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30 Berkeley Square, London, United Kingdom, W1J 6EX

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Admission to this sale is by ticket only.

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Please email tickets@phillips.com

\n","auctionDetailsSmall","London Auction 3 March 2022","extraInfo","

Rosanna Widén
\nSenior Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
\n+ 44 20 7318 4060
\nrwiden@phillips.com
\n
\nOlivia Thornton
\nHead of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe
\n+ 44 20 7318 4099
\nothornton@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",3,"auctionEditorialID",1488,"editorialID",3788,"flocklerID",90967643,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/anselm-kiefer-phillips-auction-sale-b7d5f0a3-2db9-4a0b-9dd7-0baca9d2b437_s600x0.jpg","A selection of outstanding works from the 3 March 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sale in London. ","Editors' Picks: London Calling ","

Anselm Kiefer, Freia's Garden, 2013. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Phillips' 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sale in London on 3 March is an exceptional number of works whose scale, scope, and variety span from deeply historical landscape rendering to present-day examinations of iconography. We've assembled a roundup of key pieces across the sale for an overview of a remarkable collection.

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Anselm Kiefer

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Rooted in one of Kiefer’s most enduring motifs – the persistence of nature and blooming of flowers amid a desolate and destroyed landscape – Anselm Kiefer’s Freia’s Garden is a powerfully affecting work from one of the most significant artists working in Germany today. First presented at the Royal Academy’s substantial 2014 retrospective and executed the year before, Freia’s Garden belongs to Kiefer’s Morgenthau series, a cycle of works engaging directly with myth, memory, and the question of German post-war consciousness. The present work is a masterful expression of the innovative and philosophical dimensions of Kiefer’s practice, Kiefer used this armature as a way of imagining an alternative pastoral history that is not only markedly different to the post-war Germany that he grew up in, but that might help us collectively come to terms with a deeply traumatic past. In its monumental scale and arresting, immersive intensity, Freia’s Garden is a paradigmatic example of Kiefer’s reinvention of the landscape tradition. A meditative reflection on the history of landscape painting and of the role that landscape – both real and imagined – continues to play in the German psyche and cultural memory, Freia’s Garden sits at the intersection of the past and the future, the spiritual and the terrestrial, death and rebirth.

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Issy Wood, Chalet, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Issy Wood

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Referencing her classical style and the darkly imaginative world that her paintings inhabit, interdisciplinary vanguard artist Issy Wood describes herself as a “medieval millennial.” Taking her source material from old auction catalogues, her grandmother’s compellingly dated possessions, and photographs taken with her phone, Wood unpicks the thread of tragedy that she finds quietly woven through contemporary commodity culture, maintaining a level of temporal dissonance that radically undercuts the sharply polished qualities of traditional Surrealism. Chalet is typical of Wood’s seductive style, belonging to a body of work that includes her closely cropped and magnified images of car interiors, leather jackets, and everyday commodities that are made unsettling in their proximity to bodies, desires, and an alluring darkness that extends far beyond her chromatic preferences, drawing together a wide net of disparate associations including masculinity, deviance, lust, and violence, with the artist self-consciously playing on slippery distinctions between inside and outside, objects and objectification. Velvet painting has been historically designated wealth, prestige, and opulence. Slipping into kitsch in more recent years with popular subjects including depictions of Elvis Presley and Jesus however, the luxury material now also signifies a somewhat seedier set of associations that Wood amplifies to such powerful effect here. Wood’s use of materials draws on the fetishistic – velvet’s tactility, like fur’s, working with the proximity of gloves to hands, human touch, and sensuality to produce a charged erotic symbolism.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (March 5th) #2, 1991. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres

