Apr 03 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2698 -

Sale 2698 - Lot 154

Estimate: $ 200,000 - $ 300,000
JOHN BIGGERS (1924 - 2001)
Death and Resurrection.

Oil on linen canvas, 1996. 1016x1524 mm; 40x60 inches. Signed and dated, lower right.

Provenance
Private collection, Texas, comissioned directly from the artist (1996).
Swann Galleries, April 14, 2019, lot 156.
Private collection, Connecticut.
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Additional Details

John Biggers's Death and Resurrection is an important and beautiful painting from the artist's twilight years, a wonderful example of the rich complexity in composition, subject matter and symbolism in Biggers' late paintings. Here, Biggers continues to the develop the important theme of the celebration of life and death that he first explored in the 1950s - found in his seminal paintings Web of Life and Jubilee: Ghana Harvest Festival.

In the 1990s, Biggers displayed a fluency in rich symbolism derived from his study of African cultural practice, with Death and Resurrection serving as its culmination. Its composition includes a procession of women carrying goods on their heads, mothers carrying babies, lines of shotgun houses and the river teeming with turtles, herons, water lilies and fish, rendered in the patterns and colors of African fabric. Biggers scholar Dr. Aliva Wardlaw has written how he further references various African traditions inDeath and Resurrection, including the gelede masks from the Yoruba, the Horus symbols on the headresses from ancient Egypt, and printed patterns found in traditional South African dress. The striking scene is bathed in a dramatic red light from a fiery setting sun. This rich panorama of African tradition overwhelms the modern urban skyline tucked in the upper left corner. Alvia Wardlaw describes how in Biggers' Death and Resurrection "it is apparent that he is continuing to explore the mysteries of life and death while drawing upon so much of his earlier imagery and iconography to develop the work."

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