The Garden of Delights

The Garden of Delights was made during a fertile creative period in Coetzee’s career. His experiments with ‘informalism’, and an initial trip to Japan in 1960, had led him to the Gutai group of experimental painters, with whom he would exhibit in Osaka in 1960. A painting from this collaboration would later be shown at the Art of Assemblage show at MOMA in New York.

A subsequent long sojourn in Paris produced significant solo shows, and group shows with artists like Dorothea Tanning and Yves Klein. Coetzee produced this piece in a Neo-Baroque mode that had become important in his work at this time, immediately prior to his return to South Africa, via Spain, in 1965. 

Artwork courtesy of Pretoria Art Museum.