Fook Island sticker by Norman Catherine (c1970's)

A piece of South African art history. A Fook Island sticker, created as part of the Fook Island conceptual art project, the brainchild of the legendary South African artist Walter Battiss (known as King Ferd III of Fook Island) and his close collaborator, Norman Catherine (known as the Norman King), who is the artist of this specific sticker.

Fook Island, founded in the early 1970s, was a "utopian, imaginary island" created as a playful but pointed rebuke to the rigid censorship and social restrictions of apartheid-era South Africa. It wasn't just a series of paintings; it was a fully realized "state of mind" with its own:

• Alphabet and Language: (visible in the "Fook script" scattered throughout this sticker).

• Stamps and Currency: Like the sticker

• Passports: Battiss famously traveled the world using his Fookian passport, which was actually stamped by customs officials in the UK, US, and Germany.

About this sticker

• Title: The bottom left corner identifies this specific work as Shadow of Fook.

• Signatures: You can see his stylized "NC" monogram in the bottom right corner of the artwork itself.

58mm x 70mm (the size of a large postage stamp).

R1,250