LONDON.- Africa’s leading auction house, Strauss & Co. is hosting their first official London private sale and loan exhibition dedicated to Alexis Preller this march. The public exhibition devoted to ‘Missing Modernist’ Preller on view at Cromwell Place is timed to coincide with Growing Interest in the Missing Modernists of Africa. To be staged at Cromwell Place and open to the public from 5 to 10 March, the show comes hot on the heels of the artists retrospective at the Norval Foundation, South Africa. It is the first time works by Alexis Preller will be celebrated in London, even though the South African artist was in London at Westminster Art school, graduating in 1934.

Kate Fellens, Strauss & Co’s, Business Development Director also has recently relocated to London and pledges to continue work in showcasing artists arguably often neglected outside Africa.

“As collectors increasingly look to broaden their acquisitions, Strauss continues to offer great works of art from Africa at tempting prices,” Kate Fellens commented. “Due to the turbulent history of South Africa and across the Continent during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there are many ‘Missing Modernists’ whose work has not had the attention they deserve. It is with great excitement that we welcome Dr. Alastair Meredith, Head of Art Department & Senior Specialist to London in March who will share great insights about this Surrealist-inspired artists’ work. The available works in the exhibition will start at £30 000.

Alexis Preller (1911 – 1975) was a mid-century South African painter. Born in Pretoria and attended the Boys High School there. After completing school, Preller worked as a clerk before persuading his family to allow him to seek a future as an artist. In 1934 he set off for London where he met JH Pierneef, who advised him to enrol at Westminster School of Art. Returning to Pretoria, he held his first exhibition in 1935. In 1937 he went to Paris and studied art at Grande Chaumiere, under Othon Frieze.

“Over four decades he developed a beautiful and highly personal iconography drawn from Sub-Saharan African motifs and culture, early Renaissance imagery, and the hieratic traditions of Greece and Egypt,” says Dr. Alastair Meredith. “At various points his painting style relied on gentle Post-Impressionism, linear precision, and broad abstraction. His colour combinations were typically off-key and memorable.”

While he worked in relative isolation on the outskirts of Pretoria, he was widely travelled and abreast with European modernisms. He might have had no official links to the Surrealist movement, but many of his meticulously recreated visions and dreamscapes have obvious Surrealist counterparts.

In 1954 he had settled on a farm near Hartebeespoortdam, designed by his friend Norman Eaton. In his last years the artist became increasingly open about his sexuality and was asked by the South African government to sit on its committee reporting on the welfare of homosexuals.