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
\n
\nclientserviceslondon@phillips.com

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“Chamberlain is to Smith and the Minimalists as Giacometti was to Brancusi – an intensely human and vulnerable outlook, emotionally engaged with the modern world.”
\n—Mark Rosenthal

\n\n

Master of his materials, John Chamberlain’s sculptures are comprised of manipulated junk metal and scraped car parts, objects that he designates as ‘chosen’ rather than ‘found’.ⁱUndoubtedly, this process elevates discarded detritus to the status of traditional high art materials, but despite its stunning visual effects, this choice was less conceptual than practical, scrap metal’s ubiquity and affordability being what first attracted the artist to it.

\n\n

In an improvisational manner recalling the syncopated rhythms of Jazz and the free verse experiments of Chamberlain’s Black Mountain poetry tutor, Charles Olson, the artist joins unwieldy, contorted forms together as a painter connects independent forms. Irregular meets irregular as every minor adjustment, twist or replacement is met with painstaking consideration to achieve the perfect balance and sentimental harmony between each piece. In this manner, monumental works such as Sprayed Myopia demonstrate how elegance can overcome imposing, brute weight.

\n\n

\"\" — John Chamberlain with the present work

\n\n

Crude Elegance

\n\n

Standing over two metres tall, the lack of a sculptural base here only emphasises the work’s astonishing balance; what were once cumbersome disparate elements are now formed into a weightless whole. In 1981, Chamberlain began to stretch the limits of his works, accentuating more and more their streaming verticality or elongated nature. Sprayed Myopia is a result of this shift, and it endorses the artist’s belief that his work has a ‘light-on-its-feet stance’ that allows his heavy sculptural forms to dance in space.ⁱⁱ Transforming the crude, hefty bones of metal, Chamberlain manipulates his materials into a crescendo of billowing, graceful forms.

\n\n

Ranking amongst some of the most iconic sculptural works of the post-war period and distilling something quintessentially American in his adoption of repurposed automobile parts, Chamberlain’s careful balance of rhythm and movement and the expressive plasticity of his practice also draws on a long tradition of European sculpture. Chamberlain once likened his vertical sculptures to Auguste Rodin’s Le Monument à Balzac, an apt comparison for Sprayed Myopia’s imposing presence and treatment of form, the latter perhaps even adopting Le Monument à Balzac’s asymmetric, understanded contrapposto pose. The deep folds of Rodin’s expressive drapery is mirrored in the folded metal, although the remarkable fluidity and lightness achieved by Chamberlain here draws closer to the dramatic intensity and capacious, marbled drapery of the High Baroque.

\n\n

\"\" — Left: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, *L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila)*, 1647-1652, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Image: Matteo Omied / Alamy Stock Photo
\n Right: Auguste Rodin, *Le Monument à Balzac*, 1898, Rodin Museum, Paris. Image: VPC Travel Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

\n\n

However, the volume which Chamberlain transcribed into his sculptures is most linked to gestural paintings of the mid-20^th century. Inspired by the raw energy and dynamic forms seen in the works of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, Chamberlain sought to translate the language of Abstract Expressionism into sculpture. Sprayed Myopia has a visual affinity with de Kooning’s Excavation in this sense. Both works share a similar structure: multiple shifting planes which result in an overall, kinetic energy. The painted metal pieces in Chamberlain’s work, which are delineated by unfinished, metallic lines, evoke painted fields of colour, and hold pictorial volume. As in de Kooning’s work, they appear to intuitively twist and interweave as each individual shape contorts into a rhythmic whole, although the effect here is more immediately physical.

\n\n

\"\" — Willem de Kooning, *Excavation*, 1950, The Art Institute of Chicago. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence, Artwork: © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023

\n\n

Unrestricted by a two-dimensional picture plane, Sprayed Myopia’s facets of bruised metal are limitless and visceral. The piece is also reflective of Pollock’s more lyrical gesture, noticed in the bowed, dark blue bar to the top, which flashes across the predominantly white structure. And, looking more closely, one can notice how Chamberlain has dripped colours of paint over various sections in true Pollock fashion, attesting to the sculptor’s regard for metal as his canvas. In this way, and, as an Abstract Expressionist himself, Chamberlain was the first to synthesize the expressive, gestural qualities of action painting with sculpture, as he invited one of the most formative movements of modern art into the three-dimensional world.

