The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2022 Benefit Auction | Hosted by Sotheby’s
The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2022 Benefit Auction | Hosted by Sotheby’s
Refuge
No reserve
Lot Closed
February 22, 05:21 PM GMT
Estimate
3,000 - 5,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Alexandra Karakashian
South African
b.1988
Refuge
signed and dated 2021 (on the reverse)
used engine oil, black pigment and sunflower oil on canvas
150 by 106cm., 59 by 42¾in.
This work has been kindly donated by the artist
Alexandra Karakashian (b. 1988, South Africa) is an artist working through personal and family history. In her work, she draws on her grandfather’s escape from the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and reflects on current issues of exile, migration and refugee-status. Process and materiality is key to her practice.
Refuge is part of a larger series of works where engine oil is painted onto an unprimed canvas. Active and alive on the surface the oil seeps into the canvas creating a halo of fading black oil from its darkest point. It seeps at an imperceptible pace, asking of its viewer to pause and look for longer in hope of offering a space of refuge. Karakashian’s work gains its strength, by paradoxically refusing easy, puerile communication, as her canvases propose a meditation on a ubiquitous and intense relationship on the colour black. In the formal level, among the materials, engine oil, an unorthodox substance able to translate the presence of one of the dynamos of modernity, the era of displacements and exile.