Alexis Preller
The Rain Queen is one of Preller’s many Mapogga paintings, which took as subject Ndebele women distilled to pictorial sign. The composition is echoed across several paintings made the following year – among them Ritual Mapogga, Grand Mapogga I and Grand Mapogga II (all 1951). That Preller depicted the same figure in near-identical compositions is unsurprising – he often made multiple versions of his paintings with only subtle variations, pursuing a more perfect image in each iteration. His Mapogga women, transposed onto canvas, became for the artist, “a figure through which I can convey what Africa means to me.” To Preller, the Mapogga were closely associated with matriarchy, mysticism, and the longevity of traditional cultures. All share the same form, with a small oval head and elongated body wrapped beneath blankets, appearing as a single figure made multiple.
b.1911, Pretoria; d.1975, Pretoria
Only a single, modest monograph of Alexis Preller’s paintings was published in his lifetime; his work largely regarded as too enigmatic to find broad appeal. It evaded the categories of modernism, being neither surrealist nor symbolist, but surreal and symbolic. In Preller’s paintings, recurring objects and figures appear as unclear signs, their significance known only to the artist. He referred to these visual motifs as ‘household gods’, as talismans of creative impulse. An egg, candles, bowls and shells – these are the humble totems around which his compositions are arranged. In subject, Preller pursued an imagined exotic. Where many of his early paintings describe a mystical Africa, his later works considered the iconography of ancient Greece and early Christianity. In all, he looked for metaphors of a spiritual innocence, for animism and magical thinking. He is remembered, in the words of art historian Esme Berman, for “the brilliance of his colour, the luminous magic of his imagery and the extraordinary richness of his independent vision.”