\n\n

Taking colour to the third dimension

\n\n

Within the discourse of abstract sculpture, Chamberlain was the first to allow colour’s true potential to thrive. Alexander Calder added colour to his mobiles in the 1930s, but he did so with only primary hues, disinterested in the colours themselves as he sought to lighten his sculptures. This minimalist approach was later reflected in the work of David Smith, Donald Judd and Anthony Caro who all employed single primary colours to unify their works and once again alleviate the sense of physical weight. In opposition, Chamberlain employed colour in all its forms, giving it both dimension and variation. Choosing car parts for their predetermined ‘found’ colours, he placed glossy vinyl next to scratched, matte surfaces of tacky, industrial colours which stirred an emotive effect. He began to experiment by sandblasting metal surfaces, exposing the raw, exposed steel underneath and from 1974 onwards began to add lacquer paint onto his artistic materials, adding colours of his own.

\n\n

“Chamberlain is the only sculptor really using colour, the full range, not just metallic shades; his colour is as particular, complex and structural as any good painter’s”.
\n—Donald Judd

\n\n

Sprayed Myopia displays the full array of these techniques: its resplendent chrome surfaces refract and mirror light whilst the white sections appear to absorb it. The battered steel surfaces offer endless gradients through their indentations, curvatures, and bends, and by applying colour to these infinite surfaces it becomes three-dimensional, becoming a part of each physical angle whilst offering countless variations in reflected tone. Indeed, there is no flatness involved. Works such as this exemplify how Chamberlain gave colour new meaning in sculpture - it no longer held a secondary position to form - as much as they disprove Clement Greenberg’s assertion that colour was inherent to painting.

\n\n

Chamberlain’s works have amalgamated various antitheses and have been ascribed new meanings since their conception. They are abstract yet pose rhetorical links and questions. Is the use of consumer material a reference to popular culture? Is the use of junk material conceptual? Does the present work’s reference to “myopia” – the quality of being short-sighted – refer to the limits of our vision, or is it perhaps a poetic allusion to the sculpture’s refraction of light which blinds and confuses the eye? Looking to a long history of sculptural form and practice, Chamberlain radically expanded the possibilities of his chosen medium. As Mark Rosenthal has put it: 'Chamberlain is to Smith and the Minimalists as Giacometti was to Brancusi – an intensely human and vulnerable outlook, emotionally engaged with the modern world.”ⁱⁱⁱ

\n\n

Collector’s Digest

\n\n

\n\t
In 1961, John Chamberlain was included in the Art of Assemblage exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here his work was displayed next to Cubist, Surrealist and Futurist pieces.
\n\t
\n\t
The artist has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1971 and 2012; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1986; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1996; amongst others. In 1964, he represented the United States at La Biennale di Venizia.
\n\t
\n\t
Sprayed Myopia has been featured in several exhibitions, including with Pace Gallery, New York in 1989; Munson-Williams-Proctor Instiute, Utica in 1990; and in two Gagosian shows in Geneva in 2016 and New York in 2017. When the work was sold in New York in 2003 it set a new record for the artist at auction.
\n\t

\n\n

ⁱ John Chamberlain, quoted in John Chamberlain: Early Years, exh. cat., L&M Arts, New York, 2009, p. 53

\n\n

ⁱⁱ John Chamberlain, quoted in John Chamberlain: Early Years, exh. cat., L&M Arts, New York, 2009, p. 73

\n\n

ⁱⁱⁱ Mark Rosenthal, 'Reflections on the art of John Chamberlain', in John Chamberlain: Early Years (exh. cat.), L&M Arts, New York, 2009, p. 10

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CAROLINE WALKER Threshold, 2014

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WILLEM DE KOONING [no title], 1984

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MICHEL MAJERUS Express, 2001

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JEFF KOONS Cherubs, 1991

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ALBERT OEHLEN Ascension, 2001

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ANSELM KIEFER Walhalla, 2016

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HOWARD HODGKIN Summer Rain, 2002

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JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Sprayed Myopia, 1988

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LOIE HOLLOWELL Split Orbs in purple, ochre, and brown, 2021

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Howard Hodgkin, Summer Rain, 2002 – 2013. View lot >
\nJohn Chamberlain, Sprayed Myopia, 1988. View lot >

\n\n

Phillips invited the celebrated poet to share his insights on two masters featured in our 20^th Century and Contemporary Evening Sale upcoming in London on 2 March.
\n
\n

\n\n

Howard Hodgkin once observed that "People are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid." His usually small, gemlike paintings do radiate a certain calm, in the Baudelairean sense of 'luxe, calme et volupté'. Always painted on wood, these works are front loaded with emotion and sensuality. John Chamberlain's ferocious looking steel sculptures, reassigned to artistic purpose from salvaged motor vehicles, would seem diametrically opposed to the operatic lushness of Hodgkin's paintings, yet place this unlikely pairing together in a room, and their inapposite points seem to easily commune, disparities dissolved.

