José Parlá - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale Hong Kong Friday, October 6, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “I want to bring people together. Memories just come in and out. That’s the form and the expression is layer upon layer. I layer them so that only I can read them and other people can imagine them to be their own meditations. It’s a series of transitions from meditation to sound and music, all moving at the speed of thought, which is actually quite fast.”

    José Parlá

     

     

    Commanding in scale, standing at over a metre in height and impressive two metres in width, Will The Future Continue To Speed Up? is an expansive work by José Parlá that thrums with vibrant colours and restive movement. Widely celebrated for his improvisational and intuitive approach to painting, the artist’s practice teeters between the liminal boundaries of abstraction and calligraphy.  

     

    Composed of a network of frenzied calligraphic strokes that radiate across a densely layered canvas, the present work is a highly visceral and brilliant archetype of Parlá’s oeuvre. The artist envisions his works as a way of storytelling and demonstrates this method via a wholly gestural and meditative approach, whereby layers of mixed media, dynamic calligraphic writing, fractions of memory, history, and language coalesce to bring forth his own unique experience. As the title, Will The Future Continue To Speed Up? suggests, there seems to be a lingering sense of anxiety, coursing through every brushstroke into an accelerating thrust. Perhaps as a reference to the passage of time, this further alludes to Parlá’s concern that time is running out in this current fast-paced environment.

     

    The present work’s large-scale format invites viewers to fully immerse themselves within the composition. The more one is engaged with the work, the more details unfold revealing pockets of urban decay and rhythmic linework that all represent the artist’s collective memories and personal narratives.

     

    Born in 1973, Brooklyn-based artist Parlá has been honoured with exhibitions worldwide, presenting solo shows in recent years at Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong and London (2023), Gana Art Nineone, Seoul (2020), Gallery in New York (2019), the Neuberger Museum of Art (2018), SCAD Museum of Art (2017), Brand New Gallery in Milan, Italy (2017) and at the YoungArts in Miami (2016).

     

     

     

     

      José Parlá discusses his practice in his studio

    • Provenance

      Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

199

Will The Future Continue To Speed Up?

signed, titled, dedicated and dated 'for Charlie "Will The Future Continue to Speed Up?" Parla 2021' on the reverse
collage, acrylic, enamel, ink and plaster on canvas
122.9 x 214.5 cm. (48 3/8 x 84 1/2 in.)
Executed in 2021.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
HK$500,000 - 700,000 
€60,600-84,800
$64,100-89,700

Sold for HK$508,000

Contact Specialist

Anastasia Salnikoff
Head of Day Sale, Associate Specialist
+852 2318 2014
anastasiasalnikoff@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

Hong Kong Auction 7 October 2023