Donna Huanca - New Now & Design Hong Kong Sunday, November 26, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “I am driven by making work that brings presence to the body.”
    — Donna Huanca

     

    Oscillating between ephemerality and perpetuality, Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca’s practice is interdisciplinary, encompassing mediums from performance and video to painting and sculpture, yet remaining fundamentally rooted in the body. The present lot brilliantly illustrates the artist’s abandonment of categorial imperatives, giving way to an intimate yet enigmatic visual language.

     

    In YMA PIMA, serene oasis of colours and textures stir in commotion, its corporeality summoning Kazuo Shiraga’s expressive action paintings. Stood at 160cm, this work magnifies the artist’s own motion, hosting the body as poltergeist, a figure defined by the traces of its own movements.

     

    Detail of the present lot

     

    At the top of the composition, lines of incisions run parallel, echoing the scratching of skin. This unveils the ochre-tone layer below, a glimpse into Huanca’s uniquely self-referential artistic process where she prints and collates images from her own past performances, then paints over them with layers of oil and acrylic, forming a lush narrative of lyrical depth that at once conceals and immortalises her works.

     

    Narrative is further sculpted through the black hair-like strands, seen as an emblem of personal history, where ‘Each strand of our hair carries memory, chemical traces of our diet and the environment around us. Hair in this show is that container for history.’ i

     

    Donna Huanca has exhibited in major institutions internationally, including MoMA, New York, Lower Belvedere, Vienna, and Space K, Seoul, and is currently represented by Peres ProjectsTravesia Cuatro and Simon Lee Gallery. Her works can be found in major collections, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. Her latest solo exhibition was held at the Faurschou Foundation in New York in October 2023.

     

     

    i Donna Huanca, quoted in Miss Rosen, ‘Bolivian-American Artist Donna Huanca on Her Latest Exhibition’, AnOther, 4 March 2020, online

    • Provenance

      Peres Projects, Berlin
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

54

YMA PIMA

signed and dated 'DHUANCA 2018' on the reverse
oil on digital print on canvas
160 x 123.5 cm. (62 7/8 x 48 5/8 in.)
Executed in 2018.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
HK$180,000 - 240,000 
€21,200-28,300
$23,100-30,800

Sold for HK$165,100

Contact Specialist

Angela Tian
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now & Design Sale
20th Century & Contemporary Art, Hong Kong
+852 2318 2058
AngelaTian@phillips.com

New Now & Design

Hong Kong Auction 26 November 2023