Download PDF PHILLIPS de PURY & COMPANY ANNOUNCES THE HIGHLIGHTS
FROM MUSIC
AUCTION OFFERING MUSIC-INFLUENCED CONTEMPORARY
ART, EDITIONS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORABILIA
SPECIAL DJ SET BY JOE GODDARD AND ALEXIS TAYLOR
(HOT CHIP) ACCOMPANYING THE DAY SALE
SALE DATE: DECEMBER 10, 2010 5 PM, 7 PM
VIEWING: DECEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 10, 2010
LOCATION: Phillips de Pury & Company, Howick Place, London, SW1P
1BB
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
London - Phillips de Pury & Company is pleased to announce the highlights of
the forthcoming London Theme auction MUSIC on the 10th December 2010.
Following on from the success of MUSIC 2009 Phillips de Pury & Company
continue to offer works that emphasize the link between art and music. The Day
sale comprises 115 lots with a low estimate of £344,150/$ 548,919 and a high
estimate of £497,750/$793,911. The evening sale will comprise 19 lots with a low
estimate of £815,000/$1,299,925 and a high estimate of £1,162,000/$1,853,390.
During the Day Sale there will be a special performance by Joe Goddard and
Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip) who will DJ to accompany the auction.
Joe Goddard, one half, along with Alexis Taylor, of a core duo that have had the
name Hot Chip since they played Pavement and Spacemen 3 covers at Elliott
School, Putney where they first met in their early teens. Through Hot
Chip, the English Electropop band, they have released four studio albums—
Coming on Strong, The Warning, Made in the Dark and One Life Stand.
"We are thrilled to be presenting our second annual MUSIC sale. While last year
we had Matthew Herbert accompany part of the live auction with MUSIC, we are
very excited to have Joe and Alexis from Hot Chip do the same." Simon de Pury,
Chairman Phillips de Pury & Company.
“Phillips de Pury & Company has always been at the forefront of bringing new
and challenging art and culture into the public realm. This MUSIC sale aims to
explain the extraordinary synergy between art production and Music making.
From Idris Kahn's reworking of classical music scores to Christian Marclay's
translations from the audible to the visual. This sale highlights through
contemporary art and photography that these two parallel art forms exist as one”
Henry Allsopp, Worldwide Director of Curated Sales and Exhibitions.
Highlights of the sale include:
Damien Hirst’s, Beautiful Hours Spin Painting VI, 2008 estimated at £250,000-
350,000. “I’ve always had an interest in the music biz. I got my interest in art from
album covers. I was painting album covers on mates’ jackets at school. I loved
The Beatles – Peter Blake and Sgt Pepper, Andy Warhol and the Velvet
Underground.”
It is life and death that we recognize as the most frequent obsessions in Hirst’s
work, and the present lot demonstrates both. In Hirst’s
Beautiful Hours painting,
symbols for life’s fleetingness are crossed and multiplied: a skull with clocks for
eyes, simultaneously solidifying and dissolving; the canvas depicting a soupy,
painterly big bang from which the skull is birthed – and into which it conversely
recedes. The painting invokes the spirit of vanitas still life, the 16th and 17thcentury
painterly tradition which gathers motifs of clocks, skulls and rotting fruit
to guarantee its message is not misread; all roads lead to the same place.
Presently, a message which pushes beyond a one dimensional reading of
mortality, one that could be used to summarize Hirst’s interests generally: death
is certain, death is eternal; but also, death is beautiful.
Idris Khan’s Rachmaninoff…Preludes, 2007 estimated at £35,000-40,000. Idris
Khan’s work is a cryptic play of appropriation and re-creation, profoundly rooted
in questions of authorship and time. Khan starts by photographing a range of
existing works, subsequently digitally layering and manipulating the images to
produce a final piece that evokes new thoughts concerning the original content
and opens up room for interpretation. He uses analog and digital photographic
techniques to appropriate existing images, text and musical scores from cultural
luminaries, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann
Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, Caravaggio, William Turner, Sigmund Freud
and the Holy Quran. These figures act as literal building blocks, with which Khan
can create a single composite image.
In the present lot, Khan uses musical scores from the Russian composer and
pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff. The individual notes and staves have become
almost indecipherable and recognizable only on close inspection. The numerous
layers have created lines of engulfing energy, leaving a spectre of the original
image. The once flat page of music has metamorphosed and become animated by
the accumulative interventions of the artist’s hand. Such direct interventions
imbue the present lot with a painterly sense; it pulsates with energy. Khan’s work
can be conceived as a homage to the art, literature and music that has influenced
him and the world around him.
