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Lot 185^*

Ablade Glover
(Ghanaian, born 1934)
Woman in Red (framed)

Modern & Contemporary African Art

12 October 2023, 14:00 BST

London, New Bond Street

£5,000 - £8,000

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Ablade Glover (Ghanaian, born 1934)

Woman in Red
signed and dated 'Glo/93' (lower right); further inscribed and numbered 'ablade glover'/ '14' (verso)
oil on canvas
99.6 x 99.5cm (39 3/16 x 39 3/16in).
(framed)

Footnotes

Achieving a distinguished career both nationally and internationally, Ablade Glover's distinctive style has become widely recognised in the contemporary art stage. Synthesising his most iconic techniques, with the thick impasto and a palette that focuses on the depths of a primary colour (in this case red), we are presented here side profile of a female figure. Therefore, the present work eloquently displays the artist's talent and most recognised elements.

Woman in Red significantly presents us with a focused testimony in comparison to Glover's crowd scene paintings. More intimate given the scale of the subject, there is an emphasis here on an individual who is otherwise generally positioned as a component of his wider crowd scenes. Set against a crowd, with smaller figures in the background, the perspective her emphasises the central figure. Her anonymity remains innkeeping with the artist's style given her profile angled away from the viewer. This philosophy of anonymity integral to Glover's work is driven by political criticism, in the artist's view, how people are treated as "faceless masses...without power" in post-colonial Ghana. (Ablade Glover, in Thembinkosi Goniwe's introduction, indivisible, Ablade Glover, Cape Town: Christopher Moore Gallery, 2016).

Bibliography
Gerard Houghton, Ablade Glover: Selected Works, Celebrating the artist's 75th year, (London: October Gallery, 2009)
Thembinkosi Goniwe, indivisible, Ablade Glover, Cape Town: Christopher Moore Gallery, 2016)

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- African Modern & Contemporary Art