Roni Horn - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, June 28, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Matthew Marks, New York
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Images of a cloud formation alternate in an extended line with the blurred head of a circus clown. The pale […] cloud, soft as pudding though relatively stable (Horn explains that it is a benign formation, sculpted by wind and not associated with storms), changes slowly from frame to frame. Photographed in minute-long exposures, the clown is even hazier and double obscured: the head’s contours are smudged by movement, the white grease-painted face made up for maximum mutability into a centuries-old figure of sexless, ageless emotional abstraction. The big, red-painted lips, stretched into grossly exaggerated grimaces and heart-shaped smiles, are the only easily read features, but occasionally a slight glisten of teeth or tongue, or the dark interior of a mouth, can be glimpsed. Only once does an eye register with any clarity, revealing, barely, an iris, the faintest gleam of white and wrinkled lids. These points of contact with the face beneath the mask are powerfully unsettling. They scarcely disturb the surface rhythm of the series, but as a kind of visual undertow, they serve – like the tidal menace felt in Some Thames – as its emotional engine.”
    (N. Princenthal, ‘Taking the Long View’, Art in America, no. 10, 2002, pp.136–41).

119

Clowd and Clown (Gray) Group 3

2000-01
six colour coupler prints
Three clouds, each: 68.6 x 88.9 cm (27 x 35 in)
Three clowns: 68.6 x 68.6 cm (27 x 27 in)

Signed on a gallery label affixed to the reverse. This work is number 2 from an edition of 4.

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for £49,250

Contemporary Art Day Sale

29 June 2012
London