In the 1930s and 1940s, Gerard Sekoto’s paintings of South Africa’s urban working classes refused white audiences’ exoticising desires, instead advancing a mode of Social Realism characterised by empathy and a lack of sentimentality. Painted during his prolific Eastwood period (1945–1947), Self-Portrait exemplifies the oil technique Sekoto had developed since the late 1930s, expressed in assured brushstrokes and powerful colour and contrast. Dated “14.10.47” on its reverse, Self-Portrait was apparently completed days before his arrival in London en route to Paris, after a two-week voyage from Cape Town. On the verge of exile, having sensitively recorded the ordinary lives of those he refused to cast as victims, Sekoto turns his gaze, in this first known self-portrait, towards the observing artist. Sekoto typically captured subjects engaged in activity, always moving; here, he glances back into the darkness, as his body turns towards the light, evoking the bright future to which powerfully reimagined workers progress in his celebrated and contemporaneous painting Song of the Pick: “I am looking into the future of our country with much anxiety, yet fully determined to live this life as everybody does”.
This is the first time the work of Gerard Sekoto is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
