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\n","auctionDetailsSmall","London Auction 4 March 2022","extraInfo","

\n\n

Specialist, Associate Director, Head of Day Sale, 20th Century & Contemporary Art
\n+44 20 7318 4084

\n\n

stovey@phillips.com

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Left: Doron Langberg, Amy in Her Studio, 2017. 20th Centuy & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Right: Sungi Mlengeya, Chaotic Disposition, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale.

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For some, the doldrum days between February and March are yet another opportunity to take stock of the changes behind and the days ahead. In that spirit, we've looked to the emerging artists of our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day & Evening London Sales for six timeless lessons in personal growth that will (hopefully) bring out the best in us.

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Vulnerability: Doron Langberg & Sungi Mlengeya

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It’s rather fitting that February is split exactly (most of the time) in half by the lead up to and the fallout from a commercial holiday about love, and one that explicitly targets our vulnerability toward the world. As Doron Langberg and Sungi Miengeya capture so acutely, it’s the vulnerability of self that endures and endears.

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Israeli-born, New York-based Doron Langberg creates vibrant works typified by vulnerability, queer intimacy, and community. Shown here alone, Langberg’s friend and fellow artist Amy sits pensively in her studio, elusive and absorbed in thought, the tools of her trade scattered around her. As a working space where the artist explores ideas and turns them into material realities, the studio vividly captures this porous exchange between interiority and environment. Self-taught Tanzanian artist Sungi Miengeya’s exploration of negative space in Chaotic Disposition (2020) presents an intimate, liberating moment alone; the kind of moments that allow us to find whatever is it we want – clarity, silence, anything – away from external pressures.

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Left: Serge Attukwei Clottey, Jidenna, 2020-2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale. Right: Foster Sakyiamah, Yellow Girls Synced, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale.

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Poise: Serge Attukwei Clottey & Foster Sakyiamah

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Powerfully self-possessed, Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei’s figures embody a poise and elegance we might all aspire to. This is especially evident in Jidenna (2020–2021), where the subject’s face is turned slightly upward, equally inquisitive and knowing. Clottey is perhaps best known for his Afrogallonism concept, making use of the ubiquitous yellow gallon containers around Accra to invent works in myriad forms. However, Clottey’s focus on the figure carries equal weight in his practice, here offering a compelling counterpoint to his assemblages.

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So too does Foster Sakyiamah’s Yellow Girls Synced (2021) exhibit this graceful balance – neither practiced stoicism or performative gesture, but an inalienable confidence that shines through any pose. Another emerging Ghanian talent, Sakyiamah is a graduate of Ghanatta College of Art and Design whose paintings express the dynamic richness of subjects interacting with their environment in expressive, composed ways. Grecian-style swirls and feline accompaniment create an energy in the present work as it builds around the canvas, poised to launch into kinetic movement at the subjects’ count

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Left: Rafa Macarrón, Balcones, 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Right: Avery Singer, Prada Mask, 2012. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale.

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Dimension: Rafa Macarrón & Avery Singer

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Leave it to flatness to give a perfect summary of dimension. Self-taught artist Rafa Macarrón’s subjects in Balcones (2018) engage with their surroundings in a way that pushes the limits of two-dimensional space. His 13 subjects smoke cigarettes, sit under rain clouds, and look out from comically sized glasses, stacked against an acid yellow and fluorescent orange ground. A physiotherapist by training, Macarrón has a carefully studied knowledge of human anatomy, which he relates directly to his characteristic distorted figures and simplified gestures, pushed right up against the picture surface.

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The deceptive simplicity of Avery Singer’s Prada Mask (2012) – centered by its voided eyes – offers a look at the infinite depth of a single color. Singer’s use of technology is key in her practice: the artist manipulates technologies to illustrate historical artistic references and explore the possibilities of software. The present work uses an architectural design modeling program to render a flattened, sharp refocus of the artist’s engagement with Modernism.

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Left: Jadé Fadojutimi, Swamp, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale. Right: Jordy Kerwick, Cool Cats, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale.

