Seated Nude with Oranges by South African artist Irma Stern and a birthday card by another South African artist, Marlene Dumas, are to be auctioned in Bonham’s South African Art sale today for an estimated price of between £800,000 and £1,200,000.

Irma Stern was born in the Transvaal but spent much of her childhood in Germany where she studied art in Berlin and Weimar. In 1917 she met Pechstein and exhibited in the Berlin Sezession exhibitions in 1918 and 1920 , the year in which she returned to South Africa.

From 1927 she lived in The Firs, Capetown, which is now a memorial museum. Ms Stern’s prolific œuvre may be divided into European and African subjects, the product of her own multicultural experiences. She painted in an Impressionistic manner until c. 1916 , when her work became more Expressionist, and, after the early 1930s, in an immediate and personal representational style ideally suited to exotic subject matter.

Marlene Dumas lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Ms Dumas tends to paint her subjects at the extreme fringes of life’s cycle, from birth to death, with a continual emphasis on classical modes of representation in Western art, such as the nude or the funerary portrait.

By working within and also transgressing these traditional historical antecedents, Ms Dumas uses the human figure as a means to criticise contemporary ideas of racial, sexual and social identity.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Ms Dumas was raised on her family’s vineyard just beyond the city limits in the semi-rural Kuils River region.

As a student of painting at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Arts during the early 1970s, Ms Dumas gained exposure to the decade’s preoccupation with conceptualism and art theory.