Sergej Jensen - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Sunday, June 28, 2015 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Simon Lee Gallery, London

  • Catalogue Essay

    Sergej Jensen takes an eclectic approach to materials, and has referred to his practice as ‘painting without paint.’ (Sergej Jensen in Roberta Smith, ‘A Textured Palette Without Much Paint,' New York Times, 27 January 2011). This pithy description of his technique captures the expansive materiality of his work as much as his compositional sensibilities. Sewing together and stretching fabric, he creates textile assemblages that echo painterly form. Preferring the frayed to the polished, his work is characterised by sensitivity and craft.

    In Untitled, as in many of Jensen’s works, image and canvas are inextricable. Pieces of fabric are stitched together into one larger black expanse. In its monochromatic tonality, the work gestures towards the Minimalist tradition. Yet there is more evidence of the human hand and less industrial distance than in the work of this movement’s progenitors. Joins are visible, running like fault lines across the piece’s surface. Jensen is interested in disruption, but also in repair. Notions of salvage are at the heart of his practice; remnants of material from one work often find their way into the fabric of another.

    Jensen valorises craft, marrying the formally progressive and the warmly familiar. Untitled is an affecting embodiment of this aesthetic. An act of care is inscribed into the very surface of the piece, transforming the conceptual into the humane. It is a work of reconciliation in which material fragments are joined together in service of an affecting, even moving, totality.

51

Untitled (Schwarz/Durchsichtig)

2009
sewn fabric
115.3 x 80 cm (45 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.)

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 ‡♠

Sold for £32,500

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

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 29 June 2015 7pm