Strauss & co - 26 - 28 July 2020, Online

77 246 Olaf Bisschoff SOUTH AFRICAN 1976– Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 2020 signed, dated 2020 and inscribed with ‘Picasso’on the reverse oil on board 99 by 99 cm R30 000 – 50 000 ITEM NOTES In this work, the artist refers to Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which is widely regarded as having changed the course of art practice and ushered in the possibility of total abstraction. The large oil on canvas is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has been more studied, more emulated and more derided than almost any other work in art history. 247 Olaf Bisschoff SOUTH AFRICAN 1976– The Sleeping Gypsy 2020 signed, dated 2020 and inscribed with ‘Rousseau’on the reverse oil on board 99 by 99 cm R30 000 – 50 000 ITEM NOTES This work makes reference to the famous painting, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), by French ‘naïve’artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). That work depicts a lion approaching a sleeping woman and her mandolin in an imaginary desert landscape on a moonlit night. The work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This series of works is a celebration rather than a statement of the fact that there is ‘nothing new’ to be made art-wise. Falling squarely into the modernist revival, these paintings test already used images in another painted setting. The works function in an idiom of painting that has been re- hashed before, and certainly will be again. The artist attempts homage to modernist abstract painting and appropriates well-known art work titles, giving the series of works a certain ‘back to school’flavour. Out-of-place-objects are introduced into ‘painted out-of-place’ landscapes: sometimes the landscape is completely elimi- nated to make way for expressions of pure form and colour. Colour use and a sense of ‘automatic’ composition are at the forefront. 1 1. Adapted from the artist’s statement, 2020.