Strauss & co - 2015 Mid-year Review

Maggie Laubser Lake Garda Sold R568 400, 16 March 2015 Gregoire Boonzaier Bo-Kaap, Overlooking Table Bay Sold R1 136 800, 1 June 2015 ©The Estate of Maggie Laubser | DALRO Boonzaier’s position as South Africa’s pre-eminent painter of cityscapes is guaranteed, above all, in the vital quality he introduces into lifeless materials. In Boonzaier, the stones remember and the spaces and structures they define swell, pulsate and contract with memory and human use to make up something like a crazy-paving bricolage of the heart. There is a boundless optimism about Maggie Laubser’s view of Lake Garda that starts out in a jaunty tracery of branches and tree trunks, the planar dabbings of green and yellow foliage, and translates into saliboats in a wide and limpid bay. Laubser’s captured moment is more than sufficient – in the proscenium arch in which the swaying sails are framed – unto the day, and more than sufficient to the painterly exuberance of the artist’s canvas. There is nothing, indeed, that is remarkable about Laubser’s composition but in the repleteness of that rounded moment, there is a transcendence of sorts, something that lifts the picture as the picture lifts the spirit – and, in the same gesture, also the value fetched by Laubser’s work at auction. 15