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Highlights Tour
\n

\n\n

Milan
\n13 - 15 September
\nVia Lanzone 2
\n20123 Milan
\n

\n\n

Paris
\n20 - 24 September
\n46 Rue du Bac
\nParis 75007
\n

\n\n

New York
\n18 - 25 September
\n432 Park Avenue
\nNew York NY 10022
\n
\nAdmission to this sale is by ticket only.
\nPlease email tickets@phillips.com
\n

\n","auctionDetailsSmall","London Auction 13 October 2023","extraInfo","

Rosanna Widén
\nSenior Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
\n+44 20 7318 4060
\nrwiden@phillips.com
\n

\n\n

Olivia Thornton
\nHead of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe
\n+44 20 7318 4099
\nothornton@phillips.com

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Daniel Richter, Schakal Reloaded, 2009. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

\n\n

In the divided Germany of the 1980s, a group of outcasts in Hamburg emerged as a creative community united by a shared belief in a socialist future and a disdain for leadership in both the East and West. “In the early ‘80s, late ‘70s when I was young, punk was the way out,” painter Daniel Richter once recalled of his youth. Richter joined this informal group in his early 20s, squatting in abandoned buildings and engaging with the city’s thriving punk scene. The artist spent a decade living in this Hamburg community, satisfying his creative urge by making punk concert posters. He preferred to work alone, not favoring the inherently collaborative nature of music-making, later noting that making imagery “was the natural role the subculture chose for me.”

\n\n

The artist has recounted that this period was not without conflict, as the group often faced public backlash and assaults from the police, as well as violence from neo-Nazi groups. These early encounters added steam to Richter’s already established skepticism of authority, which can be seen throughout his later work.

\n\n

\n
“The idea was not to wait for the communist party, but instead to do it ourselves.”
\n—Daniel Richter
\n

\n\n

When the Berlin Wall fell, Richter’s reality crumbled, and the unification of Germany prompted the painter’s creative expansion into fine art. He remembers that when “the Soviet Union collapsed it was clear to me that there would be shifts of power in the world and that the idea of what a democracy is will be massively changing.” It was at this point, at the age of 30, that the artist realized he needed to find a new path, as many in his orbit had either become bitter with age or died young. It was a struggle for him to make this leap, recalling, “I didn’t have money, I didn’t have wealthy parents, I didn’t have any education, so I was a bum by definition of the State. The only thing that I had always done, and I’d always been obsessed with, was images.”

\n\n

He enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg to discover what can define art, led by a questioning of the artistic validity of his own posters. Upon graduation he worked as assistant to several artists, most notably Albert Oehlen, as he refined his painterly style, initially emerging on the scene with colorful abstract paintings before shifting to the more figurative and politically charged paintings that are emblematic of his social outlook.

\n\n

A Symbolic Jackal

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\n\n

Daniel Richter, Schakal Reloaded, 2009. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

\n\n

Richter’s 2009 work Schakal Reloaded is a striking canvas that reflects the fraught political landscape of the early 2000s and the horrors of the war on terror. In this painting we’re confronted with what at first seems to be an enchanted mountain landscape, the complex narrative concentrated in Richter’s flattened pictorial space. This graphic visual language coupled with the work’s expressive use of color are somewhat reminiscent of graffiti and street art, perhaps relating to the artist’s early experience. On closer look, we discover a jackal figure at the left of the composition, rendered in a hazy orange. Its presence is menacing, and the nearby human figures scream in terror. It is the turbans of these figures coupled with Richter’s visual suggestion of the jackal’s symbolic associations that call to mind the charged political atmosphere of the time, reminding us of the nickname given to the powerful armored vehicles deployed to the Middle East by the United Kingdom. The overtones of the associations in this image can be considered as ascribed to the Western militaries, assigning them the personality of a cunning trickster, indifferent to the plight of others. Poignantly, we realize this scene places us in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the “jackal” vehicle roamed.

