be pinpointed. The landscapes show no traces of human life except for her presence. The colour, the coating, the hiding, emerging and covering [of her body], as well as the moun- tain, the ocean and the air show the desire to stay, in that her body gives the gesture and posture of that which could be interpreted as a rooting or connecting to that place.’ 1 In an attempt to seek refuge in an alien environment, Berni Searle inserts herself in a bleak landscape defined only by such basic elements as air, water, and earth. In Flight , the first in a series of works titled Seeking Refuge , her black scarf