Photographer earns his stripes with R1.7m SA record

This is SA’s most expensive photograph.

The shot by Athi-Patra Ruga sold for R1,707,000 at an auction on Saturday at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.

Strauss & Co director Bina Genovese said two determined bidders drove the price for the 2013 photograph, The Knight of the Long Knives, to six times its pre-sale estimate.

“The remarkable sale price not only set a new world record for the East London-raised artist, but also marked the first time a photograph has ever sold for more than R1m at a local auction,” she said.

“Ruga was thronged by well-wishers when he attended the Investec Cape Town Art Fair the day after the sale.”

Genovese said the 35-year-old’s record was one of six set at the sale for SA art.

“The top-selling lot after Ruga was an early student work by painter Marlene Dumas, a portrait of her lecturer Dimitri Fanourakis, which sold for R1,593m, a new South African record for the Amsterdam-based artist,” she said.

“A remarkable colourist landscape painted in 1997 by Robert Hodgins rounded off the top three, fetching R1,024m.”

Genovese said younger painters and photographers shone in the sale, with painter Mustafa Maluka’s 2008 portrait You Say the Things You Think You Have to Say, selling for R477,960.

“Collector interest in Georgina Gratrix remains high, with two works by this young Cape Town painter placing in the top 10 lots sold. Bride Dressed as Cake, an energetic expressionist study of a smiling bride, sold for R261,740, while Ed with Bubbles, an affectionate portrait of artist Ed Young, fetched R250,360.

“Other young painters who performed well at the sale included Zander Blom, Mia Chaplin, Alexandra Karakashian, Banele Khoza, Simphiwe Ndzube and Pierre Vermeulen.”

The sale confirmed the auction status of Blom, whose large 2014 abstract work Untitled 1.627 sold for R250,360, and established benchmark prices for Karakashian, Khoza, Ndzube and Vermeulen.

Photographs by Jane Alexander, David Goldblatt, Zanele Muholi, Mary Sibande and Wolfgang Tillmans also performed well, said Genovese.

David Goldblatt’s 1975 black-and-white photograph of two park-bench sitters in Johannesburg was the first lot to go under hammer and fetched R170,700.

A 2006 colour photograph by Goldblatt of a farm at Seweweekpoort, near Ladysmith in the Western Cape, sold for R341,400, and Zanele Muholi’s masked self-portrait Isililo XX went for R113,800.