Mother And Child ,1966
Procedencia : [Propriété non datée]
- Private collection, Cape Town
Exhibited : Adler Fielding Galleries, Johannesburg, 'Sculpture SA 1900-1967', 12 September 1967 another example from the edition exhibited.
Literature : Feni, D. & Dube, P. M. (2010). 'Dumile Feni: The Story of a Great Artist'. Johannesburg: Motloatse Arts Heritage Trust, illustrated on p.225; Dube, P. M. (2006). 'Dumile Feni Retrospective'. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, the terracotta mould illustrated on p.28.
Notas : The theme of mother and child has both personal and political significance in the oeuvre of Dumile Feni. In its typical (art) historical convention, mother and child conveys fecundity, beauty, and idealized motherhood. This idolization of the mother as bearer of and embodied life was an expressive motif of the filial values and lived experience of a given, convivial social life.
However, in Dumile’s iconography such a visual motif acquires a new materialist valance and interpretation. It asks us to contend with denied filiality. At the level of the personal, it gestures to the loss and mourning of the artist’s mother who died when he was still very young. It can also become a eulogizing and appreciatory device that recognizes the maternal figures in and around his life.
Here the severance of the black family is a natural outgrowth of the political lived experience under conditions of racial subjection. Thus, the recurrence of this theme throughout his art, might be indicative of the presence and inseparability of the personal from political or even the aesthetic from the moral.
The sculpture depicts an intense frontal figuration of dejection and torment not only in how it portrays the subject’s faces, but also in how their bodily forms are distorted. The mother’s arms are wrapped around her child’s body, as she kneels, staring at the viewer with a look of desperation. We can’t escape her despondent eyes. However, the sheer muscular comportment of the mother indicates her latent potential to raise herself from the dirt. She has the power!
Athi Mongezeleli Joja
The work was cast by the Renzo Vignali Foundry as confirmed by the Foundry and by Salome le Roux from the ART-Group and Gerard de Kamper from the University of Pretoria Museums.
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