George Condo, Jake Chapman, Dinos Chapman and Paul McCarthy - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, October 12, 2023 | Phillips

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  • DOOR is a compelling and monumental product of the 2006 collaboration between Paul McCarthy, Jake and Dinos Chapman and George Condo. The project facilitated by RS&A, London and Deitch Projects, New York, saw the four groundbreaking contemporary artists collectively create eight canvases and four etchings over a period of a year, each work demonstrating the artists’ unique perspectives. Inspired by great artistic partnerships of the last century such as those between Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente in 1983, each artist had an existing familiarity with working collaboratively. The Chapman brothers are known primarily for their work as a duo; Condo had created several works with Keith Haring and William Burroughs a quarter of a century earlier and McCarthy has received acclaim for his work with Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades. However, for this endeavor the group looked to the Surrealists and their Exquisite Corpse game for the parameters of the project. Adopting the sequential approach, each artist had one month to work on each artwork in isolation from the others, rotating to allow all a turn to be first, second, third and fourth – breaking from convention, even Jake and Dinos Chapman worked separately, constructing a temporary wall in their shared studio space. 

     

    McCarthy began work on DOOR and with typical irreverence, the artist affixed a studio door to the centre of the canvas, carving a large square hole through the centre of both. The door and applied t-shirt are daubed with blood red paint, which splatters over the edges onto the icy blue background. Three letterbox shaped clippings from Topper, Big Wheel magazine and Play Station hover ambiguously either side and at the centre of the door. For his turn, Jake Chapman rotated the work 90 degrees clockwise, covering all but the Big Wheel collage and adding figurative elements including the grotesque many-eyed figure to the right of the work. Building on his previous work exploring Nazi symbolism, Chapman added two swastikas at either end.
     

    Artwork: © Paul McCarthy 

     

    Third to make this mark, Dinos Chapman immediately undid his brothers’ controversial additions, leaving just a shadow of the larger swastika at the upper left corner. He armed the monster with pencil and added pinned sheets of paper, one black and one with an uncompleted ‘paint by numbers’ design. The previously flat background is transformed into wooden floorboards and sky and the central hole becomes a window to a printed brooding landscape. Here, Chapman borrows from early modernist movements, Fauvism and Cubism with fragmented perspective and a warped central focus.

     

    Left: Artwork: © Paul McCarthy and © Jake Chapman. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023
    Right: Artwork: © Paul McCarthy and © Jake and Dinos Chapman. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023 

     

    In the case of DOOR, Condo worked last, which allowed the artist the defining and lasting creative oversight on the finished work. Working primarily in pastels, Condo added his archetypal faces and abstract lines to the left sheet of paper and upper third of the work. These also extend from the main figure’s pencil, affording them a spontaneous graffiti-like effect. Condo’s additions are instantly recognizable as his own, but also further art-historical influences, such as the green oval form at the upper centre, which strongly recall’s Philip Guston’s eyes. DOOR in its completed state is a playful and complex demonstration of the four artists’ individual creative expression and perfectly encapsulates the power of collaboration.

    • Provenance

      Deitch Projects, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, Deitch Projects in Collaboration with RS&A, With The Artists/Meet The Artists, 29 March - 28 April 2007, pp. 34-41 (illustrated, p. 41)

134

DOOR

signed and dated 'Condo 06 Paul McCarthy 06 Dinos Chapman Jake Chapman' on a piece of canvas affixed to the reverse
oil, acrylic, wood, cotton shirt, metal clamp and string on canvas
199.8 x 290.3 x 36 cm (78 5/8 x 114 1/4 x 14 1/8 in.)
Executed in 2006.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000 

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs
Associate Specialist
+44 73931 41144
cgibbs@phillips.com

Simon Tovey
Specialist, Associate Director
+44 20 7318 4084
stovey@phillips.com
 

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 12 October 2023