Pope.L - New Now London Wednesday, April 5, 2017 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    The Project, New York
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Brussels, Jewish Museum of Belgium, After Images, 28 April - 28 August 2011, pp. 108-109 (illustrated)

  • Literature

    Mark Bessire, ed., William Pope L.: the friendliest Black artist in America, Cambridge MA, 2002, p. 122 (iv illustrated) and p. 124 (i, ii, iii, v, vi, vii, viii illustrated)

  • Artist Biography

    Pope.L

    American • 1955

    Pope.L, who calls himself “The Friendliest Black Artist in America©”, is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture. “At 62, POPE.L is inarguably the greatest performance artist of our time,” Megan O’Grady wrote in The New York Times Style Magazine in March 2018, “This is exactly the kind of label he would find absurd, but over the course of the last four decades, no artist has so consistently broken down the accepted boundaries of the genre in order to bring it closer to the public, with lacerating, perspicacious and gloriously anti-authoritarian projects that play with our received notions of race and class and almost always cut more than one way.”

    Building upon his provocative performances and public interventions, Pope.L has applied the same social and formal strategies to painting, photography, performance, video, and installation to probe issues of language, system, class, race and gender. For his RePhotocollage series, Pope.L has manipulated and combined images of body parts to create “figural encounters”. Originating out of the artist’s desire to betray the artist’s hand while simultaneously creating images highly suggestive of the body, these compositions are scanned, flattened and reprinted on single large planes of paper. 

    View More Works

98

Eight works: (i) White People are the Beef of the Fire; (ii) White People are Hoi Vuc Vietnam 1965; (iii) White People are my Tears; (iv) Black People are a positive cancer; (v) White People are nice to their Ideology; (vi) White People are Gabriel and his Boner; (vii) White People are not White People; (viii) White People are what White People lack

(i,ii) pen and marker on paper; (iii,iv,viii) pen, marker and tape on paper; (v) pen, marker and masking fluid on paper; (vi,vii) pen, pencil and marker on paper
each 31.8 x 25.4 cm (12 1/2 x 10 in.)
Executed in 2001.

Estimate
£8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for £21,875

Contact Specialist
Simon Tovey
Head of Sale
+44 20 7318 4084

New Now

London Auction 6 April 2017