Rosanna Widén
\nSenior Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
\n+44 20 7318 4060
\nrwiden@phillips.com
\n
\nOlivia Thornton
\nHead of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe
\n+44 20 7318 4099
\nothornton@phillips.com
\n
\nclientserviceslondon@phillips.com

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\n\n

Join Dr. Caroline Knighton to discover the space between sensation and gesture in this astonishing work by
\nCecily Brown.

\n\n

“My ideal is to have the tension and intensity of an aggressively sexual image without actually having to describe it.”
\n—Cecily Brown

\n\n

Immediately arresting in its scale, subject, and stylistic virtuosity, Skulldiver II is a breath-taking 2006 work by acclaimed British artist Cecily Brown. With every corner of the surface activated by writhing, protean brushstrokes, the work’s climactic energy is palpable - an erotic charge passing through the two figures at the centre and electrifying the entire composition. Richly painted in thick, gestural marks of variegated fleshy tones, the present work is one of a suite of four Skulldiver paintings focused on the same explicit theme, and was included in Brown’s 2008 exhibition with Gagosian in New York alongside two other works from the series, one of which is now held in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

\n\n

\"Installation — Installation view of *Cecily Brown*, Gagosian, New York, 2008 featuring three of the *Skulldiver* canvases, the present work is visible on the left. Image: Courtesy the artist, photograph Rob McKeever

\n\n

Abandoning themselves to pleasure, the figures at the centre of these paintings appear to dissolve into one another, as overcome by Brown’s sensuous application of paint as by their own carnal desires. Borrowing from pornographic and painterly sources alike, Skulldiver II bluntly emphasises the centrality of touch and sensation in Brown’s practice, the monumental canvas showcasing the close conceptual connections between oil paint and corporeality that have interested the artist throughout her career.

\n\n

Shifting restlessly between figuration and abstraction, Brown’s paintings are – as feminist art historian Linda Nochlin has noted - intensely embodied, making close and careful reference ‘to the act of painting, painting as process’ within which she positions the sex act itself as ‘both an analogy and a specific referent.’ⁱ Drawing out the latent sensuality of oil paint and its proximity to bodily textures, Brown seems to suggest that sex has as much to say about painting as painting might have to say about sex.

\n\n

Art and the Erotic

\n\n

Looking back to overt eroticism of her early Bunny Paintings and the ribald orgies and contorted bodies that shift in and out of focus in works such as Trouble in Paradise, Skulldiver II also showcases the artist’s promiscuous blending of art historical sources, bringing to mind a dizzyingly expansive net of references that rove from the voluptuous fleshiness of Titian’s nudes to the gestural vitality of Willem de Kooning’s mark-making via Chaïm Soutine’s ‘tornado like landscapes, glutinous paint, and unembellished brushstrokes.’ⁱⁱ

\n\n

\"Left: — Left: Chaïm Soutine, *Carcass of Beef,* 1925, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis. Image: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Winston and an anonymous donor, 57.12
\nRight: Willem de Kooning, *The Visit*, 1966-67, Tate Collection, London. Image: © Tate, Artwork: © Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust/ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023

\n\n

Buried amongst the rich, fleshy palette of flushed peach tones, chalky whites, and streaks of vermillion, Brown has also introduced verdant shocks of green, evoking tangled undergrowth and introducing a more complex sense of place into her painterly narratives. Recalling an earlier body of work featuring trysting couples in rich, green landscapes, Brown here too evokes the natural world in a contemporary reframing of the fêtes galante, bucolic scenes of pastoral bliss that came to prominence in France in the early decades of the 18^th century. Typically associated with painters such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard – who would eventually push the more mannered Rococo elements of their predecessors into more overtly erotic territory – these paintings typically featured playfully amorous groups of fashionably dressed men and women set within cultivated, rolling parkland.

\n\n

\"François — François Boucher, *Les Charmes de la vie champêtre (Charms of Country Life)*, 1737, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

\n\n

Evoking these pictorial traditions, Brown amplifies their latent eroticism, drawing especially on the furtive or illicit quality of these en plein air liaisons. Abandoned to their passions and completely absorbed in each other, the couple at the centre of Skulldiver II seem caught in a stolen moment of uncontrollable desire, the pulsing fluctuations of Brown’s brushwork also generating a visual correlate for the sensations and shattering self-annihilation of la petit mort.

