Norman Catherine (South Africa 1949-) Hotel Babylon ,1998
Provenance : [Propriété non datée]
- Private collection, Johannesburg
Exhibited :
Literature :
Notes : Notes: In 2000, the Goodman Gallery produced a book on Norman Catherine which, twenty-two years later, remains a stellar study of contemporary South African art, and an invaluable asset for all art collectors, not least because of the foreword by David Bowie. The great rockstar too owned one of Catherine’s libraries of wooden curiosities. That one of these, Hotel Babylon (1998), is up for sale is thrilling. No South African artist ranks as highly in the global Pop idiom, none has more hilariously examined white colonial mischief or the perversities of black power. Hotel Babylon is an invaluable assemblage, not only because it is an exquisite slice of Catherine’s irresistible punctuality – his ‘Nowness’ – but because no artist, in this manically distressed and restless moment, better typifies both an African and global condition. Catherine’s surreal figures are a mirror image of Fanagalo – a lingua franca that combines Nguni languages with English and Afrikaans and a result of indenture and migrant labour. A syncretic makeshift language, and, as such, wildly loose and irreferential. Doubtless, in Catherine’s menagerie Bowie saw a number of alter-egos. This is because Catherine’s personae are psychic projections and representations – they manifest the dark human undertow, the instinctive, venomous, hilarious, and macabre. In the introduction to the book, Norman Catherine, I reflected on “the innumerable gashed, howling, serrated mouths”, their acidic expressions caught “in a rictus of demonic pleasure”. Catherine’s hard-edged cut-out technique, the strange ‘laughter’ that galvanises his sculptures that veer “from the mildly comic to the absurd to an affect hauntingly predatory”.[1] In this regard, Hotel Babylon is an exemplary congregation of Catherine’s dystopic brilliance. Ashraf Jamal [1] Jamal, A. (2000). Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, preface. Collections: The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Javett Art Centre, Pretoria and The Haenggi Foundation Inc., Basel.
Condition_report : The overall condition is good. Minor surface dirt.