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Resilience: Jadé Fadojutimi & Jordy Kerwick

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Resilience is a twofold implication: first, the ability to bounce back from difficulty; second, the ability to shape a path forward. Jadé Fadojutimi’s Swamp (2015) is an example of the artist’s exploration into the abstract places of her mind. Born and raised in East London to Nigerian parents, Fadojutimi’s British-Nigerian cultural duality raised continuous questions for the artist around identity. A transitional environment combining both land and water and operating as a site of rebirth and transformation even in the face of unwelcoming conditions, it is tempting to read an autobiographical element at work in this stunningly light composition.

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Resilience is also a staple in parables and folklore, two influences for Australian artist Jordy Kerwick. The self-taught painter explores the imagination as a landscape of its own, one to be fully embraced instead of limited by expectation. Kerwick’s tactile surfaces are rendered in thick layers of oil paint. The present work, Cool Cats (2015), is an exercise in repetition; the artist created several iterations of flowers and bookstacks, often with cheeky references – not in search of perfection, but rather as examples of the repetitive nature of everyday life and the simple difference between falling into routine and finding enjoyment.

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Left: Lauren Quin, Airsickness, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Right: Antonia Showering, It Wasn't To Be, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale.

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Vitality: Lauren Quin & Antonia Showering

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Ah, vitality, the quality that beacons outward and brings others to us. It is magnetic, hard to place, but immediately felt. California-based artist Lauren Quin’s Airsickness (2021) seems at a digital collage; however, her methods are remarkably analog, involving drawing, scratching, systematic mark-making, and a form of trace mono-printing whereby the surface of the work is gently pressed onto an ink-covered pane of glass. These stained and carved line drawings create an organic warmth that draws the viewer in all directions, following the energy of snaking tubes that oscillate between microscopic and interdimensional.

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Opposite Quin’s immutable vitality, Antonia Showering transforms the familiar glow of a family portrait into a self-contained universe. Almost Polaroid-like in its framing – not fully focused, off-center, with indeterminate subjects – the British artist gives us a glimpse of a shared moment, as if taking a picture, not as a fellow family member, but as a passerby asked kindly to hold the camera. There, in the viewfinder, we find what we are most drawn to: an invitation to see and be seen, a reciprocal form of interaction between art and life.

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Left: Cinga Samson, Ubuhle beenkanyezi VIII, 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Right: Cecily Brown, When Time Ran Out, 2016. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.

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Connection: Cinga Samson & Cecily Brown

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So crucial is connection to life that after the fuss of food, water, and shelter, connection can be understood as the formative element of the human condition. The methods with which we create connections go beyond the constraints of the knowable world, and so are constantly forming novel ways of expression. Cinga Samson's Ubuhle beenkanyezi VIII (2018) translates from the Zulu dialect as The Beauty of the Stars – its subject appears as a messanger between two realms, liminally between physical and spiritual planes. With its otherworldly eyes and possessive stance, the subject comes into frame with a conceptual distance, although its presence signals an imperative: connection. Whether present to warn, empower, or relay, the messenger as a universal subject is the connective tissue between the viewer and world it inhabits.

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A connection with history is at the heart of Cecily Brown's When Time Ran Out (2016). The shipwreck – one of Brown's signature motifs – draws its intensity directly from Jean-Louis Théodore Géricault’s 19th century masterwork, La Balsa de la Medusa, as its contorted figures strain against their fates. Some faces are trodden, others defiant in a critical moment in Géricault’s version, as a rescue ship is finally spotted in the distance. Brown’s abstracted painting replaces the horizon with the gangrenous hue of decay, and yet, in the composite chaos, we see her faces seeking each other, looking outward, attempting to find something, even in a hopeless situation. The imperative here is Beckettian: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

\n\n

Two Studies in Intimacy: Henry Moore & Jean Dubuffet >

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Birds of a Feather: Phillips x ARTEMARTIS >

\n","publishDate","2022-02-17T19:43:45.000000Z","authorCredit","Arian Murati","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/90967643/how-art-imitates-life","displayOrder","auctionEditorialID",1491,"editorialID",3788,"flocklerID",90967643,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/warburg-phillips-sale-f519c2fd-d199-4ef4-a1b2-68b288baefc9_s600x0.jpg","Goshka Macuga, Michael Joo, and Cornelia Parker on the \"Warburg Renaissance\" and what the venerable institute means to their work. ","The Future of Cultural Memory: The Warburg Institute Today","

Goshka Macuga, Untitled 5 (Aby Warburg Photograph, April 1896, Pueblo woman escaping into her house at the sight of Warburg’s camera), 2008. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Phillips is proud to present a series of works at auction as par of the 4 March 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale in London to support The Warburg Renaissance, a capital transformation project that will create in London’s 21st-Century Knowledge Quarter the interdisciplinary laboratory that founder Aby Warburg dreamed of in early 20th-century Hamburg. We spoke with three artists whose work features in the collection about the unique ways the institute has inspired their practices and understanding of cultural memory.

