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

230 615 Robert Hodgins SOUTH AFRICAN 1920-2010 The Witch in her Domain signed, dated 1995/7 and inscribed with the title and ‘For Graham Flax on his 21st birthday’on the reverse oil on canvas 41 by 51cm R120 000 - 160 000 This spare composition by Robert Hodgins typifies his economy of means as a painter. A barely human figure with aquiline nose, button-like blue eye and burnished-wood complexion is depicted in profile in a bland interior setting with a window ajar. The artist’s approximation of a cat takes fright at the anthropomorphic shadow cast by the painting’s imposing central figure in a pink dress. The air of domestic disquiet is complicated by the presence of a noose, which Hodgins emphatically delineates against an undifferentiated slab of red. What do all these elements together amount to? Hodgins rarely painted with binding intent. His distinctive characters – pinstriped executives, decorated generals, punch-drunk boxers, cloistered wives – would often emerge from a smudge of marks and colours. Hodgins’s associative way of arriving at a figure was informed by his love for Philip Guston, whose cartoonish style, formal restraint and gallows humour he much admired. 1 It was also guided by his enduring sense that “history is lived near the bone. It’s not something that happens outside your studio.” 2 Hodgins frequently depicted hangmen and gallows from 1985 onwards. This lot was started in the year capital punishment was abolished in South Africa. It was gifted to collector Graham Flax, a friend of the artist, around the time of Flax’s fiftieth birthday. In 2013 a transgender woman murdered Flax in Sea Point. 1. Kathryn Smith (2012) ‘Some General Rules: Robert Hodgins in Conversation with Kathryn Smith’, in A Lasting Impression: The Robert Hodgins Print Archive , Johannesburg, Wits University Press, page 117 2. Ivor Powell (1984) ‘One of my own fragments: An interview with Robert Hodgins’ De Arte , No. 31, September, page 37.