\n\n

The two artists and their respective works are certainly unlikely bedfellows; Hodgkin a highly erudite and rather austere Englishman, Chamberlain a U.S. Navy vet and wild reveler who originally used the G.I. Bill to study hairdressing, in order, he said, to meet more girls. This was before his epiphany in Larry Rivers' backyard in Southampton, when he ripped the chromium fenders off a vehicle abandoned there, beat them into shape by driving over them with his truck, and thus created his first sculpture in steel, which he named Shortstop.

\n\n

Chamberlain was fond of saying that he got his sense of color from de Kooning, and 'gesture' from Franz Kline, two major exponents of the AbEx ethos, both of whom were friends and drinking companions. It's difficult to imagine Hodgkin carousing with them at the Cedar Bar while Pollock was busy tearing the door off the lavatory, and yet the threads of his expressionistic work intertwine comfortably with the more explosive outbursts of the New York AbEx crew.

\n\n

Hodgkin's sensuous, intense paintings, infused with his love of late 19th-century French painters like Degas and Vuillard, also reflect his passion for the vivid light and colors of India, a country he visited frequently throughout his life. These tropical colors contrast sharply with the white glare of the studio in which he worked, full of light and devoid of any decoration.

\n\n

Many of Chamberlain's turbulent steel pieces, whose gaudy colors exude a jingle jangly urban rhythm, were produced in the sylvan setting of Shelter Island, where Chamberlain finally settled after sojourns in New York City, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Connecticut, and Florida. The vast studio on Shelter Island is a step away from his living quarters, and both areas were filled with the materials he used in his art, which was never limited to disassembled cars — he also produced works in sculpted sponge, in paper and aluminum foil, each piece crumpled and squeezed until the form pleased the artist's eye, often guided by his early love of poetry, which he had studied at Black Mountain College with Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. "If I have a room full of parts, they are like a lot of words, and I have to take one piece and put it next to another and find out if it really fits."

\n\n

Hodgkin on the other hand wryly observed that "I never try to understand anything I do — it's a waste of time." But, he was also a lover of poetry, although he preferred more traditional English poems. The painting Green Thought in a Green Shade takes its name from Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century poem The Garden, “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.” In certain of his paintings a raw sensuality punches through the abstraction to evoke remembered moments as powerfully as one of Proust's madeleines. He is an artist who redefined the way we look at the world, bringing passion and memory into the language of painting. Both Hodgkin and Chamberlain shied away from describing or explaining their art, afraid that words would only limit the viewer’s mind and imagination. The sense of powerful feelings and emotion coursing through the work of both is more than enough to energize a room and anyone standing in it.

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About Max Blagg /

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Max Blagg, born in England, has lived in NYC since 1971. Long recognized as a highly respected poet, visual artist, and performer on the New York art and literary scene, he has appeared at innumerable venues including the Kitchen, Guggenheim Museum, Parrish Museum, St. Marks Church, The National Arts Club, and Bowery Poetry Club. Blagg has published several volumes of poetry and prose internationally and in the U.S. with Carpe Diem Press, Paradigm Press, and Shallow Books. Blagg's collaborations with artists, including Alex Katz, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Keith Sonnier, Jack Pierson, and Larry Clark, have culminated in books, artworks, and videos. His artworks have been exhibited at The Parrish Museum, Luring Augustine, Exhibition A, and collected by artists Richard Prince, Larry Clark, Nate Lowman, and Adam McEwen. Four of his "flyers" from 1984 were included in the Nan Goldin exhibition, MoMA, NYC, 2016. A poem/painting collaboration with Richard Prince was included in the Richard Prince Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2007.

