Ryan Sullivan - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 15, 2013 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Nicole Klagsburn, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Seeing how things change as they dry keeps me coming in every morning. I wouldn’t want to learn how to control that. It’s really important to let a painting take on its own direction.” - Ryan Sullivan.


    Combining natural forces with hermetic studio practice, Ryan Sullivan mitigates gesture and authorship through an entropic apparatus. Characteristically entitled February 5th, 2011, the day of its conception, the canvas bears witness to its own creation – emphasizing the dynamic movements and transformations of its raw materials. Positioning his canvases, Sullivan layers latex, oil, and enamel to generate colour-drenched pockets that gradually coalesce into surprising leathery skins. Sullivan then vertically tilts the partially-dry canvas thick with the mixture, creating a subtle interplay between viscous and gravitational forces, driving the alchemical development of each work he produces.

    Drying at a variety of different rates, an event beyond Sullivan’s artistic agency, the multi-toned grey strata wrinkle, crack and coagulate, bringing to mind a variety of associations, from the diverse ways tape can be distended and furrowed to the deterioration of paint on a car: “in general my philosophy is to use the physical properties of paint to guide the work. The vast majority of painting follows fairly rigid technical guidelines…if you don’t follow them, paint does unpredictable things; it cracks, changes colour, wrinkles”, (Ryan Sullivan, J. Mischef, “West Street Gallery”, Dossier Journal, July 2010). This shifting paint strengthens the concept of painting as a temporary entity, reminding us that ‘painting’ symbolizes both a process and a result.

    The material movement in the present lot manifests into a nexus of lines, a characteristic reminiscent of a series of textured monochromatic grey paintings by the preeminent painter Gerhard Richter. In February 5th, 2011, fractures, mounds, sags, and fissures construct an electric volatility on the painted surface, evoking small-scale and natural phenomena, such as rippling water and undulating sandbanks. His paintings are strikingly physical, referencing topographic and geological elements, such as pyroclastic flows and tectonic shifts. Creating an ambiguous allusion of depth and scale with his open-ended process, Ryan Sullivan collapses form, content, practice, and product to create an industrially produced, yet seductive, singularity.

1

February 5th, 2011

2011
oil, enamel and latex on canvas
150.2 x 114.6 cm. (59 1/8 x 45 1/8 in.)

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for £98,500

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 16 October 2013