Tim Noble and Sue Webster - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Kukje Gallery, Seoul

  • Exhibited

    Seoul, Kukje Gallery, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, The Joy of Sex, 7 October - 6 November, 2005

  • Catalogue Essay

    In the mid 1990s, collaborative duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster launched themselves in the London art scene with their magical transformation of inanimate refuse into representations of life. At heart, both artists are intense rock music enthusiasts, finding their inspiration in advertising and vernacular culture which involuntarily infuses a punk attitude into their work. Their fascination with junk, the residue of American pop culture, developed in the summer holidays during their time at art college, when they went touring around junk yards and shopping malls, searching and collecting pieces of scrap metal and rubbish with a unique quality. In the present lot, the artist duo sculpts piles of street rubbish and lighting them a precise angle to create a realist silhouette of two rats. Rats are the archetypal animals of human fear, which highlights the rather sinister, creepy aspects of the subject matter. Yet it takes extraordinary skill and technique to transform junk into art through assemblage and this sense of craft is entirely self-taught and improvisational. Using strategies of modern sculpture to make art from anti-art, Noble and Webster have perfected the art of magic and illusion that is also an art of direct experience. Creating a work, based on the shadow, combines theatrical know-how and conceptual ideas in the tradition of Duchamp, to create “a double structure that belongs to two worlds at the same time: that of fiction and that of reality”, using the shadow to make “the absent become present.” (Taken from Tim Noble & Sue Webster Wasted Youth, Rizzoli, New York, 2006)

This work is in very good condition. This work is comprised of

343

A Pair of Dirty Fucking Rats

2005
Light projector, cardboard, metal, cigarette boxes, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, pencils, markers, toothbrushes, photographs, wood, dirt, fabric scraps, and wooden scrub brush.
Installation dimensions variable. Sculpture: 20.1 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm. (8 ¼ x 18 x 18 in).

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 Ω♠

Sold for £49,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London