London – Major works by Marlene Dumas, William Kentridge and Ibrahim Mahama are highlights offered in the Modern and Contemporary African Art sale in London on 16 October 2024.

Helene Love-Allotey, Head of Modern and Contemporary African Art Department, said: "Our autumn sale showcases the extraordinary range of work from African artists throughout the continent. In addition to Modern masterpieces by Irma Stern, Ben Enwonwu, and Gerard Sekoto, we are delighted to present a vibrant selection of Contemporary art by artists such as William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas, Esther Mahlangu, whose mural will be featured at this year's Frieze, and Slawn, who has a courtyard installation at Somerset House, London during 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. A spectacular installation by Ibrahim Mahama from the Saatchi Collection is another highlight of this very strong sale."

Highlights from Contemporary African Art section include:

Marlene Dumas (South African / British born 1953)
'Billy Holiday', 1993 (six studies), ink on paper. Estimate: £80,000-120,000

Dumas's portraits aim to convey the essence of her subjects and their relationship with the world. In this work comprising six portraits of Billie Holiday, Dumas strips back details to present an unvarnished version of the American singer, that creates a tension between what is displayed and what is concealed. Dumas was fascinated with Billie Holiday's tumultuous lifestory and in how her race and gender influenced the course of it. Living – and witnessing – the malign effects of the South African Apartheid regime herself, Dumas's interest in the segregation laws in the American South and their disastrous effect on Billie Holiday was a further angle to be explored.

Marlene Dumas was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. Since 1976, she has been living and working in Amsterdam and is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary portrait artists today.

Dumas has held solo exhibitions at galleries globally including Tate Gallery in London (1996); solo exhibitions included shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2001); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001); David Zwirner, New York (2010 & 2018). Marlene Dumas is currently on show at Frith Street Gallery in London until November 2024.

William Kentridge (born 1955)
Monument I. Estimate: £200,000 - 300,000

Kentridge's blockbuster exhibition last year at the Royal Academy in London was a spectacular survey of the artist's work which also showcased the range of media he uses in his practice. This image is taken from Kentridge's film 'Monument' (1990) which explores exploitation, passivity, responsibility, and power – and is closely modelled on Samuel Beckett's short play Catastrophe. The work in the sale, Monument I, captures the moment before a statue of a worker is unveiled by mine-owner Soho Ekstein, Kentridge's omnipresent character. As the crowd is gathered awaiting the concealed lonely figure to be revealed, the work crystallises a moment of anticipation.

El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944)
Change Goes On, signed and dated 'EL 1993-2020' carved, incised, scorched, and painted wood panels (in 54 pieces). Estimate: £120,000-180,000

El Anatsui's work is known throughout the world for its language of an African aesthetic. His work is on the global stage and in major international collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

El Anatsui began his artistic training in Kumasi, where he was given a grounding in Western art traditions and practices. Wanting to connect with the arts of his own country, he began to visit the Kumasi National Cultural Centre on weekends. Here he was exposed to weavers, potters, cloth-printers and carvers, all working in indigenous methods.

The artist began to incorporate elements from these crafts into his own work, forging a distinctly Ghanaian aesthetic. This work employs the colours and geometric symbols traditionally used for Asante Adinkra cloth. The age-old Adinkra patterns are counter-posed by modern construction techniques. The planks of wood have been cut with a chainsaw and blackened with an acetylene torch. For the artist, the tearing of the saw through wood functioned as "a metaphor for the way in which the western powers had carved up and brutally divided the African continent amongst themselves, ripping through and destroying both local history and culture".

Ibrahim Mahama (Ghanaian b.1987)

A major installation piece by Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, Untitled from 2013, has an estimate of £30,000-50,000 and comprises 11 draped coal sacks made from jute that hang down from the walls. The work was first exhibited in Pangaea: New Art from Africa to Latin America at the Saatchi Gallery in 2014. It is being offered from the Saatchi Collection.

Born in 1987 in Tamale, Ibrahim Mahama is one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Africa today. Educated at Ghana's prestigious Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (K.N.U.S.T.) with a degree in Painting and a Masters in Painting and Sculpture, Mahama had a work chosen for Ghana's first national pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. His work also featured at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. Additionally, Mahama has had solo exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London – most recently, Lazurus in 2021 - and has created major installation works at Kumasi Railway station. In July 2024, Mahama transformed the Barbican Arts Centre by enveloping the Brutalist concrete walls in 2,000 metres of woven cloth. The work, Purple Hibiscus, was a collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Mahama's birthplace, Tamale in Ghana.

