Jack Pierson - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 11, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Cheim & Read, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Collection of Peter Remes, Wayzata, Minnesota

  • Literature

    R.D. Marshall, Jack Pierson: Desire and Despair, New York, 2006, p. 86 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    "My work demonstrates the disaster inherent in the search for glamour" (quoted in D. Rimanelli, ‘Jack Pierson, Regrets', Art Forum, November, 2002). The work of Jack Pierson is cluttered with the broken debris of glamour, a universe where personal and collective dreams are always intentionally incomplete. Pierson's work tells everyday life stories and strongly utilizes the human predisposition towards desire and eroticism. His art often relies on feelings of isolation and a heavy reference to fringe society.The present lot, Heroin, constructed in the manner that brought Pierson to prominence, encapsulates this notion of desire with the use of this single loaded word.
    "Pierson's art is built on reference and counter-reference.The allusions forming his world are familiar enough: Diana Ross and the Yellow Brick Road, Vegas motels, empty corridors and Marilyn Monroe.The cultural and even emotional landscape suggested by his work is instantly recognizable as one of tawdry glitz and glamour, melancholy and nostalgia. There is an ethos of specificity involved here; every object, whether a book or a photograph or a single scrap of newspaper, carries with it a culturally conditioned sense of significance. In this aspect his work is deeply set into its chosen context and historical period. Nonetheless, individual pieces seem designed to function as a rebuttal of context...The specific quality of Pierson's work lies in the contradiction between these two impulses, between the overproduction of allusion on the one hand and its near obfuscation on the other. Deftly playing with notions of meaning and interpretation, it hinges on the simultaneous evocation and denial of context.The fragmentary elements that constitute his work are never restored, and their meaning never wholly fixed. In Pierson's world dreams perennially elude their context and interpretation, and it is for this reason that they are so haunting." (K. Kitamura, ‘Jack Pierson', Frieze Magazine, Issue 98, April 2006)
     

9

Heroin

2000
Plastic, painted metal, marker on styrofoam, and press board.
74.3 x 241.3 x 10.5 cm. (29 1/4 x 95 x 4 1/8 in).
Signed, titled, and dated ‘Jack Pierson Heroin 2000' on the reverse of the letter ‘O'.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 Feb 2009, 7pm
London