\n\n

Although laying out across her back, her naked body stretched out before us, the female figure retains an air of detached autonomy, her head and face obscured in a flurry of gestural brushstrokes. In this respect, Skulldiver II also represents a bold and uncompromising expression of female erotic desire that finds a literary analogue in the provocative sexual confessions of of Anaïs Nin, Katherine Millett, and Annie Ernaux. Maintaining a careful tension between abstract and more figurative qualities, Brown ensures that the woman’s pleasure remains her own, bringing a distinctly feminine perspective to bear on art’s relationship to the erotic. Indeed here, as is so often the case in Brown’s painting, it is this sense of embodied sensation that brings the work to life, Skulldiver II masterfully employing the ‘distinctly sexual turbulence that brings forth the image, giving it density, definition, before swallowing it right back up again.’ⁱⁱⁱ

\n\n

Executed in the early years of the 21^st century, Brown’s bold and uncompromising take of sexual desire and the fundamentally erotic nature of oil paint has paved the way for a new generation of artists whose work similarly engages with the tactile and embodied qualities of the medium to explore intimacy and physical sensation. In their luminous celebration of touch and human closeness, emerging artist Doron Langberg’s depiction of queer love and longing in particular nods to the raw physicality of Brown’s work and the ‘complex and stimulating meditation on the nature of painting and the place of the human figure within it’ that it proposes.^iv

\n\n

\n\n

Collector’s Digest

\n\n

\n\t
First exhibited in 2008 with Gagosian Gallery in New York, Skulldiver II is a monumental celebration of erotic and painterly pleasure. One of four Skulldiver paintings, a sister work is now held in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
\n\t
\n\t
Now based in New York, Cecily Brown was born in the UK and studied at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art. She is an internationally recognised and defining figure of contemporary art, with examples of her work held in some of the most prestigious public collections in the world, including the Tate Collection in London, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
\n\t
\n\t
She has been the focus of solo exhibitions around the world, including the significant Where, When, How Often and with Whom held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark in 2018 and the recent exhibition of new paintings installed in historic Blenheim Palace in 2021.
\n\t

\n\n

ⁱLinda Nochlin, ‘Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch’, in Cecily Brown (exh. cat), The Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines, 2006, p. 55.

\n\n

ⁱⁱ John Yau, ‘How Soutine Showed de Kooning a Way Out’, Hyperallergic, July 24 2021, online.

\n\n

ⁱⁱⁱ Jan Tumlir, ‘The Paintings of Cecily Brown’, in Cecily Brown (exh. cat.), New York, 2003, p. 10.

\n\n

^iv Linda Nochlin, ‘Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch’, in Cecily Brown (exh. cat), Des Moines, 2006, p. 55.

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CAROLINE WALKER Threshold, 2014

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WILLEM DE KOONING [no title], 1984

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MICHEL MAJERUS Express, 2001

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JEFF KOONS Cherubs, 1991

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ALBERT OEHLEN Ascension, 2001

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ANSELM KIEFER Walhalla, 2016

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HOWARD HODGKIN Summer Rain, 2002

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JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Sprayed Myopia, 1988

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LOIE HOLLOWELL Split Orbs in purple, ochre, and brown, 2021

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Howard Hodgkin, Summer Rain, 2002 – 2013. View lot >
\nJohn Chamberlain, Sprayed Myopia, 1988. View lot >

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Phillips invited the celebrated poet to share his insights on two masters featured in our 20^th Century and Contemporary Evening Sale upcoming in London on 2 March.
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\n

\n\n

Howard Hodgkin once observed that "People are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid." His usually small, gemlike paintings do radiate a certain calm, in the Baudelairean sense of 'luxe, calme et volupté'. Always painted on wood, these works are front loaded with emotion and sensuality. John Chamberlain's ferocious looking steel sculptures, reassigned to artistic purpose from salvaged motor vehicles, would seem diametrically opposed to the operatic lushness of Hodgkin's paintings, yet place this unlikely pairing together in a room, and their inapposite points seem to easily commune, disparities dissolved.

