Maria Farrar - Wired: Online Auction London Wednesday, October 28, 2020 | Phillips
  • Description

    Please note this lot is the property of a private individual.

  • Provenance

    Ota Fine Arts, Singapore
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    Maria Farrar’s whimsical handling of everyday scenes transports the viewer to an alternate reality of colour and intrigue. Born in the Philippines in 1988, the artist was raised in Japan until the age of 15 when she moved to London – Farrar has observed the subsequent cultural duality in her work, identifying the influence of Japanese Calligraphy and Manga married with a Western use of colour and technique. In Stroll from 2019, Farrar reconstructs the mundane activity of walking ones’ dog with the fairy-tale attributes of a female figure in a flowing ballgown, poised at the edge of a lake and flanked by a flamingo. The close cropping of the image renders the figure anonymous and instead, her red shoes and the wolf-like dog, poised with teeth bared are the protagonists of the scene. The picture is imbued with a sense of elusiveness and through the positioning of the three figures, the narrative of the scene remains just out of reach.

    In the background, Farrar has let the grey texture of the paper show through, flattening the composition and creating a stage-like quality. On the intentional use of negative space in her work, the artist writes ‘I remember as a kid, once a month a special edition of the cartoon strip I followed came out in print and only the first few pages were printed in colour. I looked forward to them as I discovered skintones, colour of their homes and clothes and it felt like a real treat. I think of colour in paintings as a luxury, the less you see, the more you want.’ (Maria Farrar, interview with Maria Vogel ‘A Global Perspective guides Maria Farrar’, Art of Choice, 17 October 2019, online). The contrast between the vibrant shades of pastel and neutral base give the work an enchantingly story-book quality, leaving the viewer with a lingering sense of fascination for the world which Farrar has created.

10

Lot offered with No Reserve

Stroll

signed with the artist's initials 'MF' lower right
pastel on paper
42 x 29.6 cm (16 1/2 x 11 5/8 in.)
Executed in 2019.

Estimate
£2,000 - 3,000 •♠

Sold for £3,276

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs

Head of Sale, London

+44 20 7901 7993

cgibbs@phillips.com

Wired: Online Auction

Online Auction 28 October - 5 November 2020