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Auction /

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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
\n2 March, 5pm
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

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\nViewing /

\n\n

23 February – 2 March
\nMonday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm
\nSunday, 12pm – 6pm

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

\n\n

New Talent Speaks: Five emerging artists to benefit Foster Pride >

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Wave After Wave: Paul Laster on six women artists on the contemporary crest >

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\n","publishDate","2023-02-20T17:35:37.000000Z","authorCredit","Don Carroll","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY","articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/115035458/an-unexpected-pairing","auctionEditorialID",1743,"editorialID",4123,"flocklerID",115035458,{"_1229":1253,"_1231":231,"_1232":1254,"_523":1255,"_1235":1256,"_1237":1257,"_1239":1240,"_1241":1242,"_1243":477,"_1244":1258,"_470":229,"_1246":1259,"_1248":1260,"_1250":1261},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/young-dekooning-b33d52c3-53ea-4735-8e15-d427303b6ae1_s600x0.jpg","A reflection on the late great Willem de Kooning by Anthony Haden-Guest.","On a Very Good Day","

The artist Willem de Kooning as a young man, August 1953, East Hampton. Photo by Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images.

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Phillips invited elder statesman of the art world, Anthony Haden-Guest to take the long view of the life and career of Willem de Kooning — whose monumental triumph [no title] of 1984 features in our 20th Century & Contemproary Evening Sale in London on 2 March.
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Willem de Kooning traveled from Holland to the United States as a stowaway, made it to New York in 1926, and soon, the 22 year old was putting bread on the table by painting houses, doing illustrations, and making displays for department stores as he worked on his art. In this he was doubly gifted, both at making incisive figurative drawings and painting abstractions, and such was his need to make art that he gave up that Depression rarity — a paying job — to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the federal arts project, so as to be near working artists. There he was an assistant to Fernand Léger and, crucially, grew close to Arshile Gorky, through whom he learned how to absorb what he needed from Picasso’s Cubism, without being crushed by the maestro’s heft and reach.

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De Kooning shortly became part of the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, the movement which would be swiftly accepted as having enabled New York to replace Paris as global capital of the contemporary art world. The AbEx group included Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and Franz Kline, so it was hardly low on talent, but de Kooning and Jackson Pollock had soon emerged as contenders for leading roles. Then, as was humanly inevitable, came the sniping as to which deserved the number one spot; sniping in which both, from time to time, participated.

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Their differences went deeper than manners of painthandling. When Hans Hofmann, the German AbEx artist, asked Pollock if he worked from nature, Pollock riposted “I am nature.” When de Kooning was explaining why he so liked the Hamptons in a letter to friends, he wrote: “For a painter like me it is much better to be surrounded by a small nature. Places like the Grand Canyon would frighten me to death.”

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That was just a coincidence of phrasing, but it reflects the fact that the swirling planes on a Pollock canvas appear to have been executed with a deliberate indifference to the long-standing norms of composition, however these are the norms in which de Kooning was well schooled and used to his own remarkable ends. “De Kooning blew open the Cubist grid, changing its mode from structural to fluid,” in the words of the late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, a writer with un uncanny gift for getting into an artist’s head and brush hand, “De Kooning is to classical Cubism as flying is to walking.”

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In 1950 de Kooning painted Excavations, a tremendous canvas, interpreted by his fellow AbExes, as a direct challenge to Pollock. This was one of the four de Koonings that Alfred Barr presented at the Venice Biennale in 1953. Three years later Pollock died, drunkenly crashing his car in Springs, New York. “It’s over. I’m number one,” de Kooning said at the funeral.

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De Kooning settled down to decades of making abstractions infused with a sense of the real, works which could seem crowded, but each of which was singularly resolved. He matched Picasso and Matisse for longevity, but his progress was very different from either. Matisse’s final work, his paper cut-outs, were well received. Picasso’s last canvases were expressively Picassoid, indeed controversially so, and it took a while before they got critical recognition and market acceptance.

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The changes in the paintings of de Kooning’s last period were more striking than either. These spare, pure canvases are at once serene and high energy, alive with looping, form-defining lines, and always achieving a deeply satisfying resolution; they take abstraction to places where it has never been. In his old age, de Kooning retained a magic wrist such as few others, and had decades of craft moves embedded in his head.

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“Pollock may be our greatest artist,” wrote Carter Ratcliff in The Fate of a Gesture. “Some have nominated Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol for that position. Undoubtedly, though, our greatest painter is de Kooning.” Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “The art of painting does not get more exciting than Willem de Kooning on a good day.” This painting was made on one of his best.

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Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1984. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.
\nEstimate: £7,000,000–9,000,000. View lot >
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Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, cartoonist, art critic, and frequent contributor to publications across the art and culture spheres. An elder statesman of the art scene, his books include TRUE COLORS: The Real Life of the Art World and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night, along with collections of verse, cartoonery, and critique. He lives and works in New York and London.

