Mona Hatoum - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    White Cube, London

  • Exhibited

    Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, July 19-September 14, 1997 and New York, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, December 4, 1997-February 22, 1998, Mona Hatoum, p. 46 (another example exhibited; illustrated); Bordeaux, Cartier Shop (another example exhibited)

  • Literature

    D. Cameron and J. Morgan, Mona Hatoum, Chicago, 1997, p. 46 (illustrated); M. Archer. G. Brett, and C. de Zegher, eds., Mona Hatoum, London, 1997, p. 75 (illustrated); P. Harper, “Visceral Geometry: Works of Mona Hatoum”, Art in America, September 1998
    T. Gorb, J. Glencross and J. Antoni, Mona Hatoum, 2002, p. 25 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Mona Hatoum's entire body of work invites viewers to experience anew the cultural intersections that link our identities with the physical and perceptual world. Through the use of a wide variety of media and techniques, Hatoum’s unique style is characterized by forms and materials that evoke feelings of intimacy and familiarity, while simultaneously suggesting the possibility, whether real or imagined, of physical danger. By skillfully drawing the viewer into close visual and psychological proximity with her work, Hatoum complicates these strategies with frequent quotations from Minimalist and Conceptualist practices of the 1960s, as well as with the use of industrial processes and unusual materials. The resulting tension between the distance which causes forms to appear stable, and the proximity that reveals the element of danger, permits the viewer to make the leap from a perceptual experience to its applicability as a metaphor for cultural relations within a broader social framework.

    Hatoum’s fascination with the relation between interiority and exteriority and the bodily association of certain surfaces, materials and forms, is skillfully demonstrated in the present lot, Hair Necklace, 1995. “The necklace was displayed in the window of Cartier in Lyons, France on one of the jeweler’s busts as part of an exhibition entitled Shopping; it invoked a critique of the commodity implicit in much minimalist and postminimalist sculpture, but with the miniaturist’s attention to detail reminiscent of a bygone era” (J. Morgan and D. Cameron, Mona Hatoum, Chicago, 1997, p. 22). The hair, all Hatoum’s, collected over years from brushes, and although dead, is still disturbingly human. “There is something fascinating about the origins of this work: keeping strands of one’s fallen hair over a period of six years, rolled into balls and stored in shoe-boxes without any particular purpose. Then there is the marrying the material, at a certain point, in certain circumstances, with a space. It would be hard to imagine a more fragile manifestation of a human presence in a space, or a more startling contrast to the often bombastic colonization of space by artist’s installations...” (M. Archer, G. Brett, C. de Zegher, eds., Mona Hatoum, London, 1997, p. 75).

34

Hair Necklace

1995
Human hair, wood and leather bust, and Plexiglas vitrine.
Bust: 12 x 8 1/2 x 7 in. (30.5 x 21.6 x 17.8 cm); Vitrine: 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 x 12 1/2 in. (40 x 40 x 31.8 cm).
This work is from an edition of three.

Estimate
£30,000 - 40,000 ‡ ♠

Sold for £60,000

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London