PHILLIPS de PURY & COMPANY ANNOUNCES HIGHLIGHTS FROM ITS FEBRUARY CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTIONS

Dal Thursday 16 February 2012
al Friday 17 February 2012

PHILLIPS de PURY & COMPANY ANNOUNCES HIGHLIGHTS FROM ITS FEBRUARY CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTIONS
FEATURING LUCIO FONTANA, ROBERT INDIANA, RUDOLF STINGEL, ANDREAS GURSKY, DAMIEN HIRST, MARC QUINN, ANDY WARHOL, THOMAS SCHÜTTE, AHMED ALSOUDANI
EVENING AUCTION: 16 FEBRUARY, 2012 7 PM
DAY AUCTION: 17 FEBRUARY, 2012 2PM
HIGHLIGHTS ON VIEW: 1 – 6 FEBRUARY, PHILLIPS de PURY & COMPANY, 45-47 BROOK STREET AT CLARIDGE’S
VIEWING: 8 -17 FEBRUARY HOWICK PLACE
AUCTION LOCATION: Phillips de Pury & Company, Howick Place, London,SW1P 1BB

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

London - Phillips de Pury & Company is pleased to announce the highlights from its London Contemporary Art auctions. The Evening auction will feature 27 lots with a low estimate of £5,985,000/$9,377,291 and a high estimate of £8,910,000/$13,960,178. The Day auction will comprise of 194 lots with a low estimate of £3,467,000/$5,432,092 and a high estimate of £4,928,500/$7,7219,68.

“Our Contemporary Art Evening sale offers a broad and diverse range of works that will appeal to the young and established collector alike. We are pleased to continue our tradition of offering the most exciting young Contemporary talent alongside the regular established artists in this field.” Peter Sumner, Head of Contemporary Sales, London.

“This season’s Contemporary Art Day Sale showcases a great selection of today’s top emerging contemporary artists alongside some of the most established names in post war and contemporary art. Highlights from this sale includes works by today’s most sought after artists such as Tauba Auerbach, Gedi Sibony, Martin Boyce, Seth Price, Ugo Rondinone, Sterling Ruby and David Noonan alongside recognized masters Gilbert & George, Thomas Struth, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke Sol Lewitt, Bridget Riley and Alex Katz. Overall this auction is a well curated and great cross-section of Post War and Contemporary art. ” George O’ Dell, Head of Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.

CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING SALE

Highlights of the Contemporary Art Evening auction include:
Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese estimated at £1,000,000-£1,500,000. Concetto Spaziale, Attese, executed in 1960, is an important work in the oeuvre of Lucio Fontana that was an undeniable highlight in Andy Warhol’s collection until his death in 1987. It is an outstanding example of the work to come out of theSpazialismo (Spatialism) movement, founded by the artist in 1947. Six carefully premeditated cuts run across the thinly painted monochromic canvas, emphasising the physicality of this work. It is charged with energy of the physical act of the artist slashing the surface with a knife. This physical act or gesture became the central idea of Spatialism, to the extent that it figured in the movement’s ‘First Spatial Manifesto. Through the use of gesture, Fontana was in fact one of the first artists to perceive art as a performance. This constituted a significant challenge to traditional Western painting.

Robert Indiana, LOVE, estimated at £800,000-£1,200,000. Commonly associated with the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana is considered to be one of the most prominent and influential Pop artists to have emerged in America in the 1960s. His work has always been conceptually distinctive. While his contemporaries were concerned with the mass-media, pop-culture and its icons, Indiana’s work has been more personal, dealing with subjects of American nationhood, American life and cultural identity. The present lot is one of Indiana’s most important works. It was conceived in 1966 and executed in 1999. While Indiana uses his LOVE motif in a variety of materials, sizes, arrangements and configurations, the LOVE sculpture, in particular, is a seminal work. The current lot is a particularly important example, as its hard-edged, stencil like lines are rendered in the classic original Indiana colours – these reference the influence of his friend and contemporary Ellsworth Kelly but also stemming from his childhood memories.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, estimated at £450,000-£650,000. Rudolf Stingel’s wallpaper paintings are, on first appearance, pure aesthetic pleasure. Luxurious gold and baroque elegance oozes from the pattern, drawing us in with arresting awe. A gilded artifice, the canvas is like a window to a bygone era of decadence: at once a static wall, on second look a dynamic surface with myriad reflections and inflections. Through the appropriation of an original damask pattern, gold enamel has been applied to the monochrome canvas. Its subsequent removal has left its deep residue and varying trace upon the surface. What might once have been a Minimalist monochrome painting has been transformed into a layered baroque composition with all the imperfections brought about by chance. Stingel toys with our expectations of not only ‘painting’ and ‘paint’ but also of the role of the ‘painter’ as well – the artist maintains his autonomy in the process of creation.

