Other noteworthy art lots sold included two undated flower studies by Frans Oerder, a master of this evergreen genre. Italian contemporary artist Nicola Samori’s mixed-media composition Revenant III (2004) sold for an estimate-beating R293 125. The top-selling art lot was Alexis Preller’s fetching watercolour and mixed media composition Sketch for the Flower King, which sold for R351 750. The art department earned a combined total of R6.3 million in sales, with a satisfactory lot sell-through rate of 65%. “We are thrilled with the amount of competitive bidding that took place throughout the auction, which resulted in fantastic results for a number of artists, specifically Heather Gourlay-Conynham, Alexis Preller and Lionel Smit featured in the portrait session, as well as Frans Oerder and Nicola Samori,” says Strauss & Co art specialist Arisha Maharaj, who coordinated the art department’s bumper six-session art auction. The three specialist auctions, which ended at staggered intervals on 14 March 2022, attracted interested buyers from a dozen countries and netted a combined total of R7.3 million.

Like, for example, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin or the sculptor Adriana Varejão, Samori occupies the Grand Guignol corner of the contemporary artworld-with its interest in shocking, and deformity and body parts-an area related to the grotesque.A delightful bounty of 2012 vintage wines, historical English and Cape country furniture and eye-catching portraits by South African painters offered by Strauss & Co in a trio of online-only auctions yielded excellent results. In this way, these works reject not only art but also anti-art, including themselves.

These works can be seen as an attack on a specific period of art, or they can be more widely interpreted as a ferocious dismissal of all types of art, sweeping the whole concept of art practice to one side. Sometimes he also removes the faces of portraits from other supports and attaches them flipped over on to new heads to create voided 'holes' as in Il veleno nelle ombre (2010).

The wounding is assisted by his admiration for modernist artists like Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, who are known for 'mutilating' basic painting support materials, and also his interest in moulage, where he creates hideous skin diseases or injuries.

It is an emotional and physical attack on the cumulative weight of art history pressing down on contemporary European artists, believing in the power of 'irresponsibility' and 'wounding' to hit back-a retaliation in search of freedom. Samori ridicules those civilised painted images by turning them into objects of pity or revulsion, as evidenced by Seer (2011), Agnese (2009), June 27 (crowned) (2014), and Ciclope (2020). He specialises in a form of aggressive baroque art that humiliates the neoclassical tradition exemplified by 17th-century Old Masters in the Netherlands and Bologna.

Nicola samori prints for sale