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Daniel Richter, Schakal Reloaded (detail), 2009. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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This work is deeply rooted in the events that have defined Richter’s creative life. If the German reunification was the first historical event that shook Richter’s world, the terrorist attacks of September 11th were the second. The two are linked for Richter, as he has noted, “The fall of the Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union are the reason for the reappearance of religions and nationalism haunting us today.” By suggesting through charged symbolism that Western militaries are untrustworthy, Schakal Reloaded presents us with the tragic absurdity of such political tensions. The artist has made countless pointed comments on this dynamic in the post-9/11 era. He has remarked of Islamic extremism that “it’s a war for dumb guys believing in lord penis, in guns and violence, and all that kind of paranoid, fascist, megalomanic power scheisse.” In turn, he’s also pointed out that the very same ideals flow through the male leadership of some recent Western administrations and has questioned how the war machine has allowed Western economies to flourish. These ideas represent what perhaps defines Daniel Richter’s thinking — a continuous challenge of authority demonstrated not just by an approach to art and imagery, but to a way of life.

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Unreliable Witness: On memory and veracity in ‘Rome’ by Luc Tuymans >

\n\n

\n","publishDate","2023-10-02T15:27:02.000000Z","authorCredit","Jesse Limbacher","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/132403391/art-auction-london-daniel-richter-forever-punk","displayOrder","auctionEditorialID",1932,"editorialID",4345,"flocklerID",132403391,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/tuymans-lead-8dc9c8f8-d133-471c-a2a4-6d1175c6d8bb_s600x0.jpg","On memory and veracity in ‘Rome’ by Luc Tuymans.","Unreliable Witness","

Luc Tuymans, Rome, 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

\n\n

Luc Tuymans’ highly distinctive painting practice navigates the complex ambiguities between history, power, imagery, and memory; probing, in essence, these themes to question the very existence of absolute truth. “There is no truth in the work,” Tuymans asserted of his practice in an interview with Iona Whittaker, noting further and quite obliquely: “I have a high distrust for images, even my own.”

\n\n

Ahead of Phillips’ 20th Century & Contemporary Art auctions in London this October, where Tuymans’ monumental 2007 painting Rome will be offered at auction for the first time, we look to the artist’s work and ideas to explore memory and its relationship to truth, power, and identity.

\n\n

As the fresh-to-market Rome has been on loan since its initial acquisition — first to the Stedejlik Museum in Amsterdam and then to the Kunstmuseum in The Hauge — the occasion presents a rare opportunity to discover the painting, which will be on view at Phillips’ Berkeley Square gallery from 4 October through the auction on 13 October.

\n\n

Critically regarded for his belief in painting at a time when conceptual art circles had declared the practice futile, Tuymans has proved painting to be the only medium appropriate for his investigations into questions of power, memory, and visual representation. Moreover, as many of his contemporaries were moving increasingly into abstraction, Tuymans privileged the figurative, coming to prominence in the early 1990s as a painter of peculiar and affecting images that explored history and its antimonies, the strangeness of routine objects, and the ways in which power, technology, and time impact our vision in an increasingly fraught and rapidly evolving cultural landscape. His work has challenged the supposedly honest relationships between seeing, believing, and remembering, interrogating the forms and functions of images and the ways in which truth and falsehood are codependent entities.

\n\n

A consummate example of Tuymans’ painterly practice, Rome is one of nine canvases that make up Les Revenants — the first in a trilogy of series that confront the image as an instrument of power. First shown in 2007 at Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, works from the series have gone on to be included in some of Tuymans’ most significant subsequent exhibitions. Only three works from the series have ever appeared at auction.

\n\n

Monumental in scale, Rome is the largest of the nine canvases from the series. Typical of the artist’s practice, the source material of the image was a homemade print of a digitally compressed image. The result is a painting that the writer Hans Theys describes as “reminiscent of illustrations in old textbooks. The reality has the air of a disintegrating cardboard theatre or thousands of scattered, tiny patches of light.” A muted tonal palette and soft, diffused brushstrokes are characteristically employed by Tuymans to present a cinematic image of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The architectural heft of the basilica is conveyed by the sheer scale of the canvas and the spaciousness of the asymmetrical composition. Imposing structural details including massive sculptures and columns combine to present a majestic vision of the building, rendering the assembled enormous congregation almost insignificant before the weight of the occasion. Yet, much of the vital action is seen bottom right, where Belgian Archbishop Daneels is sparsely depicted among a group of candidates for elevation to cardinal. Just a moment after our first sight of this image, the newly elevated cardinals — including Daneels — will kneel.