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Highly representative of the artist’s conceptual practice in its charged use of everyday objects and expansive thematic scope, “Untitled” (March 5th) #2 marks the Felix Gonzalez-Torres' first use of illuminated light bulbs, directly prefiguring the celebrated light strings which have since become synonymous with the artist. Of the artist’s works made with light bulbs, “Untitled” (March 5th) #2 is poetic in its careful union of concept and execution, the two bare bulbs elegantly suspended from long cords and intertwined like two lives. Contemplative and deeply poetic, it is a profoundly moving sculptural expression that is at once personal and poignantly universal, evoking myriad associations such as love, loss, and the potential for continuous renewal. “Untitled” (March 5th) #2 comprises two standard light bulbs in porcelain sockets, hanging from electrical cords, gently resting in the warm, softly diffused glow of the other. Executed in 1991, the year his partner Ross Laycock died of complications from AIDS, the work may be seen as a discreet celebration of the beginning of life rather than the finitude of death, as the work quietly incorporates Ross’s birthday into the parenthetical portion of its title. Formally, Gonzalez-Torres’s use of parentheses alludes to the subtle ways in which language can shape our experiences, while also ensuring that his own experiences and references do not circumscribe the potential meanings that his work might accrue over time. The profound power of a work like “Untitled” (March 5th) #2 lies not only in the experience of a specific historical moment, not only in the austere and resonant beauty of its form (and its subtle reference to a loved one), but in its graceful proposition that illness and loss are fundamentally interlaced with a potential for infinite renewal.

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Alexander Archipenko, Statue on a Triangular Base, 1969. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Alexander Archipenko

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Coming to auction directly from the highly distinguished collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this important work by Ukrainian-born sculptor Alexander Archipenko comes with an exceptional provenance.

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Statue on a Triangular Base is a preeminent example of the distinctive visual language pioneered by Archipenko during this formative period of his career. One of the earliest artists to apply broadly Cubist techniques to three-dimensional forms, the young Archipenko was a central player in the European avant-garde in the significant early decades of the twentieth century and was included in some of the era’s most definitive exhibitions, including the infamous 1911 Salon des Indépendents and the epoch-defining 1913 Armory Show in New York. Supremely elegant in its careful compositional balance and attention to structural form, the statue extracts the essence of a female figure with a remarkable lightness of touch: presented in an exaggerated contrapposto pose, the angular form of the arm is perfectly mirrored by the triangular base of the title. Poised between these two, opposing diagonal forces, the sculpture contains an enormous amount of energy and kinetic potentiality, recalling the defining sculptural image of a body in motion. Establishing a lively dialogue between material and subject, the rendering of these geometric planes in bronze further accentuates the sense of taut musculature and fluid movement achieved in Archipenko’s treatment of plastic volume.

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Renato Guttuso, Aranceto Notturno, 1957. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Renato Guttuso

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A testament to its arresting visual power and art historical importance, Renato Guttuso’s Aranceto Notturno comes to auction with exceptional provenance, coming directly from the highly distinguished collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Renato Guttuso remains one of Italy’s most highly esteemed post-war painters for giving form to a generation’s struggles in the face of Fascist oppression and the destruction wrought by World War II. Aranceto Notturno is typical of the artist’s accessible style and his celebration of the landscape and everyday lives of southern Italy and its people. Although his name is often associated with his more overtly political canvases, Guttuso’s painterly foundations are rooted in his native landscape, commenting later in life that his deepest inspiration was found “in my childhood, my people, my peasants […] the gardens of lemons and oranges.” Guttuso developed his own, distinctive brand of realism counter to the perceived elitism associated with abstraction in favor of a more expressionistic use of line and heavily saturated Mediterranean palette which would prove to be hugely influentially in shaping the artistic currents of Italian art in the immediate post-war period. Richly painted in a flurry of precisely fragmented brushstrokes in alternating flashes of electric blue, deep, mossy greens, limes, and of course the bold, bright orbs of orange edged in white, Aranceto Notturno is a dramatic example of Guttuso’s technical virtuosity and skill.

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Robert Nava, Sylvia (87 Sylvia), 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Robert Nava

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Robert Nava’s playful and intentionally naïve approach to painting combines a childlike simplicity and nostalgic sense of uninhibited playfulness, allowing him to evoke fantastic narratives in the most direct of means. Sylvia (87 Sylvia) is one of six large-scale canvases exhibited in Nava’s self-titled solo exhibition at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels in 2020. Each work in the exhibition represents an allegory pertaining to a different irreverent theme from Time to Ecology. Sylvia (87 Sylvia) is the Allegory of Extinction, number 6 of 6, its place in the series is fitting of the finality of its theme. The conception of Sylvia (87 Sylvia) is poised precariously between light and darkness, with two thirds of the picture plane enveloped by the inky blackness of night. As if wiped away, like condensation on a bathroom mirror, gaps in the black pigment create four windows into the scene behind, allowing the viewer glimpses of the monstrous being behind. Heavily abstracted by the encroaching darkness, Nava’s beasts are a tangle of teeth, scales, and claws, interrupted by planes of cobalt blue and gestural strokes of violet. The flashes of red and yellow pierce the picture space, conjuring images of lightning, lasers, and violent spurts of blood. These references to ingenuous violence are possibly what resonates so strongly with a generation of collectors raised on video games, sci-fi and fantasy stories.