Martin Creed’s, Work No. 134: Largo, larghetto, adagio, andante, moderato, allegro,
presto e prestissimo, 1995 estimated at £35,000-45,000. For over twenty years,
conceptual artist Marin Creed has combined wit and humour in his instinctive
anti-materialist artistic practice. While indebted to the Minimal and Conceptual
art movements from the 1960s, the Turner Prize winning artist’s work is infused
with playfulness reminiscent of the Dadaists and the Surrealists. Predating his
iconic
Work No. 227, The lights going on and off, the present lot,
Work No. 134, is
an early exploration of the banality of everyday life and everyday existence using
the incessant repetitive ticking emitted from a set of metronomes.
Simultaneously beating at a different speed, each metronome maintains a
consistent tempo around a fixed beat thereby creating a collective dissonant
cacophony from an individual rhythmic precision. Expanding upon Minimalist
notions of repetition and progression using sound, Martin Creed perfectly
achieves with
Work No. 134 the concept of controlled chaos and chance which
permeates his entire oeuvre. In addition to depicting the hopeless romantic ideal
of the eternal, the metronome’s perpetual monotone clicks raise fundamental
questions about the relationship between art and music.
Gregor Hildebrandt’s, Pictures of You (Cure), 2007 estimated at £18,000-22,000.
“There are no colors per se, in the direct or conventional sense of the term but
these recorded tape ribbons could be considered a musical painting. The
support remains a canvas, the glue is applied with paint brush, and the
placement of the glue always plays an essential role in how the cassette tapes
will therein be organized. When you really get down to it, it really consists of
painting. But I often call them collages, as I find the expression more chic. I see
myself as an artist, rather than a painter. But I can’t disown painting, it is the root
of my work.
“[…] I feel close to Manzoni or Yves Klein, for example. My link with these artists
is built on a reflection about space and painting. When someone looks at one of
my larger collages, they can see there an evocation of the firmament. The small
white marks, which are the material beginnings and endings of every song, can
refer to stars. And clearly, the space is the black surface. Klein was a kind of wild
type and everybody used to tell him that above is black, not blue. I would say,
who cares? For an artist, the idea builds the legitimacy, which is crucial.
“I’ve been thinking about paying homage to Klein. I would like to take on the idea
of the Anthropometries, with the naked women covered in paint, who whored
themselves on the canvas. Klein realized this work while an orchestra was
playing, it would make sense considering what I’m focused about in my own
work. Yeah, well, I still have to discuss that with my girlfriend…”
(Gregor Hildebrandt, from an interview with Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, 2
November 2010, http://stilinberlin.de).
John Armleder’s, Untitled (FS 245), 1990, estimated at £60-000-80,000. John
Armleder was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1948, although not a musical
practitioner himself – he plays no instrument – he admits that what appeals to
him is not only the way instruments sound but also the visual aspect. “I like the
fact that the instruments stay the same. They have been like that forever. The
electric guitar does not need to look like that anymore. The technical part moves
on but this brings in the aesthetic. Because of the way they look, they become
more a formal element and they become fetishes, recalling who has played them.
The musician’s significance also produces meaning’. Untitled (FS 245)
incorporates the geometric patterns that Armleder appropriated during the 1970s
alongside the concrete musical object, presented here as a formal element.
Appropriation is something that Armleder has unashamedly used throughout his
career incorporating variously Op-Art-like decoration, Suprematist composition,
De Stijl design and Minimalist pattern, at one time or another. To Armleder’s
career of over 40 years, appropriation is an enabling process that allows him to
continue his investigations and practice.
George Condo’s, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1999 estimated at £60,000-80,000.
George Condo may well be best remembered for being the artist whose cover art
for Kanye West’s
My Dark Twisted Fantasy was almost censored, as Wal Mart
allegedly threatened not to sell the album depicting a man resembling West with
a naked phoenix. This polemical image is in the same style that has led Condo to
become one of the most sought-after artists of the 21st century. Ironically, the
fearlessness that makes his work so sought after in the art market is the very
thing that has led to his seemingly fraught encounter with the music industry.
Jenny Holzer’s, Selections from
Truisms (1977–79) and
Survival (1983–85), 1997
estimated at £80,000-120,000.Holzer is an artist celebrated for her use of words.
