Roses & Grapes ,1986
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Note : Still life paintings often celebrate the pleasures of life. Roses and fruit provide evidence of the joys of life as much as they are reminders of its brevity. The mandolin, with ancient origins in the musical bows of prehistoric France and the bowed harps of West Africa, is played and enjoyed with varying instruments and styles across the world. But Coetzee would most likely have heard the mandolin in Spain, where he spent a good deal of time each year after acquiring his home in 1965 in Finestrat, in the Valencian province of Alicante on the Mediterranean coast.Painted in 1986, this sumptuous painting explores the romanticism of his Spanish worldview in found objects representing European cultural history and art. However, in tying the mandolin to the stretcher of a painting, Coetzee affirms his radical determination to challenge the conventions of painting by including the back of a canvas in the composition.
Emma Bedford
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