London – Major works by Ben Enwonwu, Gerard Sekoto and Alexander 'Skunder' Boghossian are among highlights of the Modern & Contemporary African Art sale at Bonhams New Bond Street, London on 20 March 2025.

Helene Love-Allotey, Bonhams Head of Modern & Contemporary African Art Department, comments, "This sale showcases the extraordinary range of work by African artists throughout the continent. From masters of African Modernism to pioneering contemporary photography, the sale offers something for every collector with many rare and exceptional works. A highlight of the sale is Sekoto's The Artist's Brother, painted between 1945-1947, a highly sought after moment in his oeuvre before his voluntary exile from South Africa. Sekoto's contributions were vital to the development of his home country's cultural landscape. It is a pleasure to be offering such a rare and important example of the artist's pre-exile work, and we expect significant interest."

The Artist's Brother: The painting which funded Sekoto's move to Paris and kickstarted an international career

Gerard Sekoto (South African, 1913-1993) painted The Artist's Brother while living in Eastwood, a Black dormitory suburb of Pretoria, between 1945-1947. The work offers an insight into Sekoto's early formal experimentation, as well as suggesting the interplay between tradition and modernity in contemporary African urban life.

Sekoto posed his brother with a deliberate twist in his torso, a self-imposed challenge by the artist still in the early years of his career. Surrounded by canvases, Bernard is situated in the artist's studio, another visual reminder of Sekoto's creative endeavours. He includes an African grass mat in contrast to the suburban furniture in their Eastwood home, suggesting a deliberate interplay between tradition and modernity and Sekoto's understanding that African modernity is firmly rooted in African culture.

From as early as 1939, Sekoto had aspired to work in Paris, which he believed to be the centre of the international art world in the 20th century. By 1947, the escalating racial segregation in South Africa led to the artist's voluntary political exile, a move he would self-fund with the financial success of his most recent exhibitions. This included an exhibition at Christi's Gallery Pretoria in April 1947, where he sold The Artist's Brother. By September 1947, Sekoto had left South Africa for the last time and headed to Europe, where his success only continued to grow. The work is offered with an estimate of £100,000-150,000.

Ben Enwonwu, Dance Movement

For Ben Enwonwu (Nigerian, 1917-1994), communicating the Negritude ideology lay in the form of the black African woman. The sinuous abstraction of a silhouette of the regal female represented his ideal of African culture; beautiful, powerful, and full of creative potential. Surrounded by figures in motion, the focal female subject is depicted with clarity, adorned in jewellery and detailed dress, emphasising her captivating presence. A swirling blue sky and bright streaks of yellow in the primary dancer's dress charge the canvas with energy and movement. Enwonwu masters form and composition, communicating a scene in constant motion.

To the right of the dancers, Enwonwu includes plants, a rare fusion of his talent for landscape and vegetation paintings with his dance subjects, both in one painting. Additionally, a blue headscarf or Gele can be seen behind the central figure, possibly as a subtle reference to the artist's works of Yoruba women including his Tutu series. These artistic crossovers highlight Dance Movement as an amalgamation of Enwonwu's most successful works, condensed into one important and rare painting. The work is offered with an estimate of £120,000-180,000.

Ben Enwonwu, Agbogho Mmuo

Agbogho Mmuo, 1949, depicts a solitary dancer in profile view, a canvas charged with energy through vigorous brushstrokes and bold colours. Representing the flowering of Enwonwu's mature style, the form, composition and themes he established in this early painting recurred in many works throughout his career. The theme of dance sustained Enwonwu's art for almost five decades and this particular work is a rare early example of how deeply the artist mined his Onitsha-Igbo culture for significant forms and symbolic imagery. The work is offered with an estimate of £160,000-220,000.

Additional highlights of the sale include

• Irma Stern (South African, 1894-1966), Old Friends. Estimate: £60,000-90,000. Stern visited Alicante from winter to summer in 1961 to escape the Northern European winter and return to work after a long illness. She and her companion Dudley Welch stayed in the Carlton Hotel, with a sitting room turned into a studio. It was during this time that she painted Old Friends, a work which began as an observational study of local villagers in ballpoint pen and pastel. Struck by the figures' closeness and comfortability, she translated the study into an oil painting on canvas, titling the work Old Friends.

• Alexander 'Skunder' Boghossian (Ethiopian, 1937-2003), Ju Ju's Conference. Estimate: £10,000-15,000. Completed in 1972, Ju Ju's Conference was executed in the same year that Skunder Boghossian began working at Howard University, where he taught painting until 2001 and became a mentor to many rising artists from Africa and the diaspora. Intellectual and academic underpinnings are found throughout his work, as he reinterprets formal practices of Old Master paintings including the Tondo canvas with a synergised expression of his African culture. Ju Ju's Conference evokes a distinctive sense of mysticism through fading light and a flowing composition, as well as Orthodox Christian iconography from Ethiopian and wider African mythology, and is an important example of the artist's recurring cosmological themes. The work was included in Skunder's last solo exhibition held at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York in June 1972.

• Salah Elmur (Sudanese, born 1966), The White Shoes. Estimate: £8,000-12,000. This large-scale work (140 x 128.5cm) expresses Elmur's cultural and personal identity, growing up in a newly independent Sudan. Part of his Kamal Photography series, Elmur uses works such as The White Shoes to celebrate his father and grandfather's photography studio work; he documents the lives of the community he grew up surrounded by in Khartoum, using his childhood memories rather than a camera to capture the characters, colours, scenery, and motifs of his past. The work has been exhibited in Sharjah and London, testament to its prestigious positioning in Elmur's oeuvre.

• Sam J. Ntiro (Tanzania, 1923-1993), Untitled. Estimate: £7,000-10,000. Working as an artist, educator, diplomat, public official and civil servant, Ntiro's contributions are highly important in the development of modern art in East Africa. The first East African artist to hold solo exhibitions abroad, and the first modern African artist to have work purchased by the MoMA in New York, Ntiro's work still remains highly sought after. Untitled is an important example of Ntiro's depictions of Tanzania and offers an insight into the artist's masterful control of colour and composition.

5 March 2025