\n\n

The two artists and their respective works are certainly unlikely bedfellows; Hodgkin a highly erudite and rather austere Englishman, Chamberlain a U.S. Navy vet and wild reveler who originally used the G.I. Bill to study hairdressing, in order, he said, to meet more girls. This was before his epiphany in Larry Rivers' backyard in Southampton, when he ripped the chromium fenders off a vehicle abandoned there, beat them into shape by driving over them with his truck, and thus created his first sculpture in steel, which he named Shortstop.

\n\n

Chamberlain was fond of saying that he got his sense of color from de Kooning, and 'gesture' from Franz Kline, two major exponents of the AbEx ethos, both of whom were friends and drinking companions. It's difficult to imagine Hodgkin carousing with them at the Cedar Bar while Pollock was busy tearing the door off the lavatory, and yet the threads of his expressionistic work intertwine comfortably with the more explosive outbursts of the New York AbEx crew.

\n\n

Hodgkin's sensuous, intense paintings, infused with his love of late 19th-century French painters like Degas and Vuillard, also reflect his passion for the vivid light and colors of India, a country he visited frequently throughout his life. These tropical colors contrast sharply with the white glare of the studio in which he worked, full of light and devoid of any decoration.

\n\n

Many of Chamberlain's turbulent steel pieces, whose gaudy colors exude a jingle jangly urban rhythm, were produced in the sylvan setting of Shelter Island, where Chamberlain finally settled after sojourns in New York City, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Connecticut, and Florida. The vast studio on Shelter Island is a step away from his living quarters, and both areas were filled with the materials he used in his art, which was never limited to disassembled cars — he also produced works in sculpted sponge, in paper and aluminum foil, each piece crumpled and squeezed until the form pleased the artist's eye, often guided by his early love of poetry, which he had studied at Black Mountain College with Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. "If I have a room full of parts, they are like a lot of words, and I have to take one piece and put it next to another and find out if it really fits."

\n\n

Hodgkin on the other hand wryly observed that "I never try to understand anything I do — it's a waste of time." But, he was also a lover of poetry, although he preferred more traditional English poems. The painting Green Thought in a Green Shade takes its name from Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century poem The Garden, “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.” In certain of his paintings a raw sensuality punches through the abstraction to evoke remembered moments as powerfully as one of Proust's madeleines. He is an artist who redefined the way we look at the world, bringing passion and memory into the language of painting. Both Hodgkin and Chamberlain shied away from describing or explaining their art, afraid that words would only limit the viewer’s mind and imagination. The sense of powerful feelings and emotion coursing through the work of both is more than enough to energize a room and anyone standing in it.

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About Max Blagg /

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Max Blagg, born in England, has lived in NYC since 1971. Long recognized as a highly respected poet, visual artist, and performer on the New York art and literary scene, he has appeared at innumerable venues including the Kitchen, Guggenheim Museum, Parrish Museum, St. Marks Church, The National Arts Club, and Bowery Poetry Club. Blagg has published several volumes of poetry and prose internationally and in the U.S. with Carpe Diem Press, Paradigm Press, and Shallow Books. Blagg's collaborations with artists, including Alex Katz, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Keith Sonnier, Jack Pierson, and Larry Clark, have culminated in books, artworks, and videos. His artworks have been exhibited at The Parrish Museum, Luring Augustine, Exhibition A, and collected by artists Richard Prince, Larry Clark, Nate Lowman, and Adam McEwen. Four of his "flyers" from 1984 were included in the Nan Goldin exhibition, MoMA, NYC, 2016. A poem/painting collaboration with Richard Prince was included in the Richard Prince Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2007.

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Auction /

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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
\n2 March, 5pm
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

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\nViewing /

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23 February – 2 March
\nMonday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm
\nSunday, 12pm – 6pm

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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New Talent Speaks: Five emerging artists to benefit Foster Pride >

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Wave After Wave: Paul Laster on six women artists on the contemporary crest >

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\n","publishDate","2023-02-20T17:35:37.000000Z","authorCredit","Don Carroll","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY","articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/115035458/an-unexpected-pairing","auctionEditorialID",1743,"editorialID",4123,"flocklerID",115035458,{"_1221":1245,"_1223":293,"_1224":1246,"_512":1247,"_1227":1248,"_1229":1249,"_1231":1232,"_1233":1234,"_1235":467,"_1236":1250,"_460":291,"_1238":1251,"_1240":1252,"_1242":1253},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/young-dekooning-b33d52c3-53ea-4735-8e15-d427303b6ae1_s600x0.jpg","A reflection on the late great Willem de Kooning by Anthony Haden-Guest.","On a Very Good Day","

The artist Willem de Kooning as a young man, August 1953, East Hampton. Photo by Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images.