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KAWS, THIS IS THE WAY, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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KAWS

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Larger than life and dominated by vibrantly saturated color, KAWS’ monumental work THIS IS THE WAY synthesizes the artist’s unique blending of art history, pop culture, and contemporary iconography. In the present work, KAWS juxtaposes snippets and fragments from his cast of appropriated characters, fusing them into a singularly specific reinterpretation of the original source material. This collision of familiar cartoons is simultaneously discernable and jarringly unfamiliar, a feverish assembly of referential content in the era of intellectual property ubiquity. Existing within the figure is a medley of superimposed personalities, from comic strip animals Garfield and Odie, to the Muppet Gonzo and the Nickelodeon characters Spongebob Squarepants and Squidward against a recognizable Smurf. In this way KAWS masterfully tips the balance between the innocence and play typically associated with childhood cartoons, promoting a distinctive sense of unease which showcases the artist’s unique capacity to create uncanny and ominous works in equal measure. Commanding in scale and arresting in its vibrant tonality and universally legible pictorial content, THIS IS THE WAY successfully dissolves the purported distinctions between fine art and mass media, culture both high and low, and exemplifies the highly accessible art for which KAWS has become best known.

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Jack Whitten, Space Busters III, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Jack Whitten

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Executed in the twilight years of the artist’s radically innovative career, Space Busters III exemplifies Jack Whitten’s thought-provoking and investigative work. Best known for his abstract canvases, mosaic-like composition, and deep engagement with the legacy of African American history, Whitten’s relentless technical experimentalism and exploration into the materiality of painting showcases the painter’s often radical experimentation with his medium; having exhausted the possibilities of paint and brush. In its relentless material creativity, Space Busters III sprawls across the canvas in an incandescent explosion of form and color, examining of the limits of paint in tandem with an overtly sculptural process that juxtaposes two and three-dimensional forms to create a composition bursting with the kind of energy the artist employed to veritably shatter the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Whitten’s playful interrogation of space is analogous to the experimentation and subversion of what might be his foundational artistic inspiration – Jazz. Whitten’s own artistic practice bears the hallmarks of crafted improvision and chromatic alteration characteristic of Jazz music.iii In Space Buster III, the taut lattice of tiny white orbs, sculpted by the artist through casting a mixture of polyurethane and acrylic, provides a clean, static structure, or in musical parlance a composition, around which an improvisation of whorls of inky black, cobalt blue, and jade green paint swirl and oscillate in undulating concentric loops.

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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","2022-02-24T19:33:17.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/91273347/editors-picks-tca-london-sale-phillips",2,1490,3793,91273347,"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.”

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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Two Studies in Intimacy: Henry Moore & Jean Dubuffet >

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How Art Imitmates Life >

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David Hockney, Self-Portrait on the Terrace, 1984. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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With Phillips’ 3 March 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sale in London just around the corner, we’ve selected works that embody the colors and emotional landscapes of each season and paired them with a playlist of songs to evoke the moods associated with them.

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Spring: David Hockney

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Basking in an inimitable California sunshine and executed in vibrant passages of bold color, Self-Portrait on the Terrace is a vibrant example of David Hockney’s California landscapes, highly unusual in its incorporation of a delicately rendered self-portrait. Painting the areas in and around his Hollywood Hills home after having relocated to this spot on the West Coast in 1978, Hockney took great inspiration from the dramatic, expansive landscapes he discovered on drives through the hills above the city. Among the many, fantastic paintings of the wide-open vistas and ribbons of road carved into the hillsides around Los Angeles that Hockney captured in these years, undoubtedly it was the house itself that quickly emerged as a favorite subject, reproduced across a selection of paintings, drawings, and prints from the period. In the gossamer impression of Hockney’s figure, we see a Janus-like face peering in opposite directions, as if trying to follow a concerto of birdsong around the yard on an early spring morning.

