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Highlights Tour
\n

\n\n

Milan
\n13 - 15 September
\nVia Lanzone 2
\n20123 Milan
\n

\n\n

Paris
\n20 - 24 September
\n46 Rue du Bac
\nParis 75007
\n

\n\n

New York
\n18 - 25 September
\n432 Park Avenue
\nNew York NY 10022
\n
\nAdmission to this sale is by ticket only.
\nPlease email tickets@phillips.com
\n

\n","auctionDetailsSmall","London Auction 13 October 2023","extraInfo","

Rosanna Widén
\nSenior Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
\n+44 20 7318 4060
\nrwiden@phillips.com
\n

\n\n

Olivia Thornton
\nHead of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe
\n+44 20 7318 4099
\nothornton@phillips.com

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Daniel Richter, Schakal Reloaded, 2009. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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In the divided Germany of the 1980s, a group of outcasts in Hamburg emerged as a creative community united by a shared belief in a socialist future and a disdain for leadership in both the East and West. “In the early ‘80s, late ‘70s when I was young, punk was the way out,” painter Daniel Richter once recalled of his youth. Richter joined this informal group in his early 20s, squatting in abandoned buildings and engaging with the city’s thriving punk scene. The artist spent a decade living in this Hamburg community, satisfying his creative urge by making punk concert posters. He preferred to work alone, not favoring the inherently collaborative nature of music-making, later noting that making imagery “was the natural role the subculture chose for me.”

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The artist has recounted that this period was not without conflict, as the group often faced public backlash and assaults from the police, as well as violence from neo-Nazi groups. These early encounters added steam to Richter’s already established skepticism of authority, which can be seen throughout his later work.

\n\n

\n
“The idea was not to wait for the communist party, but instead to do it ourselves.”
\n—Daniel Richter
\n

\n\n

When the Berlin Wall fell, Richter’s reality crumbled, and the unification of Germany prompted the painter’s creative expansion into fine art. He remembers that when “the Soviet Union collapsed it was clear to me that there would be shifts of power in the world and that the idea of what a democracy is will be massively changing.” It was at this point, at the age of 30, that the artist realized he needed to find a new path, as many in his orbit had either become bitter with age or died young. It was a struggle for him to make this leap, recalling, “I didn’t have money, I didn’t have wealthy parents, I didn’t have any education, so I was a bum by definition of the State. The only thing that I had always done, and I’d always been obsessed with, was images.”

\n\n

He enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg to discover what can define art, led by a questioning of the artistic validity of his own posters. Upon graduation he worked as assistant to several artists, most notably Albert Oehlen, as he refined his painterly style, initially emerging on the scene with colorful abstract paintings before shifting to the more figurative and politically charged paintings that are emblematic of his social outlook.

\n\n

A Symbolic Jackal

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\n\n

Daniel Richter, Schakal Reloaded, 2009. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Richter’s 2009 work Schakal Reloaded is a striking canvas that reflects the fraught political landscape of the early 2000s and the horrors of the war on terror. In this painting we’re confronted with what at first seems to be an enchanted mountain landscape, the complex narrative concentrated in Richter’s flattened pictorial space. This graphic visual language coupled with the work’s expressive use of color are somewhat reminiscent of graffiti and street art, perhaps relating to the artist’s early experience. On closer look, we discover a jackal figure at the left of the composition, rendered in a hazy orange. Its presence is menacing, and the nearby human figures scream in terror. It is the turbans of these figures coupled with Richter’s visual suggestion of the jackal’s symbolic associations that call to mind the charged political atmosphere of the time, reminding us of the nickname given to the powerful armored vehicles deployed to the Middle East by the United Kingdom. The overtones of the associations in this image can be considered as ascribed to the Western militaries, assigning them the personality of a cunning trickster, indifferent to the plight of others. Poignantly, we realize this scene places us in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the “jackal” vehicle roamed.

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Daniel Richter, Schakal Reloaded (detail), 2009. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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This work is deeply rooted in the events that have defined Richter’s creative life. If the German reunification was the first historical event that shook Richter’s world, the terrorist attacks of September 11th were the second. The two are linked for Richter, as he has noted, “The fall of the Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union are the reason for the reappearance of religions and nationalism haunting us today.” By suggesting through charged symbolism that Western militaries are untrustworthy, Schakal Reloaded presents us with the tragic absurdity of such political tensions. The artist has made countless pointed comments on this dynamic in the post-9/11 era. He has remarked of Islamic extremism that “it’s a war for dumb guys believing in lord penis, in guns and violence, and all that kind of paranoid, fascist, megalomanic power scheisse.” In turn, he’s also pointed out that the very same ideals flow through the male leadership of some recent Western administrations and has questioned how the war machine has allowed Western economies to flourish. These ideas represent what perhaps defines Daniel Richter’s thinking — a continuous challenge of authority demonstrated not just by an approach to art and imagery, but to a way of life.