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Phillips invited elder statesman of the art world, Anthony Haden-Guest to take the long view of the life and career of Willem de Kooning — whose monumental triumph [no title] of 1984 features in our 20th Century & Contemproary Evening Sale in London on 2 March.
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Willem de Kooning traveled from Holland to the United States as a stowaway, made it to New York in 1926, and soon, the 22 year old was putting bread on the table by painting houses, doing illustrations, and making displays for department stores as he worked on his art. In this he was doubly gifted, both at making incisive figurative drawings and painting abstractions, and such was his need to make art that he gave up that Depression rarity — a paying job — to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the federal arts project, so as to be near working artists. There he was an assistant to Fernand Léger and, crucially, grew close to Arshile Gorky, through whom he learned how to absorb what he needed from Picasso’s Cubism, without being crushed by the maestro’s heft and reach.

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De Kooning shortly became part of the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, the movement which would be swiftly accepted as having enabled New York to replace Paris as global capital of the contemporary art world. The AbEx group included Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and Franz Kline, so it was hardly low on talent, but de Kooning and Jackson Pollock had soon emerged as contenders for leading roles. Then, as was humanly inevitable, came the sniping as to which deserved the number one spot; sniping in which both, from time to time, participated.

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Their differences went deeper than manners of painthandling. When Hans Hofmann, the German AbEx artist, asked Pollock if he worked from nature, Pollock riposted “I am nature.” When de Kooning was explaining why he so liked the Hamptons in a letter to friends, he wrote: “For a painter like me it is much better to be surrounded by a small nature. Places like the Grand Canyon would frighten me to death.”

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That was just a coincidence of phrasing, but it reflects the fact that the swirling planes on a Pollock canvas appear to have been executed with a deliberate indifference to the long-standing norms of composition, however these are the norms in which de Kooning was well schooled and used to his own remarkable ends. “De Kooning blew open the Cubist grid, changing its mode from structural to fluid,” in the words of the late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, a writer with un uncanny gift for getting into an artist’s head and brush hand, “De Kooning is to classical Cubism as flying is to walking.”

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In 1950 de Kooning painted Excavations, a tremendous canvas, interpreted by his fellow AbExes, as a direct challenge to Pollock. This was one of the four de Koonings that Alfred Barr presented at the Venice Biennale in 1953. Three years later Pollock died, drunkenly crashing his car in Springs, New York. “It’s over. I’m number one,” de Kooning said at the funeral.

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De Kooning settled down to decades of making abstractions infused with a sense of the real, works which could seem crowded, but each of which was singularly resolved. He matched Picasso and Matisse for longevity, but his progress was very different from either. Matisse’s final work, his paper cut-outs, were well received. Picasso’s last canvases were expressively Picassoid, indeed controversially so, and it took a while before they got critical recognition and market acceptance.

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The changes in the paintings of de Kooning’s last period were more striking than either. These spare, pure canvases are at once serene and high energy, alive with looping, form-defining lines, and always achieving a deeply satisfying resolution; they take abstraction to places where it has never been. In his old age, de Kooning retained a magic wrist such as few others, and had decades of craft moves embedded in his head.

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“Pollock may be our greatest artist,” wrote Carter Ratcliff in The Fate of a Gesture. “Some have nominated Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol for that position. Undoubtedly, though, our greatest painter is de Kooning.” Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “The art of painting does not get more exciting than Willem de Kooning on a good day.” This painting was made on one of his best.

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Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1984. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.
\nEstimate: £7,000,000–9,000,000. View lot >
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Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, cartoonist, art critic, and frequent contributor to publications across the art and culture spheres. An elder statesman of the art scene, his books include TRUE COLORS: The Real Life of the Art World and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night, along with collections of verse, cartoonery, and critique. He lives and works in New York and London.