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Luc Tuymans, Rome (detail), 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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As noted by Theys, the muted tonal palette and Tuymans’ practice of working from manipulated old photographs presents this image as professedly historical. When we realize this image depicts a contemporary ceremony, one of great importance to Belgium, we realize how Tuymans uses imagery to play with our perception of time and memory. The artist has explained his approach, stating, “Art creates its own time span and in that sense also creates its own time lapse: you are looking at something that accords time to an image, as it is made and as it shows itself.” Tuymans’ work challenges our perception of time to pose questions between memory and belief and reveal to us the dangerous reality that memory, and thus our understanding of history, may be fallible. In turn, the work proves that the image is also fallible. As writer Christina Ruiz has remarked, “At the heart of Tuymans’ project is a central conceit: that images are unreliable, that they can offer us no more than a fragment of reality and that our own memories, personal or collective, mislead us.”

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Tuymans employs a masterful and carefully considered approach to the physicality of paint, tone, and color to impress these ideas. He explained in a 2021 recorded discussion for David Zwirner gallery that he is interested how his work can influence people, to make them stop and think, or to play off their own memories. He shared that this is the principal reason that his works explore tonality rather than simply color, as he has observed that when we perceive imagery monochromatically (even if his paintings are not monochromatic) the images return to our mind at a later point. In this sense, his work not only calls upon our existing memories but plants new ones — it seeks to leave an indelible mark, not simply an impression. “I wanted my paintings to look old from the start, which is important because they are about memory,” the artist has stated.

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Luc Tuymans, Rome, 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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It is understandable why Tuymans so frequently turns to historical imagery to add weight and significance to his canvases. In the case of Rome — its pale muted color scheme appearing almost preternaturally faded — Tuymans calls upon our memories of historic religious imagery. As such, the work doesn’t just showcase the grand and theatrical nature of the religious ceremony, but also reminds us that much of the weight of the tradition and reverence for these spaces lies in the history of the church and, accordingly, the collective memories of its constituents.

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This notion of a cultural collective memory, understood through history and stories, leads us to consider memory’s impact on identity, as much personal consideration of identity lies in such shared memories, or even in the rebellion against them. In Rome, Tuymans confronts his own identity and background head on, as a Belgian painter who was raised Catholic. The artist explained to Artnet in 2010, “I come out of a country where painting is genetically understood. Highly Catholic because Catholics like images because they keep the people stupid. Western image building was born in that region, and, of course, huge trauma with it.” This wasn’t the first time the artist considered his own background and the history of Belgium in a critical light — at the 2001 Venice Biennale he presented work that explored the colonial brutality of Belgium’s occupation of Congo.

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Ultimately, in viewing Rome, we are presented with a complex web of associations that functions on us much like memory does. The painting leaves an impression, but we’re forced to connect the visual cues to find understanding in it. The experience is reminiscent of the effort we make in constructing a logical narrative from the memories of our dreams. It also recalls a tenet of Tuymans’ early work, which he described as being “about what history could mean if you dream it, and how inadequate our memory is.” Further ambiguity is lent to the image as it remains almost burned in our inner eyes after viewing, as though we’re still trying to understand the impression it leaves but unable to articulate it. As Tuymans’ himself has offered, “Every visual is in opposition to language because if we could say everything, why make a picture of it?”

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Forever Punk: Daniel Richter’s innate challenge of authority emerges in ‘Schakal Reloaded.’ >

\n\n

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“There is definitely a strong sense of voyeurism in my work… I don’t want the paintings to feel like pictures of something that’s happening somewhere else. I want you to feel like you’re involved or implicated in what’s going on.”
\n—Caroline Walker

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Caroline Walker’s large-scale, enigmatic canvases invite us into private interiors. The Scottish-born artist has gained critical acclaim for her sensitive portrayals of the modern-day woman, and her painterly realism and command for composition create balanced works that make close and careful reference to the Western canon of art history. As a viewer, we are often afforded the position of voyeur; in Fragranced, we peer through a window to see a woman at work in a perfumery. Exhibited in a major 2021 institutional show Windows, at Kunstmuseum Den Haag (K21), the work is representative of her more recent tendency to highlight the everyday experience of the working woman, which has included shopworkers, bakers, nail artists and cleaners. Walker is one of the most sought-after contemporary painters today, and since her first institutional show at Pitzhanger Manor Gallery in 2013 she has held numerous others at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; Fitzrovia Chapel, London; MAC, Birmingham; Nottingham Castle; KM21, The Hague; and K11, Shanghai. Her work is held in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Arts Council England; National Museum Wales, Cardiff; and Longlati Foundation, China.

