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

227 613 Norman Catherine SOUTH AFRICAN 1949- Red Rubber Neck Too 2006 signed; inscribed with the artist’s name, title and date on a Goodman Gallery label adhered to the reverse oil on canvas 150 by 120cm R300 000 - 500 000 PROVENANCE Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2006. Private Collection. EXHIBITED The Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Norman Catherine , 16 September to 7 October 2006. Rubber Neck Too was reproduced on the Goodman Gallery, Norman Catherine , 2006 exhibition poster. Throughout his many stylistic evolutions and creative detours as an artist, Norman Catherine has remained true to the human figure. Whether dismembered or restrained, deracinated or knotted, his human subjects also endure – sometimes with the help of bandages and here sutures. This optimism is central to negotiating Catherine’s vivid panoply of characters. The contorted figure in a dapper yellow suit depicted in this lot traces his origins back to a series of psychologically themed paintings from the mid-1980s that portrayed spindly male characters with elongated limbs. In the subsequent decade these anxious and wounded Caucasian figures took on a more bulky physique, first in a series of paintings of menacing men in tight- fitting suits, and later in the 1990s in a series of diminutive sculptures that provided the template for the artist’s current, mature practice. Versions of this elastic man are discernable in works such as Who Do Voodoo (1995), a sculptural assembly of small, hand- painted fetish idols. Whether working on canvas or three-dimensionally Catherine’s interest is in capturing the many “characteristics and pathologies of human nature,” 1 including here the all too human habit of rubbernecking – or rudely gawking – which Catherine’s energetic work thoroughly invites. 1. Hazel Friedman (2000) Norman Catherine , Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, page 123.