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Auction /

\n\n

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
\n2 March, 5pm
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

\n\n

\nViewing /

\n\n

23 February – 2 March
\nMonday-Saturday 10am – 6pm
\nSunday 12pm – 6pm

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

New Talent Speaks: Five emerging artists to benefit Foster Pride >

\n\n

Wave After Wave: Paul Laster on six women artists on the contemporary crest >

\n\n

\n","2023-02-16T20:06:58.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/114705140/the-perfect-day",1744,4119,114705140,{"_1221":1255,"_1223":293,"_1224":1256,"_512":1257,"_1227":1258,"_1229":1259,"_1231":1260,"_1233":1234,"_1235":467,"_1236":1261,"_460":379,"_1238":1262,"_1240":1263,"_1242":1264},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/lead-565b4840-7232-4125-a5e8-8f32a7a68c46_s600x0.jpg","Photography is essential to the process of five artists in our upcoming London Auctions.","The Painter’s Lens","

Caroline Walker, Threshold, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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With source material ranging from archival photographs to photographic portraits of one’s own community, we explore how five figurative artists working today employ photography in their practice to pose important questions about childhood, gender, and race in contemporary culture.

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Sarah Ball

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Sarah Ball, Elliot, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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Sarah Ball works primarily from found imagery — photographic portraits borrowed from newspapers, social media, and historical archives documenting immigration and criminality. As such, she approaches her paintings a step removed from her sitters, endowing her portraits with an air of detached anonymity which in turn encourages viewers to search deeply in their faces for these hidden narratives. As is typical of Ball’s spellbinding portraits, Elliot is titled after its sitter, a recurring subject in Ball’s work and one of the faces found through her photographic research. Closely cropped and set against a softly flattened, void space, the square format engaged here suggests the vernacular of studio photography, photobooth portraits, and even the rigid framing of the Instagram grid.
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\nStemming from an early interest in illustration and graphic design, Ball gradually honed the economic approach to form used to such powerful effect in the arrangement of crisp, flattened, monochromatic shapes at play in Elliot. Rather than cluttering her compositions with symbolically charged details, Ball’s paintings are radically reduced to better focus our attention on the most defining characteristics of her subjects. In this way, her strikingly clear portraits capture both a physical likeness and something more essential. The artist explains that she might be initially drawn to the source photograph by the small aesthetic details her subjects use to present themselves; but she focuses our attention beyond these visual markers. This method elicits an empathetic response in viewers, in a manner that at once recalls the denuded settings favored by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters and the cool psychological focus of Lucian Freud’s meticulous portraits.

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Claire Tabouret

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Claire Tabouret, L’Attente, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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At once haunting and immediately engaging, Tabouret’s painted characters are inspired by photographs, some taken from her personal archive and others from anonymous shots collected during her research. As Tabouret eloquently describes, in restoring something lost or otherwise absent from these source images, the painting emerges as “a palliative to everything I am feeling that isn’t actually visible in the photograph.” Tabouret’s figures appear suspended in space and time, ghostly impressions that seem to bring us into a direct and intimate relationship with history.
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\nImmersed in a seductive, phosphorescent light, L’Attente portrays a group of costumed children lined up in two rows. She arranges them closely together in the shallow pictorial space, stacking them in a tight, vertical format in a manner that visually recalls the more rigid configuration favored by studio photography. The figures are seen head-on, in a direct but hermetic attitude, confronting the viewer with a powerful and disarming gaze. As stated by the artist, the children she represents “have a particular mood — they are not sad, but rather solemn, serious. There is latent violence and anger in their eyes.” The use of historical photographs in her process aligns with the artist’s approach to painting — placing us in the middle of an unfolding narrative that feels both recognizable and foreign. It leaves the impression that we’re being welcomed into the past but are unable to enter it.