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Perspective is carefully considered in Walker’s compositions. We are at once invited to partake in the scene before us, yet physical and architectural barriers, most frequently windows, prevent us from ever truly being involved. The woman depicted in Fragrance is alone in the shop, and we are permitted to trespass upon a moment of quiet, solitary work. This feeling of intrusion is a major motif within Walker’s oeuvre, and as a result her works are permeated with a tension that reflects the clandestine nature of our position as voyeur. ‘It probably stems from being nosey’ Walker has stated, ‘being delighted when I’m walking around in the evening and can see into houses’.ⁱ

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\"\" — Edward Hopper, *Nighthawks,* 1942, Art Institute of Chicago. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence

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Much like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Walker uses a juxtaposition of the warm interior and cool exterior – with the window acting as a physical barrier – to afford us an unobtainable glimpse into the scene before us. Her large-scale canvases and painterly brushstrokes give works such as Fragranced a soft-focus appearance, and she evokes dreamlike worlds that blur the lines between reality and fantasy: ‘there’s a sense that you could almost step into the scene’.ⁱⁱ Whilst works like Hopper’s may be considered to contribute to the ‘male-gaze’ of female depiction in art, Walker’s position as a woman adds a nuanced layer of meaning and understanding. We are challenged to reconsider both our position as a viewer, and the subjects we are engaging with.

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\"\" — Piet Mondrian, *Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue*, 1921, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague. Image: © Kunstmuseum den Haag / Bridgeman Images

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Walker’s extensive art historical knowledge can be seen throughout her pictorial landscapes, usually including the likes of French Impressionist and Modernist masters Edgar Degas or Édouard Manet, or Dutch genre-painters Frans Hals and Pieter de Hooch. Nevertheless, Benno Tempel argues that Walker’s referential intelligence stretches to include the world of abstract art. In his essay accompanying the 2021 Windows exhibition catalogue, Tempel views the paned-windows featured in Fragranced as evocative of the grid-like structures of Piet Mondrian’s neo-plasticist works of the early 20^th century.ⁱⁱⁱ Certainly, the thick black squares of the windowpanes are reminiscent of the lattices created in works such as Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue. Moreover, a similar use of reds, yellows, blues and blacks in Fragranced’s palette provides a further ‘playful and ingenious nod to this work’.^iv

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With exceptional presence, Fragranced represents a wonderful example of many themes Walker explores within her works: women, the working environment, and a nuanced reflection of art history. We are asked to reconsider women’s position within the wider Western art historical canon, alongside our own self-conscious feelings of intrusion. Her quiet, illusory depictions of women often provoke more questions than answers, and the small narrative snapshots we are gifted stay with us long after we have stopped looking.

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Caroline Walker discussing the window as compositional device ahead of her exhibition with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 2021.

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Collector’s Digest

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Since graduating from her MA with the Royal College of Art in 2009, Scottish artist Caroline Walker has been the subject of several solo exhibitions internationally, including Janet at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh in 2020, Women’s Work at the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham in 2021, and her most recent exhibition at K11 in Shanghai in November 2022.
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Walker’s artwork is highly sought after, and Threshold achieved an auction record of £927,100 at Phillips’ London Evening Sale, on 2^nd March 2023.
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Walker’s works are included in a number of prominent public collections, including the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, The UK Government Art Collection, London, and Kunstmuseum in The Hague.
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ⁱ Caroline Walker, quoted in Chloë Ashby, ‘The Eyes of Caroline Walker: “It’s Different When it’s a Woman Looking at a Woman”’, Elephant, 13 May, 2022, online.

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ⁱⁱ Caroline Walker, quoted in Emily Spicer, ‘Caroline Walker: ‘Who we perceive to be the maker of an image affects how we consume it’’, studio international, 10 April, 2017, online.

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ⁱⁱⁱ Benno Tempel, ‘A Day in the Life’, in Caroline Walker: Windows, pp. 6-7.

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^iv Benno Tempel, ‘A Day in the Life’, in Caroline Walker: Windows, p. 7.

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38

Caroline Walker

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Caroline Walker