Harold Ancart - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Sunday, June 28, 2015 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Clearing Gallery, Brussels
    Private Collection, Italy

  • Catalogue Essay

    In soot, dust and burning, Harold Ancart finds a fragile and fugitive elegance. Often working with found media – he sets photographs of tropical beaches aflame – motifs such as palm trees and parrots recur in his work, only to be offset by the delicate restraint of his works on paper. His is a practice concerned with removal and destruction, and the spaces between objects.

    The present lot, a sharply graphic field executed in oilstick, captures the wistful quality of Ancart’s meditations. Flickering powerlines expand and contract across monolithic nightscape, illuminated by a vivid yellow disc of sun or moon; centrally aligned and recalling the pictorial elements of flag or company logo, it is lent a quiet momentum by its rising position on the rhythmic line. Small imperfections in the surface invoke a textural narrative of wear and dilapidation, placing the piece in an environment removed from its fictive exotic referent and underscoring a keenly realised physicality.

    Untitled is an apparition of enigmatic beauty, hung between the finely-tuned aesthetics of Minimalism and an obliquely Expressionist impulse of damage and loss. A mysterious play of absence and presence hovers between the lines, emanating the scented air of nocturnal mirage; in its liminal space is a sense of yearning for elsewhere.

4

Untitled

2012
oil stick on paper, in artist's frame
sheet 172.2 x 114.2 cm (67 3/4 x 44 7/8 in.)
framed 174.6 x 115.8 cm (68 3/4 x 45 5/8 in.)

Signed and dated 'Harold Ancart 2012' on the reverse.

Estimate
£20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for £47,500

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 29 June 2015 7pm