Will fine artist Marlene Dumas’ Kindvrou piece offered at the next Aspire Art’s CapeTown auction sale repeat her 2017 performance?

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

Fierce bidding is expected to take place next week, March 16 2022 at Aspire Art’s next auction in Cape Town, for one of the country’s leading artist Marlene Dumas’ art piece titled Kindvrou
The estimate: ZAR 1,800,000 – 2,400,000, although it is not unusual for prices of prized art works shooting through the roof during the excitement of bidding live.

After all, this now Amsterdam based South African practicing artists made history in this country in recent years when one of her paintings broke a South African record, a whopping selling price of R7.2 million, by the same auction house in 2019.

This is in addition to her the spectacular performance of her works at prestigious overseas auction floors, for example with her 1995 painting titled The Visitor was sold by Sotheby’s for £3.1m, making Dumas the most expensive living artist. Often the artists goes under the radr of big publicity glare, and yet for collectors and curators, she is one of the most prized living artists. Her works are known to be disturbing, as she often explores the dark side of life so many practicing artists today sometimes avoid because of the perceived risk of commercial failure associated with the art market in this century, which is increasingly becoming commercial driven.

Dumas however has gone against that norm as collectors and curators simply love her works, impressing many such globally.

And there is no surprise that Aspire is excited to be auctioning their new Dumas find,

“As one of the most celebrated living artists today, Cape Town-born and Amsterdam-based artist, Marlene Dumas, has produced an extraordinary body of work from her earliest paintings in the 1970s through to her internationally celebrated exhibitions of recent years.
Dumas painted Kindvrou in 1974/5, prior to her moving to the Netherlands in 1976. An extraordinary work, it is comparable to Irma Stern’s The Eternal Child (1916) in its painterly treatment and in the intensity of its subject. Interestingly, both artists were aged 22 at the time they produced these arresting works of girl children. Dumas’ unique technique, utilising scumbled painting to achieve smudgy contours, accentuates this liminal phase between childhood and adulthood.

Kindvrou also has much in common with another of Dumas’ works, Love Lost (1973/4) which was sold by Aspire Art in 2019 for just over R7.2 million – currently the South African auction records for the artist. Both are early works that focus intently on compelling narratives involving female figures as their central subject. The enduring appeal of a woman or a child as subject throughout art history is evident in both these paintings which prefigure the primary direction in which Dumas’ works were to develop,” Aspire Art says ahead of the auction sale..

Kindvrou features in the upcoming auction of Historic, Modern & Contemporary Art in Cape Town on 16 March 2022. The auction comprises an outstanding curated collection of 111 works by 74 artists from South Africa and Africa. Among the other significant offerings are William Kentridge’s Drawing for Mine; A Green Girl by Robert Hodgins; Ayana Jackson’s powerful photograph Destruction; early paintings by George Pemba; Edoardo Villa’s Fortress Figure and Sydney Kumalo’s Mother and Child sculpture.