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Caroline Walker

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Caroline Walker, Threshold, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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Threshold is a late work from Caroline Walker’s series In Every Dream Home. Working exclusively with women, Walker developed a rather distinct approach to her compositions during this period. Having found the right location, she hired actresses and models to spend time in the space with her, posing and photographing them before returning to her studio to work from these carefully staged images. Repeatedly seen in the same luxurious residential setting, the paintings feature a recurring cast of women whom we glimpse in moments of unguarded stillness, the passage of time propelling them through a set of familiar domestic and leisure activities.
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\nWidely regarded as one of the most technically accomplished figurative artists of her generation, Walker’s paintings privilege the female gaze. They use domestic environments to pose questions around looking and being looked at, the slippery boundary between public behavior and private space, and the relationship between the spaces that we occupy and the kind of narratives that unfold in them. Threshold, is framed by dense, overhanging foliage, and depicts two women dressed in identical orange swimsuits lying head-to-head at the edge of an outdoor swimming pool. Distinctively, their faces are hidden by broad-rimmed, black sunhats. Mirroring each other, both trail an arm languorously in the water. The strange symmetry of Walker’s careful arrangement of their pose and attire echoes in the doubled reflection of the pool, which is reinforced by the strict symmetry of the alternating panels of oak and glass behind them. Walker’s pool paintings recall David Hockney’s but carry us further into a kind of narrative disquiet that is difficult to place, but that undoubtably calls on cinematic and photographic reference points.

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\nAmani Lewis

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Amani Lewis, Star and Be, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

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Photography serves as the conduit for the expressive truths of Amani Lewis’ work, which frequently retells the stories of their own Baltimore community on the terms of its lived identities. Beginning with a photographic image, they then manipulate their source material, often applying contour lines and other digital effects. The resulting images are then transferred to canvas, and painterly techniques are applied with a variety of media to build out the surface texture. The otherworldly effect of this process shifts the viewer’s perception from questions of a perceived external reality to a more nuanced appreciation of a subject’s inner life.

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As the artists explains, these portraits “have to do with following the lines and characteristics of my subject’s body that makes them the person who they are — while also mapping the lineage of that person to the likeness of a topographical map.” Most often working directly with members of their community as sitters, Amani Lewis’ subjects are treated as equal partners in the artistic process. This is clear in the immediately arresting canvas Star and Be. Here, the viewer is invited into a private interior moment shared between the two figures. The boundaries of media are so intricately blurred that we lose sight of where photography ends, and painting and collage begin. A deeply physical, yet ostensibly digitized image, the figures appear strong, on their own terms, yet open, exposed, and intimate. The enigmatic expressions of the characters are difficult to discern, but their stories are felt.

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Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe

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Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Dapper II, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

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African artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s powerful portraits of black subjects begin with photography. Born and raised in Ghana, he was fascinated at an early age by the detailed hand-painted movie posters in cinemas, which led to his interest in painting. Searching for his own voice and artistic style after graduating from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, he took a brief break from painting and studied photography. It was during this time that he met his wife, a photography enthusiast, and relocated with her to Portland, Oregon, in 2017. Confronted with the realities of American racism in Portland, he turned his work towards themes of empowerment. In 2020, the artist told Juxtapoz magazine, “I try to find other Black people that are living here. Talk to them. Photograph them. And then try to capture everything that is there in their personality and put it in a still image.”
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\nHis portraits are celebrations of blackness and reclamations of cultural dignity. His work frequently includes bright color in the clothes adorning his figures, as well as in thick impasto backgrounds. These colors, at times reminiscent of Ghanian Kente cloth, are often set against the tonal greyscale palate used to render the skin tones of his subjects. Suggestive of black-and-white photography, this virtuosic contrast draws our gaze to the majesty of the lives depicted. With its purple background executed in thick paint and its depiction of resplendent patterned cloth, Dapper II exemplifies the powerful effectiveness of this approach.

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Auction /

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20th Century & Contemporary Art, London

\n\n

Evening Sale
\n2 March, 5pm GMT
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

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Day Sale
\n3 March, 1pm GMT
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

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\nViewing /

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23 February – 3 March
\nMonday-Saturday 10am – 6pm
\nSunday 12pm – 6pm

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

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A Life of Living with Art: Personal insights on collecting from Jimmy Belilty himself >

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On a Very Good Day: A reflection on the late great Willem de Kooning by Anthony Haden-Guest >

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Art and the Erotic

Collector’s Digest

Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1984. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.\nEstimate: £7,000,000–9,000,000. View lot >\n\n

Sarah Ball

Sarah Ball, Elliot, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

Claire Tabouret

Claire Tabouret, L’Attente, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

Caroline Walker

Caroline Walker, Threshold, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

\nAmani Lewis

Amani Lewis, Star and Be, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Dapper II, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1984. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.
\nEstimate: £7,000,000–9,000,000. View lot >
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7

Cecily Brown

Skulldiver II

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

Cecily Brown