In 1988, a small manmade island off the Dutch coast was animated with an immersive and monumental outdoor contemporary art exhibition – fifty massive 2x3 meter screenprinted flags waving in the breeze. The project was envisioned by the Gran Pavese Foundation, led by Thérèse Legierse, Peter van Beveren, and Ralph van Hesse. The foundation took their name from the Italian nautical phrase gran pavese which refers to the “dressing overall” of a voyaging ship, wherein the vessel is elaborately strung with maritime signal flags for ceremonial or celebratory purposes. Fifty internationally recognized artists were invited to design their own interpretation of a flag, with no thematic concept to unite them all beyond the medium, size and freedom to apply their own imagery and methodology to the project.
The U.S. Navy patrol boat USS Isabel (PY-10) at Hankow, China, dressed overall in honor of the coronation of King George VI of England, May 14, 1937. While many artists chosen for the Gran Pavese project were already engaging with the varied iconography and ideology of flags in their practice, the notion of creating a flag itself offered a distinctive set of challenges and possibilities. Like a painting on canvas without a stretcher, the works would eventually embody a certain fluidity, not hanging stagnant on a gallery wall, but billowing freely in the air for all to see. Artists also needed to consider the histories and multifarious meanings endowed in the symbolism of flags such as existence, origin, distinction, authority, territory, loyalty, glory, belief, and identity, amongst other philosophical conceits. With their demonstrated grasps of the extensive significance of the flag form, each of the fifty artists rose to the occasion of the project to create flags that represented a global amalgamation of unique artistic visions, socio-political convictions, and conceptual frameworks – a staggering gran pavese for the contemporary era.
A video overview of the Gran Pavese project, including footage of the printing of the flags
and their display on Neeltje Jans. © Gran Pavese.Due to both the individual creative success of each artist and the astounding experience of viewing the outdoor exhibition in its totality, the project attracted crowds of visitors to the island of Neeltje Jans. Following the Netherlands installation, the project, in all its beauty and scale, travelled the world, gracing the river borders of Frankfurt, the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Great Wall of China, and beyond. The international tour of 50 monumental flags paid homage to the Gran Pavese Foundation’s seafaring namesake, their various visuals and symbolisms representing a grand celebration of the international art community.
“I like the least pretentious and most humble means, for my ideas depend on themselves and not upon material; it is the very nature of ideas to be non-materialistic.”
—Hanne DarbovenFor the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, numbers represented a symbolic, universal language, a “way of writing without describing.” It was during a two-year stay in New York in the late 1960s that the conceptual artist discovered what would become her life-long project: the spatializing and visualization of time in its various forms. Utilizing numbers to grapple with such an expansive concept, Darboven began systematically distilling everything from a lifetime, to her time working and writing, to historical time. Darboven’s background as a trained pianist comes through in her idiosyncratic system of symbols, numbers and letters which became the artist’s notation for the metaphysics of time, an aspect of life as fundamentally intangible as music. For her flag – one of only two flags made for the project that features numbers – Darboven tackled visualizing a century (ein Jahrhundert) through her elaborately devised numerical structures.Condition Report
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Literature
Gran Pavese Foundation, Gran Pavese: The Flag Project, 50 Flags/50 Artists, 1988, pp. 54-55
Ars Publicata, Hanne Darboven, 1988.05
Property from the Private Collection of Ralph van Hessen, The Hague, Netherlands
16
00-99, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project
1988
Monumental screenprint in colors, on polyester flag.
75 3/4 x 116 in. (192.4 x 294.6 cm)
Signed and numbered 2/10 in black ink on the accompanying Certificate of Authenticity issued by the publisher (there were also 4 in Roman numerals), published by Gran Pavese Foundation, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Estimate
$3,000 - 5,000
Editions & Works on Paper
New York Auction 12 February 2025
10
This lot is no longer available.
149
This lot is no longer available.
