Allison Zuckerman - Wired: Online Auction London Wednesday, October 27, 2021 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    ‘I am primarily influenced by art history and the reality that women are often the subjects of paintings and sculptures but rarely the makers. I seek to re-tell art history within my work’ – Allison Zuckerman

    Through the bold juxtaposition of Pop imagery and art historical references, Allison Zuckerman seeks to interrogate the representation of women in visual culture. The American artist begins by amalgamating her diverse sources into a digital collage. Cut out images are arranged in Photoshop before being printed onto large-scale canvases which can then be painted upon. The resultant works are part collage, part painting – a fusion that Zuckerman understands to reflect the prevalence of internet culture in contemporary society. She notes, ‘[t]he language of instantaneity, ephemerality, and maximalism is such a crucial part of social media and I seek to represent this spirit within the paintings’(Allison Zuckerman, quoted in Constanza Falco Raez, ‘Allison Zuckerman | “Drawing Room” at Stems Gallery’, Flaunt, 8 July 2021, online).

    In her hybrid practice, Zuckerman consciously draws upon art historical sources by male artists. In the present work, Multitasker, the cut-out figure of Picasso’s Buste de femme (1940) is arranged upon an abstracted background as an orange sun glows in the upper right corner. In a Frankensteinian gesture, heavily made-up mismatched eyes and a laughing mouth are superimposed onto the painterly surface of the face, while her newly-rendered hands clutch a phone and lipstick – the accoutrement of her multitasked activities. The Ben-Day dots peppering her left hand cast her in the role of the female subjects that populate Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings that epitomise the Pop Art of the 1960s. Zuckerman conceives of these references to the male art historical canon ‘simultaneously as homage and critique’ as the amalgamated images prompt the viewer to question traditional artistic representations of women (Allison Zuckerman, quoted in Constanza Falco Raez, ‘Allison Zuckerman | “Drawing Room” at Stems Gallery’, Flaunt, 8 July 2021, online). ‘There’s no denying the contributions and significance of these artists’, she explains, ‘it’s about pointing out the inequalities that they have benefited from – unintentionally or intentionally. There’s a level of admiration that I definitely feel, but it’s also about saying, “Well, you’re not going to get away with it anymore”’(Allison Zuckerman, quoted in Taylor Dafoe, ‘Behind Artist Allison Zuckerman’s Rapid Rise From Gallery Assistant to the Rubell Family’s Newest Obsession’, artnet news, 5 December 2017, online). The introduction of the third hard, recognisable as that of the much-loved Disney cartoon character Mickey Mouse, extends the artist’s critique of male-dominated representations of women from fine art to popular visual culture.

    Born in 1990 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Zuckerman moved to New York in 2015 following her MFA at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Her work was catapulted to critical acclaim following her first solo show which took place at the influential Rubell Family Collection in Miami in 2017. Subsequently, she has extended her artistic practice into adjacent fields through collaborative ventures undertaken with Louis Vuitton for Vogue Italia and a large-scale mural for Veuve Clicquot created in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (NY). The charismatic collaging of familiar imagery, accented with humorous touches and underpinned with political intent, has established Zuckerman as a rising star in the world of contemporary art.

2

Multitasker

signed and dated 'Allison Zuckerman 2017' on the overlap
acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 cm (40 x 30 in.)
Executed in 2017.

Estimate
£20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for £126,000

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs
Head of Online Sales
+44 20 7901 7993
cgibbs@phillips.com

Wired: Online Auction

Online Auction 27 October - 3 November 2021