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Spring Tunes

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Joathan Harvey - Bird Concerto with Pianosong

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Wild Nothing - Chinatown

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Clams Casino - Treetop

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Stelvio Cipriani - Papaya

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Blue Hawaii - In Two

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Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Summer: Harold Ancart

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Teeming with Harold Ancart’s signature motifs and vibrant color in an otherworldly landscape, Untitled from 2015 beautifully embodies the artist’s painterly style for which he has become so highly regarded. Strongly identifying with an individualized notion of the flâneur as “one who walks around and tries to isolate poetic moments out of the everyday urban landscape,” Ancart’s visual lexicon is at once familiar and jarringly surreal. Slightly distorted shapes, manipulated horizon lines, and inverted color schemes challenge viewers to examine the world in new and unusual ways, as if through a pair of dazzlingly psychedelic lenses on a particularly hazy day. Dazzling and kaleidoscopic, Untitled is a pre-eminent example of Ancart’s confident handling of color. The unmistakable summer haze, that of a late afternoon which lingers beyond its reservation and well into the early evening, like a sun that meanders instead of sets, finds a prominent place in the world of Ancart’s painting just as a tropical flâneur seeks a soundtrack to a walk along an endless beach.

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Summer Jams

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Polo & Pan - Canopée

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Surfer Blood - Miranda

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Washed Out - It All Feels Right

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Neon Indian - Deadbeat Summer

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Queen - Seaside Rendezvous

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Günther Förg, Ohne titel, 2008. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Autumn: Günther Förg

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Günther Förg’s untitled work from 2008 belongs to the artist's iconic Spot Paintings, the last of his illustrious career and representing the culmination of five decades of sustained investigation into the nature of colour and structure. Characterized by loose scrawls of vibrantly hued pigments arranged in staccato formations across a vast expanse of brilliant white ground, Förg generates fascinating variety and movement through the careful juxtaposition of brighter hues of yellow ochre, vermillion, and electric shocks of cerulean blue, which oscillate against the earthier tones of chestnut browns and forest greens. The effect of this executed on such a large, immersive scale is deeply absorbing – highlighting at once the artist’s unique vision, and his sustained dialogue with art historical tradition. There is a distinct lyricism in Förg’s work which offers an interplay between the intensity of his color choices and resonant placement of words in a melody. Like any enduring song, it contains a level of familiarity but at the same time something novel, before its time yet fiercely independent of trending styles.

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Autumn Sounds

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Donovan - Season of the Witch

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Françoise Hardy - Le temps de l'amour

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Krisma - Lola

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Russian Circles - Mládek

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All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors - Saturn Jig

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Claude Monet, Le Golfe Juan, 1888. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Winter: Claude Monet

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Although painted in the spring of 1888, Claude Monet’s Le Golfe Juan is backgrounded by a waning alpine winter that so beautifully shades the emergent warmth of the Mediterranean coastline, with warm, softly diffused light capturing a dream-like feeling experienced like a confident look ahead from what remains of the long chill. Capturing the shifting qualities of light and weather conditions that he found in the Cap d’Antibes, the bright light and intense hues of the Riviera were a revelation for Monet, offering an entirely new perspective on one of his most favored motifs. After an exploratory visit taken with Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1883, Monet immediately set about planning a more extended trip alone the following year. Immersing himself in the environment that was so unlike anything he had seen before, he wrote with confidence to his companion, Alice Hoschedé, “Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue: it’s enchanting, it’s delicious.” For a musical expression of the artist’s emergent feeling, we turn to slow, atmospheric, and inventive works which fit anywhere in Monet’s landscape, from the faintest whisp of mountain air to the rocky foreground overlooking the calm morning tide.

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Winter Melodies

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Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No. 3

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Virtual Mage - Sleepy

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Meat Puppets - Aurora Borealis

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Jon Hopkins - Emerald Rush

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Memorex Memories - I Forgot About the Stars

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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 >

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'To me, the understanding of form is the understanding of colour. This is what the visual environment is made of: masses of colours that overlap, blend, assemble, or dissociate from one another, and that generate forms.'
\n—Harold Ancart

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Teeming with Harold Ancart’s signature motifs and vibrant colour in an otherworldly landscape, Untitled from 2015 beautifully embodies the artist’s painterly style for which he has become so highly regarded. Strongly identifying with an individualized notion of the flâneur as ‘one who walks around and tries to isolate poetic moments out of the everyday urban landscape,’ Ancart has created a specific visual lexicon that is at once familiar and jarringly surreal.ⁱ Slightly distorted shapes, manipulated horizon lines, and inverted colour schemes challenge viewers to examine the world in new and different ways, as if through a pair of dazzlingly psychedelic lenses.