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Unreliable Witness: On memory and veracity in ‘Rome’ by Luc Tuymans >

\n\n

\n","publishDate","2023-10-02T15:27:02.000000Z","authorCredit","Jesse Limbacher","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/132403391/art-auction-london-daniel-richter-forever-punk","displayOrder","auctionEditorialID",1932,"editorialID",4345,"flocklerID",132403391,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/tuymans-lead-8dc9c8f8-d133-471c-a2a4-6d1175c6d8bb_s600x0.jpg","On memory and veracity in ‘Rome’ by Luc Tuymans.","Unreliable Witness","

Luc Tuymans, Rome, 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

\n\n

Luc Tuymans’ highly distinctive painting practice navigates the complex ambiguities between history, power, imagery, and memory; probing, in essence, these themes to question the very existence of absolute truth. “There is no truth in the work,” Tuymans asserted of his practice in an interview with Iona Whittaker, noting further and quite obliquely: “I have a high distrust for images, even my own.”

\n\n

Ahead of Phillips’ 20th Century & Contemporary Art auctions in London this October, where Tuymans’ monumental 2007 painting Rome will be offered at auction for the first time, we look to the artist’s work and ideas to explore memory and its relationship to truth, power, and identity.

\n\n

As the fresh-to-market Rome has been on loan since its initial acquisition — first to the Stedejlik Museum in Amsterdam and then to the Kunstmuseum in The Hauge — the occasion presents a rare opportunity to discover the painting, which will be on view at Phillips’ Berkeley Square gallery from 4 October through the auction on 13 October.

\n\n

Critically regarded for his belief in painting at a time when conceptual art circles had declared the practice futile, Tuymans has proved painting to be the only medium appropriate for his investigations into questions of power, memory, and visual representation. Moreover, as many of his contemporaries were moving increasingly into abstraction, Tuymans privileged the figurative, coming to prominence in the early 1990s as a painter of peculiar and affecting images that explored history and its antimonies, the strangeness of routine objects, and the ways in which power, technology, and time impact our vision in an increasingly fraught and rapidly evolving cultural landscape. His work has challenged the supposedly honest relationships between seeing, believing, and remembering, interrogating the forms and functions of images and the ways in which truth and falsehood are codependent entities.

\n\n

A consummate example of Tuymans’ painterly practice, Rome is one of nine canvases that make up Les Revenants — the first in a trilogy of series that confront the image as an instrument of power. First shown in 2007 at Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, works from the series have gone on to be included in some of Tuymans’ most significant subsequent exhibitions. Only three works from the series have ever appeared at auction.

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Monumental in scale, Rome is the largest of the nine canvases from the series. Typical of the artist’s practice, the source material of the image was a homemade print of a digitally compressed image. The result is a painting that the writer Hans Theys describes as “reminiscent of illustrations in old textbooks. The reality has the air of a disintegrating cardboard theatre or thousands of scattered, tiny patches of light.” A muted tonal palette and soft, diffused brushstrokes are characteristically employed by Tuymans to present a cinematic image of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The architectural heft of the basilica is conveyed by the sheer scale of the canvas and the spaciousness of the asymmetrical composition. Imposing structural details including massive sculptures and columns combine to present a majestic vision of the building, rendering the assembled enormous congregation almost insignificant before the weight of the occasion. Yet, much of the vital action is seen bottom right, where Belgian Archbishop Daneels is sparsely depicted among a group of candidates for elevation to cardinal. Just a moment after our first sight of this image, the newly elevated cardinals — including Daneels — will kneel.

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\n\n

Luc Tuymans, Rome (detail), 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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As noted by Theys, the muted tonal palette and Tuymans’ practice of working from manipulated old photographs presents this image as professedly historical. When we realize this image depicts a contemporary ceremony, one of great importance to Belgium, we realize how Tuymans uses imagery to play with our perception of time and memory. The artist has explained his approach, stating, “Art creates its own time span and in that sense also creates its own time lapse: you are looking at something that accords time to an image, as it is made and as it shows itself.” Tuymans’ work challenges our perception of time to pose questions between memory and belief and reveal to us the dangerous reality that memory, and thus our understanding of history, may be fallible. In turn, the work proves that the image is also fallible. As writer Christina Ruiz has remarked, “At the heart of Tuymans’ project is a central conceit: that images are unreliable, that they can offer us no more than a fragment of reality and that our own memories, personal or collective, mislead us.”