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Auction /

\n\n

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
\n2 March, 5pm
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

\n\n

\nViewing /

\n\n

23 February – 2 March
\nMonday-Saturday 10am – 6pm
\nSunday 12pm – 6pm

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

New Talent Speaks: Five emerging artists to benefit Foster Pride >

\n\n

Wave After Wave: Paul Laster on six women artists on the contemporary crest >

\n\n

\n","2023-02-16T20:06:58.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/114705140/the-perfect-day",1744,4119,114705140,{"_1229":1263,"_1231":231,"_1232":1264,"_523":1265,"_1235":1266,"_1237":1267,"_1239":1268,"_1241":1242,"_1243":477,"_1244":1269,"_470":385,"_1246":1270,"_1248":1271,"_1250":1272},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/lead-565b4840-7232-4125-a5e8-8f32a7a68c46_s600x0.jpg","Photography is essential to the process of five artists in our upcoming London Auctions.","The Painter’s Lens","

Caroline Walker, Threshold, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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With source material ranging from archival photographs to photographic portraits of one’s own community, we explore how five figurative artists working today employ photography in their practice to pose important questions about childhood, gender, and race in contemporary culture.

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Sarah Ball

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Sarah Ball, Elliot, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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Sarah Ball works primarily from found imagery — photographic portraits borrowed from newspapers, social media, and historical archives documenting immigration and criminality. As such, she approaches her paintings a step removed from her sitters, endowing her portraits with an air of detached anonymity which in turn encourages viewers to search deeply in their faces for these hidden narratives. As is typical of Ball’s spellbinding portraits, Elliot is titled after its sitter, a recurring subject in Ball’s work and one of the faces found through her photographic research. Closely cropped and set against a softly flattened, void space, the square format engaged here suggests the vernacular of studio photography, photobooth portraits, and even the rigid framing of the Instagram grid.
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\nStemming from an early interest in illustration and graphic design, Ball gradually honed the economic approach to form used to such powerful effect in the arrangement of crisp, flattened, monochromatic shapes at play in Elliot. Rather than cluttering her compositions with symbolically charged details, Ball’s paintings are radically reduced to better focus our attention on the most defining characteristics of her subjects. In this way, her strikingly clear portraits capture both a physical likeness and something more essential. The artist explains that she might be initially drawn to the source photograph by the small aesthetic details her subjects use to present themselves; but she focuses our attention beyond these visual markers. This method elicits an empathetic response in viewers, in a manner that at once recalls the denuded settings favored by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters and the cool psychological focus of Lucian Freud’s meticulous portraits.

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Claire Tabouret

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Claire Tabouret, L’Attente, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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At once haunting and immediately engaging, Tabouret’s painted characters are inspired by photographs, some taken from her personal archive and others from anonymous shots collected during her research. As Tabouret eloquently describes, in restoring something lost or otherwise absent from these source images, the painting emerges as “a palliative to everything I am feeling that isn’t actually visible in the photograph.” Tabouret’s figures appear suspended in space and time, ghostly impressions that seem to bring us into a direct and intimate relationship with history.
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\nImmersed in a seductive, phosphorescent light, L’Attente portrays a group of costumed children lined up in two rows. She arranges them closely together in the shallow pictorial space, stacking them in a tight, vertical format in a manner that visually recalls the more rigid configuration favored by studio photography. The figures are seen head-on, in a direct but hermetic attitude, confronting the viewer with a powerful and disarming gaze. As stated by the artist, the children she represents “have a particular mood — they are not sad, but rather solemn, serious. There is latent violence and anger in their eyes.” The use of historical photographs in her process aligns with the artist’s approach to painting — placing us in the middle of an unfolding narrative that feels both recognizable and foreign. It leaves the impression that we’re being welcomed into the past but are unable to enter it.

