Bride

A painting titled Bride by South African artist Christo Coetzee (1929-2000). While Coetzee lived in Spain, he worked extensively and produced large paintings of women and experimented with faces. Not many of these works still exist, as he reworked most of these again in the late 1970s. In the case of the Bride, Christo reworked this work on Perspex, which he attached to the front of the painting. The piece of Perspex was completed in 1979. Short biography: The Johannesburg born artist, Christo Coetzee (1929-2000) pursued his art studies at the Slade School of Art in London, as a complementary tuition exercise to his fine art degree qualification acquired from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. At the time most of his artworks of art were mainly stylized figurative images and the subject of still lifes. After that, he relocated to Europe on a government travelling scholarship becoming part of the Stadler Stable in Paris, France before moving to Finestrat in Spain. Later, Coetzee visited Japan where he was invited to join the Gutai Group, the first radical art group in post-war Japan. Coetzee adapted and developed his later art style, which ultimately classified him as South Africa's leading and most prominent avant-garde artist. Coetzee received international recognition for his contributions to the avant-garde art movement known as Art Informel, Assemblage and Neo-Baroque in Paris, Spain and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Coetzee hoped to perfect this art style. The Christo Coetzee collection in its entirety was bequeathed to the University of Pretoria as he passed away at the age of 71 in 2000 in the small town of Tulbagh in the Cape, South Africa.