Made in Southeast Asia, Untitled from 2013 is created out of sacks imported by the Ghana Cocoa Boards to package cocoa beans for export. The used sacks are then repurposed to carry animal feed, coal, and charcoal around the country for domestic consumption. Roughly printed or drawn on the surface of the sacks are the companies and traders' names or transit locations by which they travel. For Mahama, the jute sacks are material metaphors for the global circulation of commodities that pass through Ghana and its associated socio-economic inequities. At Bonhams, the work has been installed with the supervision of the artist himself so that the 11 separate sheets are draped and ripple which contributes to a fluid motion.

Slawn (Nigerian, born 2000)
Untitled, 2020 (in 6 canvases) each canvas signed and dated 'SLAWN '20' and individually numbered out of 6 (verso) spray paint and acrylic marker on canvas. Estimate: £10,000-15,000

In a career that has broken traditional artistic boundaries, Slawn (Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale) has carved out his own niche. A cultural icon and entrepreneur extending his practice beyond the canvas, Slawn collaborated with the late Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, and designed the set and award for the 2023 Brit awards. In order to connect with the community, Slawn set up a café in East London which he turned into a cultural hub, where he displayed his artworks. Slawn has also created a large installation at Somerset House during the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair this October.

Untitled, (2020), (estimate £10,000 - 15,000), consists of six panels and is from the period that led to Slawn's rise to fame. Each canvas is different and yet links to the others to present a mural that conveys the urban culture of Nigeria and London. In an amalgamation of line paintings of shapes and cartoon-like figures, Slawn generates his works in both aerosol paint and thick marker pens. Slawn began his career by giving away his artworks at parties or as trophies in his occasional 'fight clubs' whereby studio visits led to fighting matches for art. "It came about from two people being in my studio and I said to them: 'If you don't want to buy [a painting], then you can fight for it."

Other highlights include

Esther Mahlangu (South African, born 1935) Deck 2 2016 estimate £3,000 - 5,000
This work was exhibited at the BMW Pavilion at Frieze in 2016.

Two works by Atta Kwami (Ghanaian, 1956-2021) Untitled (Pampaso) (estimate: £7,000-10,000) and Of Tones Deep and Blue (estimate £6,000 - 8,000) are also in Modern and Contemporary African Art Sale.
Born in Accra, Kwami's geometrical compositions and broad brushstrokes bear a resemblance to the paintings seen on Northern Ghanaian shops, houses, signs and woven textiles.

Highlights from Modern African Art section include:

The Modern section of the auction includes a bouquet of dahlias by Irma Stern from 1935; a poignant interior scene set in Sophiatown in the late 1930s by Black South African painter, Gerard Sekoto and ten remarkable works by Ben Enwonwu, one of which, FESTAC '77, was inspired by the Second World Black Festival of Arts and Culture, one of the first festivals of art and culture to be held in Nigeria.

FESTAC '77 by Ben Enwonwu (estimate £300,000 - 500,000) was inspired by FESTAC 1977, (the Second World Black Festival of Arts and Culture), a cultural initiative focused on African art, and the artists' role in promoting African aspirations. For Enwonwu, the woman's three-quarter profile and regal posture represented his ideal of African culture; beautiful, powerful and full of creative potential. The picture is reminiscent of Enwonwu's most famous portrait, Tutu of the Ife princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, which Bonhams sold for £1.2m in 2018, a world record for a Nigerian painting.

Irma Stern's Dahlias, 1935 (estimate £400,000 - 600,000) was first shown in her exhibition at the Criterion Restaurant Ballroom, Johannesburg in 1935, and was among a series of paintings of flowers that were hailed by contemporary critics as "full of depth, of light and shade and of gracious loveliness. The gladioli, the magnolias and the dahlias are exquisite".

These are the first monumental flower pieces by the artist – Dahlias is a substantial 90 x 94in – and the first works of Stern's that are clearly composed in terms of colour. No longer content to use colour descriptively, in this work Stern created colour combinations – and harmonies – that explore differing emotional conditions while also describing form. The flower pieces she made at this time marks Stern's emergence as perhaps the finest colourist in South African art.

Gerard Sekoto painted Interior with Woman c.1939 (estimate £120,000 - 180,000) in Sophiatown, a suburb of Johannesburg, where he lived from 1939 to 1942. As a Black South African, Sekoto's life in Sophiatown was an opportunity to immerse himself in urban culture. Having come from a more rural background, Sekoto felt he needed to know more about society in this cultural hub. Sekoto produced a prodigious amount of work in different media in the years he was there.

Interior with Woman, conveys a sympathetic curiosity about the living conditions of his Sophiatown subjects. In a domestic space, a woman rests from her labours while her family is at work. The lack of electricity in the house has given Sekoto the chance to explore the emotional and dramatic potential of sunlight flooding through billowing curtains. The mood is uncertain. But, for an artist who had only recently started working in oils, the painting exhibits extraordinary sophistication in the way the objects are depicted in the light - and the sense of light occupying space.

30 September 2024