Most famous today for his glittery pandas, Rob Pruitt has had his fair share of notoriety. He was shunned by the art world in the early 1990s after a collaborative exhibition at Leo Castelli that was widely denounced as racist; he returned to prominence no less quietly in 1998 with Cocaine Buffet, inviting gallery visitors to partake in a 16-foot line of the titular substance.

In the present lot we find him in more gentle mode. From a large series of sketchily drawn faces on a spectrum of Day-Glo backgrounds, Pruitt’s simple and expressive strokes create a visage that recalls the elegant economy of Picasso’s line drawings. ‘I love minimalism, and I also love melodrama. So with my face paintings, I combined the two. First I make a shifting colour, gradient backdrop – colour is one of the best ways to express emotion – and then I draw a face. Sometimes the lines of the face are steady and bold, sometimes they skip and falter. I just go with my emotions, which are always changing. What results, whether the simple lines of a smiling face over a pastel blush, or a sorrowful cry dashed over a range of fiery reds, really paints a story, not just a picture.’ (Rob Pruitt in Faces, People and Pandas, exh. cat., Milan: Massimo de Carlo, 2012).

Country Boy’s vivid hues have the quality of desktop background as much as of Colour Field painting; the sparely outlined face mimics a throwaway doodle, but is born from an Expressionist impulse of gestural emotional outpour. Pruitt continues to confound expectations. Facing us in alarming intensity of scale, his seemingly anodyne sketch presents a vision of surprising depth and sensitivity.