Sadie Benning has always resisted clear categories or labels. Over the last thirty years, the artist has worked in video, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage and sound, often referencing multiple mediums at once or subverting one process to inform another.

Made by cutting up wood based panels, coating them in layers of resin and piecing them back together, Benning’s wall based works are colorful compositions that simultaneously recall the history of painting and challenge it. The artist’s bright, abstract forms sit snugly within the painting’s edges, reminiscent of how Ellsworth Kelly might fit his circles into squares, but by sculpting physical shapes rather than painting them, Benning’s process pushes the boundaries of what a painting can be and how to make one.

The presented lot, Untitled Telephone Drawing made in 2016, is one of a number of works that find the artist leaning toward shape and form rather than more recognizable iconography or images. At an artist talk for the 2016 exhibition Shared Eye at the Renaissance Society, the artist said, “I didn’t want to dictate something so direct, I didn’t want to tell someone what they have to think...Perception is something that is constructed...We all have our own histories that we bring to what we see.”