Paul McCarthy - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Luhring Augustine, New York; Bortolami Dayan Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited


    San Francisco Art Institute, Work Zones: three decades of contemporary art from San Francisco Art Institute, 11 May - 29 July, 2006 (another example exhibited)

  • Literature


    P. McCarthy, ed., Paul McCarthy: Propo, Milan, 1999, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    Paul McCarthy’s monumental career has bridged performance, painting, photography, sculpture, and video; and has continued to challenge the conventions of art and the human body. His surreal, often sardonic photographs of staged moments reflect McCarthy’s enduring study of cultural production and perceptions of power, aggression, violence, and pleasure. The present lot is a still-life of five jars of preserved peaches stacked in a pyramid. Grime on the jars quickly overshadows the initial innocence of the image, and the photograph assumes a corrupted nature, like a criminal mug shot. Referencing the Duchamp ready-made and Warhol’s repeated soup cans, the photograph is at once an inventory of a commercially manufactured, iconic American object, and a pernicious portrait of evidence to carnage.
    The formal decision-making and much of the actual content of the artist’s work don’t merely signify but, bluntly, brutally and beautifully perform the complicated visceral relation between thinking about the body, and embodying thinking…. Duschamp discerned, as Thierry de Duve has made clear, that once painters stopped grinding their own pigment, all painting became a ready-made. [Allan] Kaprow understood the radical promise in Pollock’s ‘near destruction’ of the tradition of painting. As he tests the limits of the performance called selfhood, part of McCarthy’s project has been to challenge not only the ramifications of the readymade, but what painting is and cannot be.
    B. Hainley, “Paul McCarthy”, Frieze, April 2001, p. 90

147

Untitled (from Propo-Series) (Peaches)

1991/2002

Cibachrome print mounted on aluminum.

49 x 73 in. (124.5 x 185.5 cm).
This work is from an edition of three.

Estimate
$60,000 - 80,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York