With almost 400 works in the Strauss & Co auction, art lovers' heads will be spinning.
There are works by Pierneef, Preller, Sekoto, Irma Stern (of course), Maggie Laubser, William Kentridge and Cecile Skotnes.
Landscapes, still-lifes, photographs, urban street scenes ... an endless list of genres and styles will be on display at The Wanderers Club in Johannesburg from November 9 to 12, before the auction on the 13th.
Mary Sibande's Her Majesty, Queen Sophie, a 2010 staged photograph of the artist posing as her Sophie character, will be paid some attention since she won the Smithsonian Award for African Art last week.
Naturally this lends more value to this editioned photographic work, as does the fact that Sibande is one of the local artists commissioned to create an installation for the newly opened Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town.
Nevertheless, this work has social or political currency too. In the vein of the previous Sophie character works from 2009, in this scene she enacts a form of liberation for her grandmother, who was a domestic worker.
She references this via her outfit - a white apron and a blue worker's overall. In treating it to some exaggerated flourishes associated with the aristocracy, she claims a position of power and status for her ancestor that would have been denied to her during her lifetime.
