Christo Coetzee (South African, 1929-2000)


The Sugar Egg signed 'Christo Coetzee' (lower left); bears Hanover Gallery exhibition label (verso)oil on canvas18 x 23cm (7 1/16 x 9 1/16in).
|ProvenancePurchased by Alexander Roger Esq. from the Hanover Gallery, London.A private collection.ExhibitedLondon, Hanover Gallery, Christo Coetzee solo exhibition, 1955. The current lot is one of a series of still lifes the artist painted for his first solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, London, in 1955. The show was arranged by the photographer and designer, Anthony Denney, whom the artist had met whilst studying for a post-graduate degree at the Slade School of Art.During the 1950s, Denney regularly featured Coetzee's work in his interior design projects, juxtaposing his abstract paintings with antiques and decorative works of art. He particularly admired Coetzee's surreal still lifes:"The unexpected contradiction of a sharp note of colour, a sudden change of scale and that mysterious rapport between objects of a totally dissimilar nature which defies analysis" (A. Denney, 'Art, antiques and art nouveau', Vogue, 15.5.1965, p.70).The exhibition at the Hanover Gallery consisted of fifty-one paintings and received glowing reviews in the British press. A journalist writing for Time and Tide praised Coetzee's inventiveness and "unusual sense of the luscious possibilities of paint". Twelve of the still lifes were sold before the opening night.BibliographyStevenson & Viljoen, Christo Coetzee: Paintings from London and Paris 1954-1964, (Cape Town, 2001), pp.8-13.