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Tuymans employs a masterful and carefully considered approach to the physicality of paint, tone, and color to impress these ideas. He explained in a 2021 recorded discussion for David Zwirner gallery that he is interested how his work can influence people, to make them stop and think, or to play off their own memories. He shared that this is the principal reason that his works explore tonality rather than simply color, as he has observed that when we perceive imagery monochromatically (even if his paintings are not monochromatic) the images return to our mind at a later point. In this sense, his work not only calls upon our existing memories but plants new ones — it seeks to leave an indelible mark, not simply an impression. “I wanted my paintings to look old from the start, which is important because they are about memory,” the artist has stated.

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Luc Tuymans, Rome, 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.

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It is understandable why Tuymans so frequently turns to historical imagery to add weight and significance to his canvases. In the case of Rome — its pale muted color scheme appearing almost preternaturally faded — Tuymans calls upon our memories of historic religious imagery. As such, the work doesn’t just showcase the grand and theatrical nature of the religious ceremony, but also reminds us that much of the weight of the tradition and reverence for these spaces lies in the history of the church and, accordingly, the collective memories of its constituents.

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This notion of a cultural collective memory, understood through history and stories, leads us to consider memory’s impact on identity, as much personal consideration of identity lies in such shared memories, or even in the rebellion against them. In Rome, Tuymans confronts his own identity and background head on, as a Belgian painter who was raised Catholic. The artist explained to Artnet in 2010, “I come out of a country where painting is genetically understood. Highly Catholic because Catholics like images because they keep the people stupid. Western image building was born in that region, and, of course, huge trauma with it.” This wasn’t the first time the artist considered his own background and the history of Belgium in a critical light — at the 2001 Venice Biennale he presented work that explored the colonial brutality of Belgium’s occupation of Congo.

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Ultimately, in viewing Rome, we are presented with a complex web of associations that functions on us much like memory does. The painting leaves an impression, but we’re forced to connect the visual cues to find understanding in it. The experience is reminiscent of the effort we make in constructing a logical narrative from the memories of our dreams. It also recalls a tenet of Tuymans’ early work, which he described as being “about what history could mean if you dream it, and how inadequate our memory is.” Further ambiguity is lent to the image as it remains almost burned in our inner eyes after viewing, as though we’re still trying to understand the impression it leaves but unable to articulate it. As Tuymans’ himself has offered, “Every visual is in opposition to language because if we could say everything, why make a picture of it?”

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Forever Punk: Daniel Richter’s innate challenge of authority emerges in ‘Schakal Reloaded.’ >

\n\n

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“I'm always striving for narrative ambiguity in my work. It’s important not to give too much away, as then the painting becomes an illustration rather than a painting - there’s an important difference, and when that happens it loses power. Paintings that captivate me are ones where there are gaps in knowing. For me, ambiguity is what sustains a painting and makes it endure.”
\n—Louise Giovanelli

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British-born artist Louise Giovanelli creates opulent, tactile images of transitory moments. Whether a fleeting gesture – a hand holding a glass of wine, bodies dancing, eyelids closing – or a focus on everyday materials – hair, fabric, foliage – her compositions are seductively rendered in dazzling light and luminous oil. Living in London and Manchester, and completing her MFA in Frankfurt, Giovanelli takes her inspiration from a wide variety of subject matter, from Northern Renaissance Old Masters to Absolutely Fabulous’ Patsy Stone.

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Regardless of the original source, Giovanelli’s hyper-focused compositions and lucid application of paint turn the ordinary into the profound, creating vivid works that encourage us to take notice of the smaller details around us. In An Ex, we are confronted with a dark image of thick folds, from an indistinct foliage, demonstrating the artist’s deft command of light and tone. Across the canvas we see deep furrows, cutting into the vegetation and creating an ‘X’ shape, which provides both a structurally sound composition and an amusingly literal relationship with the title of the piece. Represented by White Cube and GRIMM Gallery, Giovanelli has held solo exhibitions in London, Amsterdam, Rome and New York. Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the National Museum of Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Hort Family Collection, New York; and The Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo.

