Wim Delvoye - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 16, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Bébert, Rotterdam

  • Exhibited

    Geneva, Halle Sud, Haut Pays-Bas, 1989-90

  • Catalogue Essay

    The artistic output of conceptual Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is wide ranging and richly layered. He gained notoriety in 1992 when he displayed his elaborately sculpted faeces on ornate tiles at Documenta in Kassel. Delvoye has continually pushed the boundaries of what is permissible, blurring the parameters between art and life. The present lot, a site specific installation comprised of a wall drawing of a basketball hoop backboard and a stained glass basketball net, is an early work in which Delvoye combines his love of sculpture and craft, his subversive sense of humour and his desire to create an oeuvre which poignantly comments on our contemporary society.     
    'The art of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is notable for the irony and humour with which it subverts popular and common objects. The work of this critic of modern consumerism has often been compared to that of a sixteen-century compatriot, Bruegel, who filled his paintings with incongruous associations bearing the stamp of folklore and the burlesque. Delvoye thus belongs in a specifically Belgian artistic tradition of combining humour, absurdity and incongruity, one that stretches from bambochades to Marcel Broodthaers. But Delvoye's influences are not limited to this culture of carnivalesque laughter, for he has also been inspired by the decorative features of the Gothic architecture found in abundance in his homeland, and uses rose windows, ogive arches and blazons to decorate the everyday objects that he appropriates from our consumer society, such as diggers, concrete mixers, trucks and ironing boards.' (K. Tuszynski, Of Mice And Men, X Rays, Galerie Guy Bärtschi, Geneva, 2008) 

36

Basket

1989
Stained glass, Basketball hoop rim and site specific wall drawing.
120.5 x 184 x 63.5 cm. (47 ½ x 72 3/8 x 25 in).
This work is accompanied by installation instructions and a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 ‡♠

Sold for £39,650

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

17 Oct 2009
London