Gloria Kisch - Design New York Thursday, June 8, 2023 | Phillips

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  • Gloria Kisch, born in 1941, was raised in New York and was exposed to everything the city had to offer. In an interview, she said, “Just growing up in the city, having those things around me, I was able to see a lot of good art real [sic] early. I was really moved by the power of the art, just incredible power, mostly of ancient art.” The power of her early exposure to art stayed with her, and she later recollected, “it became my ambition to do something of equal power.”

    “I became interested in functional art as a way of defining my external reality.”
    —Gloria Kisch

    By 1963, in pursuit of this aim, Kisch brought her young family to California to enroll at Otis College of Art and Design where she would embark on an art practice that consisted primarily of painting until she departed from the medium unequivocally in 1971 in favor of sculpture. Her sculptures, only sometimes coaxed into functional designs, were imbued with a totemic, arcane quality. In college, Kisch studied under the mythologist Joseph Campbell who introduced her to Jungian psychology. She would describe her work as “a symbiosis between primitive and futurist form,” always exploring “the relationship between illusion and reality.” Kisch explained, “Things are real because we perceive them to be real…But, in actuality, some things are really real, and some things are only real in our mind.” This psychic unease between the material precision of her work and the uncertain origin of the forms themselves produced the power that Kisch was so drawn to in the ancient art that she encountered as a child in the museums of New York.

     

    The opening invitation to Gloria Kisch’s 1989 exhibition at Art et Industrie, New York, which featured the present work on the front.

    In 1982, Kisch moved back to New York, finding a studio in the East Village. This new studio would be entirely dedicated to metalworking in bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel. Reflecting on this shift she noted, “I became interested in functional art as a way of defining my external reality.” At the same time in lower Manhattan, a new movement was growing which fused sculpture and industrial design, making space for artists to radically experiment with function and form. In 1977, Rick Kaufmann and Tracy Rust founded Art et Industrie, a Soho gallery which expressly intended to showcase artists interested in blurring the line between art and design. “Looking back, I thought we were in a revolution,” says Rick Kaufmann. “Art had more freedom and design had more discipline and these two worlds in America were desperately opposed.” Kaufmann hoped to bring about a revolution of ideas that would generate American design to rival the Italian post-modernists for conceptual weight and sheer unbounded experimentalism with just the subtlest suggestion of danger. Created in 1988, the present lot deftly and gracefully meets this tall order for the new American design. The work was featured on Art et Industrie’s 1989 gallery exhibition invitation, establishing it as a symbol of this exciting moment in the convergence of art and design.

    • Provenance

      Art et Industrie, New York
      Private collection, Virginia, acquired from the above, 1989
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      "Gloria Kisch," Art et Industrie, New York, May 2-June 3, 1989

45

"In The Mirror"

1988
Steel, stainless steel, mirrored glass.
77 1/2 x 20 x 40 in. (196.9 x 50.8 x 101.6 cm)

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$6,000 - 8,000 

Sold for $7,620

Contact Specialist

Benjamin Green
Associate Specialist
Associate Head of Sale
bgreen@phillips.com
+1 917 207 9090

Design

New York Auction 8 June 2023