Andreas Gursky, Jumeirah Palm, estimated at £400,000-£600,000. Jumeirah Palm, is an important example of Andreas Gursky’s recent body of work focusing on large-scale building projects in the Middle East. It epitomises Gursky’s fundamental theme – the documentation of the various structures and arenas which we as human beings have shaped for ourselves to live within and amongst.Jumeirah Palm is an aerial photograph of an artificial peninsula extending into the Persian Gulf off the coast of Dubai. The peninsula, begun in 2001, is constructed in the shape of a palm tree and covers an area of 5 kms square. It is ranked as one of the most ambitious engineering projects of our time and has been dubbed the eighth wonder of the world. Gursky’s lens captures a detail of the protruding landmasses which constitute the branches of the palm tree. It is a carefully constructed composition, as with all Gursky’s images, to the extent that he has utilized methods of manipulating the various elements. Viewed from afar, the image becomes an abstract pattern, and the onlooker loses all sense of subject matter and perspective. Gursky has challenged photography’s inherent representational traditions throughout his career and has taken them to the very limits.

Damien Hirst, Sensation, estimated at £350,000-£450,000. Damien Hirst has continually pushed the boundaries of art and science in his exploration of humanity. While Hirst’s paintings seemingly appropriate life through the representation of death or medicine, his sculptures often dwell on the harmony and integrity of human and animal anatomy, exploring the simplicity of its mechanics and the complexity of its perpetuation. Sensation, executed in 2003, is a powerful combination of these paradoxical concerns. The present lot is an oversized painted bronze sculpture based on an academic anatomical model, of the type most likely to be found in a school science laboratory. It depicts a cross-section of a chunk of human flesh, revealing the labyrinthine hidden workings of the body’s largest organ – the skin.

Damien Hirst’s Bronze Wretched War, executed in 2004 will also be offered with an estimate of £200,000 -£300,000. The original male counterpart to Wretched War, Hymn, created in 1999–2000, featured a 20-foot anatomical model in painted bronze. Towering over us, akin to a bewildering religious monument, the sculpture raised powerful questions on our reliance on both science and religion. As Western secular society turns more and more to a reliance on science in lieu of our past faith in religion, Hirst questions our innate dependency on external solace and meaning. A later development in the anatomical series, Wretched War again appropriates the anatomical model now in unpainted bronze, onto its equivalent: a pregnant, decapitated female. The ‘her’ to the artist’s Hymn, Wretched Warmimics the ballet pose of Degas’ Little Dancer, alluding to a teenage pregnancy. The sacred image of mother and child appears like a victim of battle, the body scarred and flayed. Yet the striding pose appears strong and solid, the echoes of Degas overlaying an elegance and beauty which triumph frailty and decay.Wretched War reminds us that science alone cannot convey the overwhelming emotion and beauty of the human body, in all its wretched glory.

Marc Quinn, the Golden Column (Microcosmos), estimated at £300,000-£500,000. Marc Quinn is primarily a figurative artist, concerned with our relationship with the body and our concepts of beauty. Quinn questions the conditioning of our idealisation of the human form, be it through Greek notions of beauty or the celebrity pages of Hello! magazine. As such, The Golden Column (Microcosmos) is a stunning example of the artist’s oeuvre, a reflection on today’s obsession with perceptions of beauty and the futility of our incessant quest for the archetypal body.

Since 2006, Quinn has studied and taken measurements of the British supermodel Kate Moss, resulting in a series of works around the ancient notions of the Sphinx and Siren – the image of the alluring and treacherous female. Portrayed in alternating unreal yoga poses, Moss appears as a timeless statue: a high definition, lustrous deity of the modern age. Throughout the series, her image is often contorted or multiplied, the female body stretched beyond comfort yet her face remaining stoic and calm. The viewer is given license to view the model at every angle: what was once a subtle sculptural representation of female beauty is now a bendable, hyperreal and super-glossy version for the twenty-first century.

