Kelley Walker - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Friday, November 16, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    In Untitled, 2007, the medium and the message are launched into an ideological battle; while it symbolizes recycling, it is made of precious gold. The appropriation that defnes Walker’s extensive oeuvre highlights the self-refexivity in art-making, challenging the very conventions of fne art. By politicizing imagery, questioning traditional materials, and manipulating symbols, Walker encourages viewers to engage his works with a critical lens. In its gilded surface, enormous size, and indestructible
    makeup, Untitled, 2007, deliberately undermines the message engrained in its composition. Instead it highlights the irrelevance of symbols in the modern world as indicative of our ambitions to better our environment, while in reality, we marvel in the excesses of the world. It celebrates the physicality of sign, scale, and material.

    When I made the recycling signs, I took the sign off a cereal box, enlarged it on the computer, and had it digitally laser cut out of steel... Applying skins allowed
    the sign to be marked out and/or packaged, and in doing this the signs could then begin to operate in a way that interested me – as a kind of naturalized logo that I could work with and respond to.
    KELLEY WALKER

    (Kelley Walker quoted in R. Nickas, “Support Failure,” Kelley Walker, Grenoble & Brussels, 2007, pp. 74-75).

126

Untitled

2007
gold leaf on laser cut steel
diameter: 58 in. (147.3 cm)

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $170,500

Contemporary Art Day Sale

16 November 2012
New York