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\"\" — Georgia O’Keeffe, *Jimson Weed,* 1936-1937, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Image: © Indianapolis Museum of Art / Gift of Eli Lilly and Company / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © 2023 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

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Despite her use of such a traditional medium as oil, Giovanelli’s work reflects an avant-garde freshness. She manipulates and distorts perspective, often by rotating and cropping images on her phone, in a way that isolates traditional subject matter – curtains, folds of fabric, hair or plants.ⁱThis detachment of subject from context allows us to really consider material physicality: its texture and how it reflects and refracts light. These close-cropped compositions, especially in An Ex’s vegetative subject matter, are evocative of pioneering 20^th-century artist Georgia O’Keeffe. In works like Jimson Weed, O’Keeffe, represents flowers in hyper-focused compositions, removing them from their usual contexts and creating sumptuously rendered forms that verge on abstraction. The same can be seen in An Ex’s sensual depiction of plant-like forms, hinting at a subject, but refusing to ever reveal itself fully to the viewer.

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Giovanelli creates the effect of spatial depth within her work by interrupting the surface and composition of her canvases. In some paintings, like those of curtains, this may take the form of a semi-opaque glaze, whereas in An Ex, this is several thin, white lines scrawled across the canvas. This form of mark making takes the form of ‘glitches’ in an otherwise perfected composition. Aside from highlighting pictorial space, these interruptions in Giovanelli’s methodically painted works create a dialogue between aestheticism and temporality; whilst her near-symmetry is punctuated, these gestural ‘glitches’ also create an ephemeral moment, as if we have ‘just missed or about to perceive an action taking place’.ⁱⁱ

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“If you’re a painter, you really have to understand where your medium has come from, you have to understand history. Just to use the act of painting, to make a mark, is to hold all of that baggage of history with you.”
\n—Louise Giovanelli

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Living in Frankfurt whilst completing her MFA, Giovanelli began to immerse herself in the world of the Northern Renaissance, stating that it was ‘the first period of influence that I was really struck by… [I] was always fascinated with how they created those textures’.ⁱⁱⁱ Artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden’s beautifully rendered details captured her imagination: ‘contorted fingers, fingers in books, or the bottoms of dresses with tiny, tiny feet’.^vi In acutely replicating these details, Giovanelli began to adopt the technique used by master oil painters of the Renaissance era – a process of applying very light layers and allowing them plenty of time to dry.

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\"\" — Jan Van Eyck, *Annunciation Diptych*, c, 1433-1435, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Image: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala, Florence

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It is the patience that comes with such delicate applications of oil that suffuses Giovanelli’s works with such luminosity. She creates depth within forms, the many layers of paint culminating in a velveteen appearance of inherent painterly luxury. Whilst she is known for her brilliant, phosphorescent use of colour, An Ex is a masterclass in creating beautifully rendered realism with a limited palette. The effect of this is not dissimilar to the technique adopted by Renaissance masters – such as van Eyck – of grisailles: paintings executed using a monochromatic palette of neutral greys. Without the distraction of other colours, the artist is forced to focus on sound composition and expert use of light and shadow. The Annunciation Diptych is one such example, and the influence of the way van Eyck executes sumptuous, undulating folds in his gowns can be seen in the lascivious ruffles of An Ex’s dark vegetation.

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Giovanelli's mastery of oil paint positions this medium at the forefront of contemporary art, drawing a lineage with Old Masters with her dichotomous mix of old and new, abstract and figurative. Nevertheless, her works are anything but antiquated. A clever manipulation of perspective and interaction with spatial planes provides a distinctly contemporary, digital feel to a medium that has been used for centuries.

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Collector’s Digest

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Louise Giovanelli is a British-born artist known for her lucid, hyper focused oil paintings. Represented by White Cube and GRIMM Gallery, she has recently held solo exhibitions from February to June this year in New York and Manchester, respectively.
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Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the National Museum of Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Hort Family Collection, New York; and The Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo.
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It has recently been announced that Giovanelli will be the recipient of a solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2024.
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ⁱ Louise Giovanelli, quoted in Lara Johnson-Wheeler, ‘Louise Giovanelli, the Artist Fusing Old Masters and Digital Imagery’, AnOther Magazine, 11 July, 2022, online.

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ⁱⁱ Louise Giovanelli, quoted in ‘Deliberate Repetition: A Conversation with Louise Giovanelli’, JUXTAPOZ, 27 November, 2020, online.

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ⁱⁱⁱ Louise Giovanelli, quoted in Lara Johnson-Wheeler, ‘Louise Giovanelli, the Artist Fusing Old Masters and Digital Imagery’, AnOther Magazine, 11 July, 2022, online.

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^iv Louise Giovanelli, quoted in Louis Wise, ‘Louise Giovanelli: the painter mixing the Old Masters with Mariah Carey’, Financial Times, 10 June, 2022, online.

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39

Louise Giovanelli

An Ex

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Louise Giovanelli