Lot 54

Claudette Schreuders (South African, born 1973)
Untitled, 1998
Unsigned
Painted Jacaranda wood carvings
32 x 19 x 20 cm
31 x 19.5 x 21.5 cm
33 x 19 x 24 cm
33 x 20.5 x 23.5 cm
KES 1,000,000 – 1,600,000
(US$) 8,000 – 12,800
Provenance: From the Collection of the Ford Foundation, Kenya
Sold KES 1,350,100

Claudette Schreuders is a South African sculptor whose carved and painted wooden diminutive figures reflect the ambiguities of the search for an ‘African’ identity in the post-apartheid era. Her sculpture is rooted in both Africa and Europe and she derives her inspiration for a number of sources including medieval church figures, West African carving and Spanish portraiture.
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Born in 1973 in Pretoria, South Africa, Claudette Schreuders lives and works in Cape Town, where she graduated with an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1998. She was part of the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1999. From 2004-2005 her first solo museum exhibition toured the United States. In 2011 she had a solo exhibition at the LUX Art Institute in California. She has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), Since 2000: Printmaking Now, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), and Personal Affects: Power and Poetics, in contemporary South African art at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York (2004).
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Solo exhibitions include In the Bedroom (2019), Note to Self (2016), Close, Close (2011), The Fall (2007), and Crying in Public (2002).

This series of 4 portraits was made during the first International Artists’ Residency organised by Kuona Trust and held at Naivasha in 1998. The carvings depict the three other artists taking part in the residency, Stanford Watson from Jamaica, Jackson Wanjau from Kenya and Manisha Parek from IIndia, with the fourth carving being a self-portrait of Claudette.