Strauss & Co will present a rare and revealing body of early work by internationally celebrated South African artist William Kentridge during its Johannesburg Flagship Auction Week. A suite of 15 wildlife drawings, commissioned in 1985 for Mobil’s (now Engen) Cape Town headquarters and held in the Engen Collection, will be offered in a live sale on Monday 17 November 2025 at 19:00 SAST.
Approaching his thirtieth year, Kentridge produced these drawings following a pivotal return to studio practice in 1984, a creative resurgence encouraged by dealer and family friend Reinhold Cassirer. The commission — arranged by architect Louis Karol — captures a formative moment in the artist’s development: work at once technically disciplined and imaginatively daring, ranging in mood from the comic to the melancholy and occasionally prophetic. One striking image of an overturned rhinoceros anticipates motifs Kentridge revisited decades later in his public sculpture Over My Dead Body.
While Kentridge’s long-term interests in human behaviour and political narrative are well documented, animals — literal, symbolic and allegorical — recur across his early practice. In the mid-1980s these figures appear in major works such as The Conservationists’ Ball (1985) and The Boating Party (1985), and even in satirical cartoons he contributed to The Weekly Mail under the playful pseudonym “PH Chere.” For the Engen commission, the artist drew on South Africa’s canonical wildlife reference books and the observational rigour of his classical training — a foundation established under educator Bill Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation — to produce drawings that balance expressive gesture with careful form.
Influences such as Goya, Daumier and the German Expressionists are visible in the emotional charge of these works; yet the Engen suite also highlights a quieter discipline born of life-drawing practice. The resulting drawings offer collectors and scholars rare insight into Kentridge’s early method and thematic preoccupations — the experiments, marks and representational choices that would evolve into the internationally recognised practice he is known for today.
Auction & viewing programme — Strauss & Co Johannesburg Flagship Week 2025
Live sale
-
William Kentridge — Drawings from the Engen Collection
19:00 Mon, 17 November 2025 SAST (live auction)
Evening sale
-
Modern and Contemporary Art
19:00 Tue, 18 November 2025 SAST
Online sales
-
Day Sale — Modern and Contemporary Art (closes 14:00 Tue, 18 Nov 2025 SAST)
-
The Starcke Collection of African Art (closes 14:00 Wed, 19 Nov 2025 SAST)
Public viewings (open daily)
-
Daily: 09:00 – 16:00
-
Saturday 15 Nov: 09:00 – 16:00
-
Sunday 16 Nov: 09:00 – 16:00
Venue: Strauss & Co, 89 Central Street, Houghton, Johannesburg.
Collector events: Join the Strauss & Co art specialists on Saturday 15 & Sunday 16 November at 11:00 for in-depth explorations of the works and artists featured in the sale.
To browse, register and bid, visit www.straussart.co.za.
A rare collecting opportunity
The offering of this 15-work suite from the Engen Collection is unusually significant: corporate commissions from this early period are scarce on the market, and suites that directly trace an artist’s developmental arc are prized for the clarity they bring to later, more celebrated works. For collectors, curators and students of modern and contemporary art, these drawings provide an uncommon view of Kentridge’s experiments with narrative, form and the animal figure — a foundational chapter in a career that has altered the global cultural landscape.
