Rob Pruitt - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale Hong Kong Saturday, May 26, 2018 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Luxembourg & Dayan, New York
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    As one of the art world’s most admired provocateurs, Rob Pruitt has walked the thin line between controversy and playfulness since the beginning of his career in the early 1990s to create beguiling works that deliver something between criticism and celebration of the art world. The glistening, large-scale paintings of giant woolly pandas, first shown in 2000, represent the artist’s best-known series. Rendered in the artist’s infamous glitter and enamel medium, Untitled presents one of Pruitt’s great pandas in a costume form. Accentuating Pruitt’s ongoing signature investigation of the spectacular, the present lot depicts the panda-costume’s wearer caught mid-performance on a stage against a psychedelic black and white curtain-like backdrop. With its tiny button mouth and wide-eyed expression, this panda is just as stunned as the viewer in reaction to Pruitt’s unrelenting shock tactics.

    Untitled, produced in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, serves as an emblem of Pruitt’s wide-ranging practice that in itself presents a kind of ongoing performance mocking and praising our received wisdom regarding fame and celebrity. Regarding the excesses of contemporary culture that have become his medium, Pruitt explains, “on the one hand I want to celebrate it, because it’s who we are and on the other hand I want to condemn it,” he said. “I think it’s always like a Ping-Pong match for me” (Rob Pruitt quoted in Randy Kennedy, "A Penitent Reflects on the Wilderness," New York Times, September 15, 2010). The visual tropes of Pruitt’s pandas have migrated from folk culture to the contemporary avant-garde where they are made even more fantastic and graphically seductive than their natural-world counterpart. Describing his own work as populist, Pruitt explains, “I’ve really enjoyed letting the world know that not everything is so mystified or so regulated to expertise—that you can make something really beautiful with a little ingenuity and some supplies from Michaels [craft shop]” (Rob Pruitt by James Franco, "Rob Pruitt," Interview Magazine, September 29, 2009). Pruitt pokes fun at the art world while comfortably sitting at the table with its elite.

46

Untitled

2011
signed and dated 'Rob Pruitt 2011' on the stretcher
glitter and enamel on canvas
203.4 x 152.5 cm. (80 1/8 x 60 in.)
Executed in 2011.

Estimate
HK$700,000 - 900,000 
€75,300-96,800
$89,700-115,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Isaure de Viel Castel
Head of Department
+852 2318 2011

Sandy Ma
Head of Sale
+852 2318 2025

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

Hong Kong Auction 27 May 2018