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PHILLIPS: What does The Warburg Institute (and the work of Aby Warburg) mean to you?

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Michael Joo: A living temple to the vision of an intellectual and artistic practice that uses history to acknowledge and create new pathways to the histories yet unacknowledged and unwritten; a place of learning and the energy generated by this.

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Cornelia Parker: My first brush with art history was when I was 15 years old and was taught by my art teachers, knowledge gleaned from Gombrich’s The Story of Art. A seed was planted in my imagination, a catalyst that propelled me towards a career in art. In 1999, I was invited to make an exhibition at the Warburg by Penelope Curtis. She wanted to show some of my Avoided Objects, which were small works using non objects. For instance, The Negatives of Words used residue excavated when carving words into silver by hand. Similarly, Collected Death of Images was made from sheets of silver reclaimed from photographic fix. I always think of the Warburg Institute as a perfect, quiet place to absorb culture, so it was a good fit.

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Goshka Macuga: Aby Warburg is an important figure to me. Having been first introduced to his work years ago before working on my project for Kunsthalle Basel, Warburg’s work and persona has had a lasting impact on me, particularly his relationship to knowledge. More widely, Warburg has had a great influence, not only on artists and scholars, but also on people who are generally interested in knowledge. The institute’s role in keeping the personal story of Warburg’s life and the history of his collection in London preserved is a great one, as a testament, not only to the history of Europe from the 19th -21st centuries, but also as something with more global significance.

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P: Tell us a bit about the work you’ve donated and why you chose it.

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CP: I have chosen one of my photogravures for my donation to the Warburg auction. I made it using glassware that belonged to the pioneer of photography Fox Talbot. He had made a famous image of his Articles of Glass in 1844. Of nineteen pieces of glassware only eight remain, the others lost or broken. The Bodleian Library in Oxford houses those that are left. I made a request to borrow the glass and made a series of photogravures using them as a kind of glass negative. Breaking with Talbot’s formal approach, my compositions are somewhat more animated.

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MJ: DRWN is from a series of works involving animals that live in or migrate through contested territories, borders and de-militarized zones. Though these liminal spaces are constructs, the particular ecosystems that form inside them and at their edges are very real. This artwork presents the legs from an endangered crane specimen that are cast in an aluminum and graphite composite; one, from a direct cast and the other its 3D-scanned and reverse-printed doppelganger. The work is installed from a height, tracing the wall’s surface on the way to the pair's final position on the floor. Each time they are installed, a trace of them is left behind, slowly contributing to their physical dissolution as indicated by the marks left on the wall above each cast. For me, the act of doing in order to see, and its requisite complication of the present and future seemed to have some resonance in my thinking about Aby Warburg and the Institute.

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GM: I’m donating a photograph taken by Aby Warburg in 1896 at the Hopi village during his trip to the region of the Pueblo Indians in North America. This image was featured in my exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2009, I am Become Death. I am donating this work to the auction to support The Warburg Institute’s plans for the upcoming renovation of the building. The funds raised through the auction could support transcription, translation and digitization of the Warburg’s collection to make parts of the Institute more accessible to the public.

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Cornelia Parker, Fox Talbot's Articles of Glass (all that are left), 2016. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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P: How does history inform your art?

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MJ: In my work, I like drawing from biased historical narratives and complicating them with complex material identities that contain their own timelines and facts. Perhaps it’s possible that these collisions of human and a-human truths and priorities can generate entangled relationships and new narratives of existence and co-existence on our planet.

