Strauss & co - 10 - 11 May 2020, Cape Town

223 PROVENANCE Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby’s, Johannesburg, 12 May 2003, lot 509. Die Kunskamer, Cape Town. Private Collection. EXHIBITED Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, The Safest Place is the Knife’s Edge: Christo Coetzee (1929-2000) , 5 October to 1 December 2018. LITERATURE Willhelm van Rensburg (2018) The Safest Place is the Knife’s Edge , Johannesburg: Standard Bank, illustrated in colour on page 72. “It was during this time that Coetzee was fortunate to study in Japan on a British Council grant. He was introduced to the post-War Japanese avant-garde group, the Gutai Art Association, founded by Yoshihara Jiro in 1954. Yoshihara’s manifesto of 1956 maintains that ‘Gutai art does not change the material; it brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other even though they are otherwise opposed to each other.’ This exposure proved to have a lasting influence on Coetzee’s art. He was in step with the Gutai’s notion of embodiment of the materiality of the medium, as well as their experiments in installation art and/ or performance art, which is evident in the slashing of his work in 1975… What is of particular interest in his work at this time is the manner in which he assembled his paintings, using manufactured as well as natural objects such as bicycle parts, ping pong balls, egg trays, coins, wire mesh and even twigs and butterfly wings, creating assemblages that reside in the intersection of painting and sculpture.” 1 1. Willhelm van Rensburg (2018) The Safest Place is the Knife’s Edge , Johannesburg: Standard Bank, page 57.