Sanya Kantarovsky - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Wednesday, May 17, 2023 | Phillips

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 17 May 2023

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  • The mis-en-scène of Sanya Kantarovsky’s Deprivation, 2018, seems familiar at first: the work depicts two figures in bed, bodies pressed together, and hands intertwined. However, the longer one looks, the more unsettling—indeed, depraved—the scene becomes. This is Kantarovsky’s method. The Russian-born artist connects his painting practice to the early 20th century Russian avant-garde concept of ostranenija, or “making-strange,” which, as the artist explains, “was the notion that art had to defamiliarize something and make you feel you’re looking at it for the first time.”i Painting, to Kantarovsky, is the best medium for ostranenija, explicitly because of the way that a viewer encounters a canvas; “it is one of the last sites we have that demands a very slow and discerning look,” he says.ii

     

    And indeed, Deprivation commands such looking. The horror, the ostranenija of the work, unfolds over time, as the viewer takes in more and more details. The experience is similar to looking at a painting by Egon Schiele or Otto Dix. First, perhaps, one notices the uneasy color palette of the work, from the dripping, acid green of the background, to the undead pallor of the figures’ limbs, stark against the deep purple and blood red of the bed. Then, the face of the male figure comes into focus, the exaggerated turquoise line across the mouth unhinging his jaw like a python, or skull. The aggressive details of the male figure compound on themselves; he straddles the female figure, his bare legs locking her in place. And his hands—what might have been a loving embrace is instead a fierce battle, as he attempts to wrench something from her grasp. We fear, from the angle of his elbow, that he may strike her if he succeeds.

     

    Egon Schiele, Lovemaking, 1915. Leopold Museum, Vienna. Image: HIP / Art Resource, NY

    Perhaps the most unnerving of all is the absence of a reaction from the female figure. Her face is hidden by her long hair and huddled shoulders. We cannot tell from her expression how she feels about this interaction, whether she is afraid, or resistant, or, perhaps, even, amused. Maybe this scene, though menacing in line and gesture, is actually humorous, a playful banter between a loving couple. Is the leering, skeletal face cracked open in a goofy grin?

     

    After all, Kantarovsky does have a dark sense of humor, and he thinks that “humor is ultimately the most important element” in a painting.iii It doesn’t have to be “a haha slapstick kind of humor,” he says; rather “a kind of self-reflexive humor, a tap on the shoulder,” to pull one out of the spiral of closely looking at a painting.iv Comic art, especially cartoons from the Soviet satire magazine Krokodil, and early American animated shorts like “The Skeleton Dance,” 1929, or “Snow White,” 1933, inspire Kantarovsky’s use of bodily distortion and “doing things that don’t add up” in pursuit of a humor “rooted in violated expectation.”v Viewing Deprivation with a gallows humor, then, one sees the absence of the female figure’s face as an opportunity for interpretation, a release from the self-seriousness of artistic study.

     

    Kantarovsky deploys his titles in favor of such humor, Deprivation included; he prefers double-entendres that, “rather than clarify something, they sort of complicate it, or make something that feels very tragic into a joke.”vi This is certainly the case with Deprivation, as the term signifies not only a presumed malevolence (depravation), but also signals to the visual elements the viewer is deprived of, eg., the woman’s facial expression, which could resolve the emotional tension of the work. But Kantarovsky does not want to fix the viewer’s uneasy relationship to Deprivation. He does not seek to normalize what he has made strange. For Kantarovsky, painting is a rich ground of experimentation, ripe with many possible readings, and unfixed meanings. The severity of our own judgement—our deprived search for depravity in the work—becomes the strange joke.

     

    Collectors’ Digest

     

    • Phillips holds the auction record for Kantarovsky, with No Eyes, 2019, in addition to four of the top five auction results for the artist.

    • Kantarovsky’s work can be found in prestigious museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Scultpure Garden, Washington DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London, among others.

     

     

    i Sanya Kantarovsky, quoted in “Sanya Kantarovsky with Jason Rosenfeld,” Brooklyn Rail, Jun. 2019, online.

    ii Ibid.

    iii Ibid.

    iv Ibid.

    v Ibid.

    vi Ibid.

    • Provenance

      Modern Art, London
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Kunsthalle Basel, Sanya Kantarovsky: Disease of the Eyes, August 31–November 11, 2018, no. 27
      London, Whitechapel Gallery, Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, February 6–August 30, 2020, no. 15, p. 144 (illustrated, n.p.)

    • Literature

      Max Glauner, “Critics’ Picks: Sanya Kantarovsky,” Artforum, October 2018, online (illustrated)
      “Sanya Kantarovsky at Kunsthalle Basel,” Art Viewer, November 7, 2018, online (illustrated; Kunsthalle Basel, 2018, installation view illustrated)
      Adrian Searle, “Radical Figures review – sex, snakes, sprouting heads and flying burgers,” The Guardian, February 5, 2020, online
      Gareth Harris and Kabir Jhala, “Three exhibitions to see in London this weekend,” The Art Newspaper, February 7, 2020, online

34

Sanya Kantarovsky

Deprivation

signed, titled and dated “DEPRIVATION Sanya Kantarovsky 2018” on the overlap
oil, watercolor and pastel on canvas
85 x 65 in. (215.9 x 165.1 cm)
Executed in 2018.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $266,700

Contact Specialist

Carolyn Mayer
Associate Specialist, Head of Evening Sale, New York
+1 212 940 1206
CMayer@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 17 May 2023