Strauss & co - 2014 Review

Suurbek (2003), which realised the handsome price of R386 512 in October of this year, is one such “little painting”. On what Hodgins would have called a “nasty” pink background and keyed by the anti- literary Afrikaans vernacular of the title, invoking a sour, pinched disapproval, the painting gives us a vivid portrait of a self-satisfied and censorious matron. The effect is achieved through the most unlikely of means: the suggestion of fleshy lips and disproportionately narrowed eyes, an uncertain line finding physiognomy against colour fields of unappealing interiority, a smug self-satisfaction that is given in the childish cartoon-drawing of clasped hands on an empty bosom suggested only by the virtual and clearly censorious third eye of a matronly brooch. This is Hodgins at his most idiosyncratic and his most assured and, speaking as a critic, it is gratifying that the market is giving its endorsement to works like this, depending as they do on subtleties of affect and minimally conjured casts of eye and inflections of observation. More remarkable yet is the record price of R1 818 880 paid for Hodgins’ The Golden Wall , an assemblage of 19 individual oils, formally cemented by six geometric screen-prints, all loosely interconnected on the conceit of a staggered conversation by cell phone. Essentially a collection of individual psychological observations – brought into being in the playoff of minimal but telling line in Hodgins’ characteristically crude drawing style, reminiscent in some ways of the American painter Philip Guston, but in fact owing more to comic books like Beano from Hodgins’inner London youth – the visual drama is rendered in a vivid play of oranges and yellows to powerfully and seemingly spontaneously good-humoured effect. There is much here to delight, from the economy of means by which the individual conversationalists are invoked – bombastic businessmen rendered in pinstripe; a somewhat wispy teacher in front of a blackboard on which the message is inscribed “I must not talk while teacher is on the cellie”; a harlequin; a cleric holding the device like a sacrament; blowsy wives and stolen passions; the thick neck and broader back of a uniformed soldier seen from behind… 57