Studio Job - Moss New York Tuesday, October 16, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artists

  • Exhibited

    ‘Spring Exhibitions’, Moss, New York, May 14 - June 30, 2008
    ‘Studio Job 2006-2008: works in paper, bronze/wood/clay’, Moss, New York, March 5-April 11. 2009

  • Literature

    Studio Job: The Book of Job, New York, 2010, pp. 222 - 2 23
    Arlene Hirst, ‘Murray Moss’, Elle Décor Italia, May 2012, illustrated p. 149

  • Catalogue Essay

    Bavaria Cupboard and Triptych Mirror are from a suite of five marquetry furnishings in Indian Rosewood, featuring intricate and fine multi-colored laser-cut inlays in a farm motif. Seventeen different brilliantly-colored dyes are used in creating the inlays, which are made from a variety of wood types, including Tulipwood, Ash, Pama, Madrona Burl, Bird’s Eye Maple, Birch, and Red Gum, depending on the grains desired for each inlaid ‘icon.’ These marquetry masterworks, with their brightly-colored symmetrical, ‘book-matched’ inlays, depict bountiful scenes of farm-life, including red barns and silos, horse corrals and dog houses, sunflowers, shafts of wheat, vegetables and luscious fruit-bearing trees which give shade to county-far-worthy cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, and sheep, and the occasional mouse and blackbird. Moving across the flat, super-dense surfaces are the tools that keep such an active farm flourishing: tractors and oil drums and wheelbarrows and spades and shovels and brooms and saws and horseshoes. Above the tumult, bluebirds fly in a Rosewood sky.

    Inspired by 17th and 18th century Bavarian hand-painted furniture, as seen in the collections of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg, Studio Job playfully switches mediums and methods, using marquetry, a traditional craft of the ‘applied arts’, to impersonate the ‘fine art’ of painting. In the process, they wantonly dismiss the historic distinctions between the fine, the graphic, and the applied arts, declaring, “In marquetry you are free as a painter; the veneers are like paint and the furniture piece functions as the canvas.” The Cupboard and Mirror, while in style antiquated, rural and mysteriously regional, are so finely, so preciously conceived and executed that they seem surely more destined for Queen Marie Antoinette’s ‘Pleasure Dairy’ at Rambouillet than for the everyday wear and tear of the common man’s farm house. In Studio Job’s ‘Bavaria’, we return to Eden – or at least an animated, naively happy, storybook rendition of Paradise, where man’s innocent, simple toil, applied to nature’s bounty, reaps a peaceful and prosperous harvest.

122

‘Bavaria’ mirror

2008
Indian rosewood, African koto, pama, tulipwood, ash, bird’s eye maple, aningeria, madrona burl, birch, red gum, mirrored glass.
49 1/8 x 31 1/2 x 6 in (124.8 x 80 x 15.2 cm) closed
Produced by Studio Job, the Netherlands. Number 1 from the edition of 6.

Estimate
$25,000 - 35,000 

Moss

16 October 2012
New York