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Planet of Painting

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\"\" — André Derain, *The Turning Road, L’Estaque*, 1906, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Image: © Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / Museum purchase funded by Audrey Jones Beck / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022

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Although the present work evokes the vibrant canvases and formal experiments of early 20^th century forebears such as the Fauves and Die Brucke, Untitled determinedly stands as a singularly individual exemplar of Ancart’s oeuvre. Born in Brussels in 1980, Ancart was a passionate artist even as a child, passing his school days by sketching and scribbling during class; as an art student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, he firmly rebelled against the late 20^th century ethos that painting was dead. Rather than turn to alternative artistic practices, as many of his contemporaries did, Ancart instead has plunged into the medium of painting with the same vigour exhibited during his primary school years. Uninspired by the dominant trend of post-conceptualism in Europe, Ancart relocated to New York, the openness and diversity of which prompted the artist to adopt it as his new home.

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'This is the planet of painting, after all, and Ancart’s space exploration is the exploration of painted space.'
\n—Chinnie Ding

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Dazzling and kaleidoscopic, Untitled from 2015 is a pre-eminent example of Ancart’s confident handling of colour. Like a midnight sun rising to its apex, the central circular form sends chromatic shards across this supernatural landscape in which light and dark, paint and negative space vie for supremacy. In a celestial symphony of the heavens, the monolithic form of the moon is counterpointed against fractured bursts of lemon-yellow sunbeams. Tactile brushstrokes of red and black paint dance across the creamy sky like a shower of meteors and stars. Within the central circle, a patch of deep blue bleeds into brushed red, into orange and finally yellow, suggesting a window into a different landscape – perhaps the setting sun of another planet in this astral scene. Sprawling across the lower register of the painting, a sea of rich, saturated colour surges in an eye-wateringly bright maelstrom of paint that evokes the palette of post-Impressionist masters and the uncanny atmosphere of René Magritte’s Surrealism. Against the depth of black paint, swathes of gold, ochre, aquamarine, scarlet and bubble-gum pink stream into one another, moving like the rainbow patterns of oil on water. The artist’s signature trees shoot towards the sky, their lush fronds sharpened into focus by the geometrically blocked ebony outline. Juxtaposition features in the best of Ancart’s practice: representation versus abstraction, the exotic and the familiar, flattened space and infinite depth, day and night, heaven and earth, the supernatural and the real, all tensions exquisitely reflected in the present work.

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\"\" — René Magritte, *The Banquet*, 1958, The Art Institute of Chicago. Image: akg-images, Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022
\nDetail of the present work

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Although suggestive of a phantasmagorical dreamscape, Untitled ultimately celebrates the beauty found in nature every day. Whether zooming into such minute details of quotidian objects – as in his matchstick paintings – or turning outward to nature in his iceberg paintings – Ancart captures and transforms the mundane into the majestic, prompting the viewer to in turn see the world anew. ‘His paintings hypostatize his en plein air expeditions into the subconscious as obsessive, bold, increasingly overlapping strokes of oil sticks. The final compositions bear the physicality of their making and conjure forms that sometimes appear like objects from our environment. Often they arrive as in the fractal vision of an acid trip – first like towers, then fire, then crystals, then desert plants and mountains. The ambiguity encourages the eye to make its own travels.ⁱⁱ

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Collector’s Digest.

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• Born in Belgium in 1980, the New York-based Harold Ancart uses a vast array of media in creating complex pictorial worlds and sculptural installations.

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• Ancart has already succeeded in carving out a role for himself in the contemporary art world; examples of his work belong to esteemed museum collections worldwide including The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Menil Collection in Houston, the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, among others.

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• Ancart has been the subject of several important exhibitions, including Harold Ancart: Untitled (there is no there there), held at The Menil Collection, Houston, in 2016, and the 2020 solo exhibition with David Zwirner held across both of their New York Galleries.

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ⁱ Harold Ancart, Julia Felsenthal, ‘Harold Ancart Brings His Kaleidoscopic Trees to Chelsea,’ T Magazine, 8 September 2020
\nⁱⁱ Kat Herriman, ‘Back and Forth with Artist Harold Ancart,’ Cultured, 29 April 2019

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31

Harold Ancart

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Harold Ancart