Flora Wirgman
Cataloguer
Lot 32*
Alexis Preller(South African, 1911-1975)Mapogga Wall
9 March 2022, 16:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £20,250 inc. premium
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Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
Giles Peppiatt
Group Head, Fine Art, U.K
Alexis Preller (South African, 1911-1975)
Mapogga Wall
signed and dated 'Preller '53' (lower right)
oil on board
25 x 30.7cm (9 13/16 x 12 1/16in).
signed and dated 'Preller '53' (lower right)
oil on board
25 x 30.7cm (9 13/16 x 12 1/16in).
Footnotes
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist;
By direct descent to the present owners.
The present work illustrates a scene of daily life in a 'Mapogga' village or kraal. Painted in 1953, Alexis Preller illustrates a stylised female figure in traditional dress in front of a façade painted with the distinctive patterns of the Ndebele. From his first encounter with the Ndebele or 'Mapogga' people settled north of Pretoria, Preller strove to represent the indigenous community's rich cultural identity within his practice. The wall paintings of the Ndebele, illustrated here, are a recurring feature in his career-long preoccupation with the 'Mapogga' theme.
Preller understood the wall paintings to be of great cultural significance to South African art. Reflecting on the exclusion of indigenous artistic practices in the Overseas Exhibition of South African Art in 1950, he commented, 'I hope future exhibitions will include such purely South African art as the beadwork of the Zulus and the Swazis, and the paintings done by the Mapogga women. Each year the Mapogga women paint their walls after the rains and the previous designs are lost through lack of documentation. Does any other country let its murals disappear through sheer lack of interest?' (Preller quoted in Esmé Berman and Karel Nel, 2009: p. 142).
In his critique of the exhibition, Preller asserts the vital role of the Ndebele women as the custodians of their community's artistic tradition which he celebrates through the subject matter of the present work.
Bibliography
Esmé Berman and Karel Nel, A Visual Biography. Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows (Saxonwold, Johannesburg, 2009).