Andy Warhol, Mao, estimated at £300,000-£500,000. As two of the biggest cultural icons of the 20th century, Andy Warhol and Chairman Mao were a match made in heaven. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the communist leader’s official portrait was reproduced across an estimated 2.2 billion Little Red Books, making it the most disseminated image in history. So it came as no surprise that Warhol, the great chronicler of popular culture, executed a series of candy coloured, Abstract Expressionist inspired portraits in the early 1970s of the authoritarian ruler.

As his first foray into the international political arena, the Mao paintings constitute in Warhol’s oeuvre a departure from his previous highly repetitive silkscreened works of celebrities and everyday objects. Each Mao canvas is significantly individual in that it includes swathes of hand-painted colour applied in abstractexpressionist style brushstrokes. These energetic expressions which nearly conceal Mao’s face have been interpreted by critics and historians as a veiled subversion of a regime which outlawed creativity and self expression. Although Warhol never stated his political views, his Maos directly reference McCarthyism’s post-war use of the Abstract Expressionist movement as a demonstration of American democratic freedom in contrast to totalitariancommunist rule.

Thomas Schutte, Gelber Hund, estimated at £250,000-£350,000. Thomas Schütte trained under Gerhard Richter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, graduating in 1981. Since then, the artist’s diverse body of work, which consistently delivers his particular vision of history’s influence on the contemporary, has been received with ever wider acclaim. Gelber Hund is one of a number of works in which Schütte has revisited his time spent living in Rome in 1992, drawing inspiration from the city’s rich artistic tradition. This potent conceptual work dwells on historical allegory; the dog’s flipper-like tail and Sphinx-like posture pay homage to the mythical creatures which adorn classical and Renaissance sculpture. The ancient Greek Sphinx, later revived in Renaissance sculptural imagery, was not only a symbolic guardian figure but one that could be merciless too. This historical premise has been reconfigured in Schütte’s Gelber Hund. At first, the sculpture suggests a child’s toy with its innocent expression and inviting yellow colour. On closer inspection, brutal disfigurement becomes evident – blood appears to drip down the body suggesting that this creature might have been a victim of human cruelty.

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, estimated at £200,000-£300,000 and violence depict human suffering and the universal experience of conflict. A native of Iraq who gained political asylum in the United States, Alsoudani witnessed the recent invasion of his country from the perspective of an outsider. Watching Baghdad, his city of birth, being bombed and torn to the ground prompted Alsoudani to make war the subject of his art-not a specific war but all wars with their death, destruction, dislocation and despair. As a result, his powerful, dynamic, large-scale canvases relay a narrative filled with deformed figures, some almost indistinguishable and verging on the bestial which intertwine and distort in surreal landscapes.

The present Untitled work from 2007 is a strong early canvas executed shortly after Alsoudani’s graduation with honours from the highly prestigious Yale School of Art. Prior to Yale, while attending the Maine College of Art, Alsoudani mainly drew and his accomplished training as a draughtsman is clearly visible in the present lot. As an important transition work, Untitled displays use of an Ingres-like line to delineate forms while also incorporating rich, saturated colour to create dynamic movement in a manner reminiscent of Delacroix. Exposing Alsoudani’s richly layered working process, Untitled is unique within the artist’s body of work as it retains the powerful immediacy of a sketch while its majestic scale affirms it as an undeniable masterpiece of his oeuvre and within the long canon of war paintings.

CONTEMPORARY ART DAY SALE

Highlights of the Contemporary Day auction include:

Tauba Auerbach Ampersand (Triptych), 2004, estimated at £8,000–£12,000;Martin Boyce Untitled, 2007 , estimated at £8,000–£12,000; Alex Katz Winter Night, 2002, estimated at £120,000–£180,000; Bridget Riley Scale Study for Painting, 1972, estimated at £18,000–£25,000; Gedi Sibony, Descending the Star, 2006, estimated at £10,000-£15,000; Sterling Ruby, Ceramic (Yellow/Red/Facial), 2006, estimated at £20,000-£30,000.

Contacts:
London
Giulia Costantini
Worldwide Head of Communications
gcostantini@phillipsdepury.com
+ 44 20 7318 4010
Fiona Mc Govern
Communications and Marketing
fmcgovern@phillipsdepury.com
+44 20 73184010