Flora Wirgman
Cataloguer
Lot 28*
Gerard Sekoto(South African, 1913-1993)The Bicycle
9 March 2022, 16:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £40,250 inc. premium
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Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
Giles Peppiatt
Group Head, Fine Art, U.K
Gerard Sekoto (South African, 1913-1993)
The Bicycle
signed and dated 'G SEKOTO/ 73' (lower right); titled 'THE BICYCLE' (verso)
oil on board
40 x 31.5cm (15 3/4 x 12 3/8in).
signed and dated 'G SEKOTO/ 73' (lower right); titled 'THE BICYCLE' (verso)
oil on board
40 x 31.5cm (15 3/4 x 12 3/8in).
Footnotes
Provenance
Acquired in Johannesburg, 1975;
Thence by direct descent to the current owner;
A private collection, France.
The bicycle recurs as a dominant motif in Gerard Sekoto's oeuvre. It appears in the artist's early depictions of daily life in District Six (Cape Town), Eastwood (Pretoria), and the suburbs of Johannesburg (as in his masterly painting Three figures with bicycle. Sophiatown (circa 1940-42) offered in the present sale). Sekoto returned to the theme years later during his self-imposed exile in Paris.
Despite the artist's geographical distance from his native country, Sekoto asserted the enduring significance of his experience as a young man living in South Africa: '[a]ll that I do, even outside of South Africa, is still with the eye, the heart and the soul of the lands of my birth' (Sekoto quoted in Lindop, 1988: p. 242). In the 1970s, he drew upon these early memories in a body of work that illustrated painted scenes of everyday life in the townships. As evidenced in The Bicycle, the figure of the cyclist persists in these works but is depicted in Sekoto's later style which embraces a softer colour palette and a more lyrical handling of form than employed in his paintings from the 1940s.
While the artist recognised the evolution of his practice across the decades, he also identified a continuity in his approach to painting these scenes of daily life in South Africa. He noted that works from 'both periods still retain the endeavour to express the movement [within the scenes] and the desire to search into the innermost feelings of my subjects' (Sekoto quoted in Lindop, 1988: p. 284).
Bibliography
Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto (Randburg, SA, 1988).