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GM: My Kunsthalle Basel show combined different strands of historical and artistic research, reflecting on Aby Warburg’s trip in the USA in 1895-96 and the Robert Morris exhibition Bodyspacemotionthings at the Tate in 1971, as well as Herbert Bayer’s Road to Victory exhibition in 1942. Through this path I tried to access different moments in time and different political stances closely related to the neo-colonial history of the United States of America. Warburg’s trip to the US directly linked with the expansion of the American Frontier in the 19th Century. Road to Victory helped to summarize U.S influence, during and post-WWII. The work of Robert Morris allowed me to draw parallels between American Wars, starting from the Vietnam War to more contemporary conflicts. I also followed the steps of Aby Warburg and traveled to the Native American Hopi tribe reservation in New Mexico as part of my research for the making of Snake Society.

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P: How do you see the relationship between books and images?

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GM: Warburg’s last, unfinished project was a “picture atlas” arranged on forty screens, titled by him: Mnemosyne. The Atlas, designed to serve as a storyboard or mnemonic device, was the culmination of forty years of his intellectual development and to this day remains as enigmatic as it was in 1929. The subjective narrative illustrated by a juxtaposition of images and texts carried deep symbolic value and until his death was open to continued rearrangements and updates, sparked by events such as the signing of the concordat with Mussolini or news of Eckener’s Zeppelin docking in New York.

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MJ: The acts of reading or writing involve an image making that can be explicit or fluid. Since these are just beyond space as we experience it, they are not fixed by material limitations and laws of the physical world. I’m drawn to the tension of this “un-fixedness” in relation to sculpture. Reading itself calls for a personal relationship to the material presented which, when combined with human experience and day-to-day life, can transform information to knowledge in an act of intellectual alchemy. Knowledge itself as an art medium is a contemporary, relevant and essential thing to consider in this day and age. The use of data to generate artforms if guided by the right algorithms, can speak to this.

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Michael Joo, DRWN (Carunculatus) AI 2, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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P: Are there any texts that have inspired your practice?

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GM: My second project – the script for Preparatory Notes for a Chicago Comedy, developed by Dieter Roelstraete and I – was based on my findings in The Warburg Institute Archive in London. While researching there in 2007, I came across information that Warburg wrote a play critiquing the art scene in Hamburg – his hometown. In his script, titled Hamburg Conversations on Art: Hamburg Comedy, characters (possibly resembling the members of his own family and friends) discussed or argued matters related to contemporary art at the time. The original text in the archive was in German, handwritten by Warburg. We had to translate it to English, using the essence of Warburg’s text to write our own script, reflecting on the global contemporary art scene today.

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P: The Warburg Institute is a place of cultural memory – what role do you think memory plays in art?

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MJ: Memory is foundational in establishing the reference markers to navigate society and the world and gives us a sense of autonomy and identity. At its most complex, I see it as a non-structural framework, perhaps like a grid in space containing all one has experienced, whether maker or viewer, which when superimposed onto the artwork or its process, helps to establish different constellations of meaning between image or object and the way we think the world works. At its most basic, it can serve as an unattainable ideal in the process of making an image or object; always on the tip of one’s tongue and fingertips and generative of something beyond representation.

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GM: Memory is fundamental in human existence as it determines how we link past events with the present as well as the future. In art, memory not only exists as a subject of research, but also as a tool, an important mechanism essential in building structures that reflect the complexities of our individual and social existence. Memory is what unites us in the sharing of pain and pleasure, as well as in our basic ability to relate to each other and our environment.

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The Warburg Institute primarily consists of image-based materials, carefully assembled by Warburg himself and put to work in projects such as Mnemosyne Atlas. In a similar way to Giordano Bruno’s Memory Wheels, Robert Fludd’s architectural visualization or Ramon Lull’s alchemical diagrams, Warburg’s Atlas can be seen as a complex system of ideas that reflect not only the history of art, but also the shared psyche of his time. The Warburg Institute has been instrumental in research and studies for art historians and visual artists and stands as a monument or a structure of knowledge that feeds cultural memory in its own right. One of the most elaborate and inspiring studies of the history of memory systems (by Francis A. Yates in The Art of Memory) is unsurprisingly affiliated with the Warburg Institute:

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“Though the mnemotechnical side of the art is always present, both in antiquity and thereafter, and forms the factual basis for its investigation, the exploration of it must include more than the history of its techniques. Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the history of the training of this most fundamental and elusive of human powers will plunge us into deep waters.”

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Two Studies in Intimacy: Henry Moore & Jean Dubuffet >

\n\n

How Art Imitmates Life >

\n\n

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