Ground (Cu) ,2000
Estimate (low-high) :
Exhibited : Standard Bank Gallery, No. 1 Jan Smuts Ave, Wits staff group exhibition, 2001.
Everard Read, group exhibition, 2008.
Notes : The present lot and lot 158 are two small portraits. Their titles, Ground (Cu) and Ground (Al), refer to the dissolution of the traditional figure-ground relationship that would ordinarily foreground the figure, or sitter in the case of portraiture. In these portraits, the material surface shifts and slips between giving shape to an image of the sitter and denying any such definition, asserting the paint and mineral surface as the viewing ground. The tension between figure and ground and the interplay between them also alludes to the polarities in portraiture between life-like representation and post-death commemoration, of physical body reduced to dust. These two works are both portraits of Wilson Mootane. Two other paintings from the artist's Infra-red exhibition at the Gertrude Posel Gallery in 2002, also using metal shavings, are in the Johannesburg Art Gallery collection.
