Cady Noland - Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale New York Thursday, March 6, 2014 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Massimo de Carlo, Milan

  • Exhibited

    Milan, Massimo de Carlo, Cady Noland, December 4, 1989 - January 15, 1990

  • Catalogue Essay

    “From the point at which I was making work out of objects I became interested in how, actually, under which circumstances people treat other people like objects.” - Cady Noland

    Cady Noland's work exposes the myth behind the promise of the American Dream – the suburban legend of universal American prosperity as manifested in big houses, big cars, big lawns, and big people. Fraught with numerous identity and political issues, the dream has come under fire for its intrinsic limitations by cultural commentators like Noland. Finding source material in the detritus of the once vaunted American highway—litter encompassing chrome-plated hardware, rearview mirrors, oil containers, beer bottles, aluminum cans, cigarette butts, and all other forms of objects flung from speeding cars—Noland uses these disparate objects to form the conceptual core and sculptural foundation of her art. Untitled, 1989, is one of Noland’s most complex and complete of the Accumulative Vessel Works. Part time capsule, part trash heap, this seminal “basket” sculpture is loaded with both anonymous and known objects that are simultaneously blank and iconographic. The result is an assemblage that’s wry as well as tragic, embodying the hopes and dreams at the heart of American culture.

    Through its contents and sculptural presence, Untitled radiates an electric energy that challenges the viewer’s understanding of space, concept and even the limitations of art. These are the formal aspects and physical energy that have caused Noland’s late-1980s works to assert a central impact on many artists working today, as they refer back to her mining of cultural flotsam, unconventional installation choices and use of silkscreen images and texts from news media. Cady Noland is one of the most celebrated and institutionally respected post-war sculptors, furthering notions of Robert Smithson’s aesthetics of decay, Donald Judd’s understanding of material and form and Bruce Nauman’s channeling of underlying desires and the absurd.

6

Untitled

1989
metal basket, car parts, beer cans
14 1/8 x 23 5/8 x 17 3/4 in. (35.9 x 60 x 45.1 cm.)

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $269,000

Contact Specialist
Zach Miner, Contemporary
Head of Sale zminer@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1256

Alex Heminway, Design
aheminway@phillips.com
+ 1 212 940 1268

Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

New York Evening Sale 6 March 2014 7pm