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Caroline Walker

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Caroline Walker, Threshold, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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Threshold is a late work from Caroline Walker’s series In Every Dream Home. Working exclusively with women, Walker developed a rather distinct approach to her compositions during this period. Having found the right location, she hired actresses and models to spend time in the space with her, posing and photographing them before returning to her studio to work from these carefully staged images. Repeatedly seen in the same luxurious residential setting, the paintings feature a recurring cast of women whom we glimpse in moments of unguarded stillness, the passage of time propelling them through a set of familiar domestic and leisure activities.
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\nWidely regarded as one of the most technically accomplished figurative artists of her generation, Walker’s paintings privilege the female gaze. They use domestic environments to pose questions around looking and being looked at, the slippery boundary between public behavior and private space, and the relationship between the spaces that we occupy and the kind of narratives that unfold in them. Threshold, is framed by dense, overhanging foliage, and depicts two women dressed in identical orange swimsuits lying head-to-head at the edge of an outdoor swimming pool. Distinctively, their faces are hidden by broad-rimmed, black sunhats. Mirroring each other, both trail an arm languorously in the water. The strange symmetry of Walker’s careful arrangement of their pose and attire echoes in the doubled reflection of the pool, which is reinforced by the strict symmetry of the alternating panels of oak and glass behind them. Walker’s pool paintings recall David Hockney’s but carry us further into a kind of narrative disquiet that is difficult to place, but that undoubtably calls on cinematic and photographic reference points.

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\nAmani Lewis

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Amani Lewis, Star and Be, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

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Photography serves as the conduit for the expressive truths of Amani Lewis’ work, which frequently retells the stories of their own Baltimore community on the terms of its lived identities. Beginning with a photographic image, they then manipulate their source material, often applying contour lines and other digital effects. The resulting images are then transferred to canvas, and painterly techniques are applied with a variety of media to build out the surface texture. The otherworldly effect of this process shifts the viewer’s perception from questions of a perceived external reality to a more nuanced appreciation of a subject’s inner life.

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As the artists explains, these portraits “have to do with following the lines and characteristics of my subject’s body that makes them the person who they are — while also mapping the lineage of that person to the likeness of a topographical map.” Most often working directly with members of their community as sitters, Amani Lewis’ subjects are treated as equal partners in the artistic process. This is clear in the immediately arresting canvas Star and Be. Here, the viewer is invited into a private interior moment shared between the two figures. The boundaries of media are so intricately blurred that we lose sight of where photography ends, and painting and collage begin. A deeply physical, yet ostensibly digitized image, the figures appear strong, on their own terms, yet open, exposed, and intimate. The enigmatic expressions of the characters are difficult to discern, but their stories are felt.

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Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe

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Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Dapper II, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

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African artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s powerful portraits of black subjects begin with photography. Born and raised in Ghana, he was fascinated at an early age by the detailed hand-painted movie posters in cinemas, which led to his interest in painting. Searching for his own voice and artistic style after graduating from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, he took a brief break from painting and studied photography. It was during this time that he met his wife, a photography enthusiast, and relocated with her to Portland, Oregon, in 2017. Confronted with the realities of American racism in Portland, he turned his work towards themes of empowerment. In 2020, the artist told Juxtapoz magazine, “I try to find other Black people that are living here. Talk to them. Photograph them. And then try to capture everything that is there in their personality and put it in a still image.”
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\nHis portraits are celebrations of blackness and reclamations of cultural dignity. His work frequently includes bright color in the clothes adorning his figures, as well as in thick impasto backgrounds. These colors, at times reminiscent of Ghanian Kente cloth, are often set against the tonal greyscale palate used to render the skin tones of his subjects. Suggestive of black-and-white photography, this virtuosic contrast draws our gaze to the majesty of the lives depicted. With its purple background executed in thick paint and its depiction of resplendent patterned cloth, Dapper II exemplifies the powerful effectiveness of this approach.

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Auction /

\n\n

20th Century & Contemporary Art, London

\n\n

Evening Sale
\n2 March, 5pm GMT
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

\n\n

Day Sale
\n3 March, 1pm GMT
\n30 Berkeley Square, London (map)

\n\n

\nViewing /

\n\n

23 February – 3 March
\nMonday-Saturday 10am – 6pm
\nSunday 12pm – 6pm

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

A Life of Living with Art: Personal insights on collecting from Jimmy Belilty himself >

\n\n

On a Very Good Day: A reflection on the late great Willem de Kooning by Anthony Haden-Guest >

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Crude Elegance

Taking colour to the third dimension

Collector’s Digest

Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1984. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.\nEstimate: £7,000,000–9,000,000. View lot >\n\n

Sarah Ball

Sarah Ball, Elliot, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

Claire Tabouret

Claire Tabouret, L’Attente, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

Caroline Walker

Caroline Walker, Threshold, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

\nAmani Lewis

Amani Lewis, Star and Be, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Dapper II, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1984. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.
\nEstimate: £7,000,000–9,000,000. View lot >
\n
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13

John Chamberlain

Sprayed Myopia

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

John Chamberlain