In the 1980s when Miranda Friedman began her art collection — freshly graduated from Wits in history of art and working at the Goodman Gallery — she and her burgeoning family had more art in their cosy quarters than they did furniture.
Nowadays, her Sandhurst home is filled amply with both, yet her collection of contemporary art still threatens to take over. Every nook hides a gem: pencil drawings by Norman Catherine, a rare figurative utterance from Kendell Geers’ days at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, a small, prehistoric-looking fish carved from wood by the late Jackson Hlungwani.
Sixteen years ago Friedman left the art world professionally and went on to found Women and Men Against Child Abuse, a non-profit organisation that provides advocacy and medical and psychological care for abused children. All this time she has remained a lover of art, a regular at local galleries and an avid collector. “Art is just something I cannot live without,” she says. “The purchase and the collecting and the viewing — it’s always exciting to me. There is a thrill in looking at a piece and thinking, I’m actually going to take you home.”
Having come from a family of art lovers and collectors, Friedman recalls she “grew up around paintings that make you think”. Her grandparents had a taste for Salvador Dali and home-grown surrealists such as Alexis Preller. Feeling that art should also “be part of society”, she donated the Ernest Ullman sculpture, The Playmakers — which stands outside the Joburg Theatre — to the City of Johannesburg.
Her own collection houses a few historical works passed down in the family, but the meat of it is contemporary artworks by local artists, with some very unusual pieces gleaned from exhibitions and studio visits.
One of these is Kendell Geers’ 1992 reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, in which Geers paints a miniature replica of the iconic scene of Christ and his disciples over a ground of Bible pages smeared with bitumen. “It’s a piece that is very special to me,” says Friedman. “I remember I would go to the Bag Factory and watch [Geers] at work. It was 1992 or 1993 and Kendell was going somewhere already then. Those were the days when in South Africa we tarred and feathered people, days of terrible persecution, and I really liked the challenge posed by the bitumen on Bible pages. Religion has a lot to answer for in the world today and if we can’t talk about it and have it to say through art, I think that’s very powerful. I think Kendell once said the only church that enlightens is the one on fire.”
Hanging near to the Geers is a gorilla in a gilded frame, Brett Murray’s 2008 work, Rougue II. This Friedman bought at Murray’s most recent exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, Crocodile Tears (2009). Of this choice, she says: “I bought the work because I looked at the gorilla and he just looked so majestic. I felt that no human could really be as pure. I loved it … the frame was also so very rich and elaborate. I thought it was something you could take home and look at whichever way you wanted to.”
Although most of her shopping is still done at galleries, at last year’s Joburg Art Fair Friedman bought one of Kudzanai Chiurai’s silkscreen-printed political posters, Abuse of Power, which now hangs in a passage outside a bedroom.
She has great faith in the Joburg Art Fair as a catalyst for collecting in South Africa because “it gives you a huge exposure to a variety of art, without making you feel like you’re in any way coming in there with less knowledge than the next person. For me that’s incredibly valuable. It’s putting something out there that there should be more of in this country.”
What’s next on her list? “Now I really need to spread my wings and look at some younger artists … I am very interested in photography at the moment and I’m definitely going to get one of Mikhael Subotzky’s works before his work gets absolutely exorbitant. I thought his latest exhibition on Ponte was phenomenal.”