Strauss & co - 2016 Review

Repatriating Adam from New York was incredibly exciting. Having known the work only from monotone photographs and, like so many Preller followers, always assumed it lost, seeing full- colour snapshots of it hanging in a Manhattan staircase was a wonderful surprise. I won’t forget the moment his enormous crate was opened in our office. Professor Karel Nel joined us, and there was a weighty silence as the sarcophagus- shaped fibreglass moulding was revealed. It was an amusing disentombment, and some of the deliverymen were left a little perplexed at our reactions. Adam ’s listed value in some of the estate inventories was set at $200, and one can only imagine that the hard-to-find signature was overlooked while it was catalogued. That he fetched R6 820 800 at our November sale in Johannesburg was a great result, of course, and one hopes he re-appears sometime in the future in a museum setting, which is where he belongs. Thanks to Preller’s radical use of gesso and negative relief, Adam changes significantly as one moves around him. He has unique crossover appeal. I can’t remember another work receiving so much attention from the hundreds of visitors that attended our lectures and previews in the build up to the sale. I love the fact that he hung alongside post-war giants like David Hockney, Robert Indiana, Fernando Botero, Anish Kapoor and Kenneth Noland in New York, but I’m very pleased he’s back home. Alastair Meredith is a fine art specialist at Strauss & Co, Johannesburg. Alastair Meredith on Alexis Preller 52