Her statements and aphorisms have been projected onto buildings and
monuments all over the world. Marking the beginning of her
Truisms series,
Holzer devised numerous slogans which played on commonly held truths and
clichés. Her eventual, now signature, use of electronic advertising boards,
typically displaying messages such as ‘ambition is just as dangerous as
complacency’, is to be seen in the present lot, which shows selections from
Truisms (1977–79) and also
Survival (1983–85). The work was made by Holzer for a
benefit organized by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and EMI Records in
1997. It is one of the few unique LED works by the artist. Her message, ticking
repetitively along the sign, is almost charmingly hypnotic, until the viewer tries to
decipher it: “Dependence can be a meal ticket” it challenges. Her messages are
at once familiar and bizarre; as such, Holzer’s mash-up of clichés infiltrate the
mind easily at first, then boggle from inside. Here, her looped message meets an
intervention of metallic seriality: twenty-four symbols, aligned on a frame in a
continuous succession. The symbol, used by the highly successful pop musician
Prince, marks the result of the musician’s legal battle with Warner Bros over the
artistic and financial control of his career. The resulting symbol thus represents
not only the musician and his work, but corporate bullying and commercial
intrigue. A pictorial truism, the symbol forces his fans to really consider what’s in
a name.
ARMAN’s Untitled, 1972, estimated at £80,000-150,000 Executed in 1972,
Untitled
is an iconic assault on art and culture in the artist’s signature style. We are
presented with a cello in shattered parts, suspended in time as if at the point of
explosion. Through the act of destruction, or rather deconstruction, and reordering
of this instantly recognizable object, Arman explores ideas about
creation and new perspectives of reality. A technique which echoes the
principles of Cubism and Dadaism and was propounded by the movement that
Arman was closely associated with – Nouveau Realisme, new ways of perceiving
the real. With this work, Arman prompts the viewer to question and re-evaluate
our understanding of the world by presenting us with a series of confounding
statements: a musical instrument that is deprived of its functional ability to play
music; an instrument permanently silenced and frozen in time by Perspex yet
presented in a way in which the sound and movement of an explosion is emitted;
the deliberate destruction of a classic musical instrument which society has
been taught to revere and the role of the artist/creator in this act; the annihilation
of aesthetic beauty in a instrumental form only to be repositioned into permanent
anarchic splendour.
Billy Childish’s, Self-Portrait, 2005–06, estimated at £12,000-18,000. Billy
Childish follows a different path to that of most artists. His prolific creative
practice encompasses not only painting, but also poetry, photography, writing
(including several novels) and music (with over 30 recordings to his name). He
pioneered a fusion of punk and blues and has been the lead figure in numerous
bands, including Thee Milkshakes (1980–84), Thee Mighty Caesars (1985–89) and
Thee Headcoats (1989–99). His paintings are for the most part figurative selfportraits,
and indeed the basis of his practice throughout all of his work has been
biographical or autobiographical in some form. The early influences on his
painting, especially the work of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, are clear
in the broad, even urgent brushstrokes with which Childish applies the paint and
in his colour palette – his whole approach in fact echoes the anxiety and
pressure of emotion that we associate with those earlier painters. The work of
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Die Brücke provides another resource for Childish’s
vision – the raw expressionism of the angular features, for example, in the artist’s
face and eyes seen in the present lot are typical in their reworking of an earlier
master.
Two works by
Vanessa Beecroft will feature in the sale:
VBKW.16.JJ, Los
Angeles, 2008 estimated £12,000-18,000 and VBKW.14.JJ, Los Angeles, 2008
estimated at £12,000-18,000. The performance, VB63/VBKW, took place on 14
October 2008 at the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles on the occasion of a listening
party for Kanye West’s album
808s & Heartbreak. Forty models were arranged
with the darkest skin tones in the foreground to lighter skin in the background in
the shape of a heart. The models stood in a gallery space as all 11 tracks of the
album were played while vibrant colours slowly alternated in the space behind
them. Recently Beecroft art-directed West’s landmark 34-minute music video
Runaway.
