Private C🍸ollection✱, Paris, acquired directly from the artist

London, Bonhams, The South African Sale, 23 March 2011, lot 123

Acqไuired from the above sale by the present owner

Following his departure from South Africa in 1947, Sekoto returned to the African continent in 1966 as a participant in the First Festival of Negro Arts at the invitation of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first President of Senegal. The two had met in Paris as active members of the pan-African movement and proponents of the pಞhilosophy of Negritude.

The Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres took place in Dakar, Senegal, and brought together thousands of artists, musicians, and writers from across Africa and its diaspora, including André Malraux, Aimé Césaire, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker amongst others. In the context of decolonization across Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States, this festival aimed to recognise and celebrate black artists and writers. Sekoto travelled to Senegal with his friend the Brazilian artist Tiberio Wilson, and the two stayed on as guests of the president for almost one yea💝r, visiting rural Casamance to the south and holdin🌠g a two-man exhibition in Dakar, before returning to Paris in 1967, where Sekoto exhibited this body of new work at the Senegalese Embassy in May 1968.

Sekoto was excited to be back in Africa after an absence of twenty years. He was particularly taken with the freedom with which the Senegalese lived and their post-colonial optimism, which was in star💜k contrast to his previous African experience, as a black man in South Africa in the years leading to apartheid. Ironically, it was during his time in Senegal that the South African government revoked his passport, forcing him into mandatory and permanent exile.

Having long drawn on his fading and increasingly nostalgi💧c memories of South Africa, his Senegalese trip provided new inspiration for Sekoto for several years after his return to Paris, as evidenced in the present lot.

The present lot was originally in a private collection in Paris, formerly the proprietor of 'Le Rubens' bistro, Rue Mazarine, Paris. Gerard Sekoto was a regular at this establish and befriended the owner, who purchased several workꦆ𒅌s directly from the artist.