Joel Brodsky’s 1939–2007
Jim Morrison, The Doors, The American poet, New York
City, 1967,estimated at £20,000-30,000.Joel Brodsky recalled his most famous
shoot in a later interview: “The Doors were among the brighter groups I’d shot at
that point. They had a visual orientation and seemed to understand the potential
of a good photo session. Initially, there seemed to be a little jealously that
Morrison was being put so up front in the photos, but basically the others
understood that Jim was the sex symbol and an important visual focus for the
band. After we’d done group shots, I shot some individual pictures of each
member, saving Morrison for last. I knew I was going to be spending the most
time with him, so I didn’t want them to have to sit around and wait too long. Well,
while this was going on, Jim was drinking quite a bit. So by the time I got to
shooting the individual shots of him, Morrison was pretty loose. The ‘American
Poet’ shot was pretty near the end, I think. He wasn’t a wild drunk - actually he
was kind of quiet - but his equilibrium wasn’t too terrific. Still, he was great to
photograph because he had a very interesting look. It seemed like a good session
to me, and then a week later, we ran one of the photos in The Village Voice. The
story I’ve heard is that they got something like ten thousand requests for the
picture. You know, Morrison never really looked that way again, and those
pictures have become a big part of The Doors’ legend. I think I got him at his
peak.” Joel Brodsky,Snap Galleries, London.
Andy Warhol’s Private rare collection of 52 album and record covers (including
Index book with hard holograph cover, picture discs and FAB magazine case),
1949–87. Eight relief prints and letterpress, thirty-eight offset lithographs, two
offset collages with collage element, two pictures discs, one bound index book
containing thirty-nine offset lithographs and a flexidisc, one hinged cardboard
case (FAB Magazine) containing various works and a flexidisc. Various
dimensions; smallest: 17.8 cm (7 in) diameter; largest: 31.1 × 31.1 cm (12 1/4 × 12
1/4 in). estimated at £20,000 – 30,000. “It was in August 1996. In a record store, I
came across a record by Paul Anka with a cover designed by Warhol. I already
knew of his two most famous album covers, the ‘peelable’ banana sleeve for the
Velvet Underground and the zippered sleeve for the Stones’ Sticky Fingers. From
then on, the challenge of discovering how many covers Warhol had created
became the great challenge of acquiring them all, together with the records […]
The album covers alone enable one to follow the whole course of Warhol’s career
as an artist, almost step by step, and this is almost unique among great artists.
Although they did not appear in museums or art galleries, the album covers
benefited from the parallel distribution network represented by the records.
Warhol fully understood this remarkable channel for disseminating his art. Most
of the covers he created were designed for that purpose and not, as is too often
the case, existing works recycled as record jackets.”
(Paul Maréchal, quoted in N. Bondil, ‘I’m Andy Warhol, I’d like to do a record
jacket for you’, in
Andy Warhol The Record Covers 1949–1987: Catalogue Raisonné,
2008, p. 7).
CATALOGUE
Editorial highlights in the catalogue include: an interview with the iconic
photographer David Bailey with editor Karen Wright. Bailey not only defined a
particular breed of editorial photography but his life and persona became
synonymous with the Swinging Sixties in London leading to Antonioni basing his
legendary film Close Up on his life. Also featured is an interview with Claude
Nobs, the founder and director of the Montreaux Jazz Festival, as well as the
former Swiss director of Warner; The interview discusses Claude¹s
contemporary art collection and how music influences his relationship to the
visual arts. Yi Zhou interview by Sir David Tan, Yi¹s videos always emerge from
collaborations with musicians. Her installation at Place Vendome was set to a
soundtrack made by AIR, her last videos have starred Pharrell Williams and
Charlotte Gainsbourg, and were scored by Ennio Morricone and Chester French.
A further highlight is an interview on Mexico City-based artist Daniel Guzman
and his projects that crossover contemporary conceptual art with music.
PHILLIPS de PURY & COMPANY
Founded in London in 1796, Phillips de Pury & Company is widely acknowledged
as one of the three leading international auction houses, and is the only major
auction house to concentrate on contemporary art and culture. The Company
has enjoyed immense success in the global marketplace as a result of its focus.
Phillips de Pury & Company is universally acclaimed for the quality of its visual
presentation in catalogues and pre-sale exhibitions, its creative marketing
activities and the pioneering vision of its Chairman, Simon de Pury, and his team
in identifying new collecting trends and setting numerous auction records.
Phillips de Pury is recognized as the contemporary culture tastemaker.
For further information:
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Contacts:
Giulia Costantini
Head of Communications
gcostantini@phillipsdepury.com
+ 44 20 7318 4010
Fiona McGovern
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fmcgovern@phillipsdepury.com
+ 44 20 7318 4010