Kate Bryan
\nSpecialist, Head of Evening Sale

\n\n

+44 7391 402741
\nkbryan@phillips.com

\n\n

Olivia Thornton
\nHead of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe

\n\n

+44 20 7318 4099
\nothornton@phillips.com

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'When I create an artwork, I want the results to feel secret, almost holy and distant. I always picture the audience of my work standing in front of it […] unclear as to what it’s all about and also having a sense that what’s in the images is something from a different world that they don’t belong to, maybe from another time or perhaps somewhere where no one goes.' —Cinga Samson

\n\n

Executed in 2016 and belonging to South African artist Cinga Samson’s compelling Hliso Street series, the present work is a stunning example of the artist’s facility for surreal mystery and great narrative power. Working within a figurative tradition, the self-taught artist explores his own complex feelings around masculinity, community, spirituality, and the tensions between tradition and modernity. A tribute to his late mother, Sis Lungy, the works in the Hliso Street series are united by recurring accents of gold, ethereal floating flowers, and cut stems held by the solitary figure, his eyes either obscured, closed over, or possessing the milky opalescence that his more recent self-portraits have become recognised for. A pivotal series, the five Hliso Street paintings occupy a transitional moment in Samson’s body of work, connecting his earlier vanitas and still-life paintings with the dominant motifs of his more recent Safari Fantasy and Ivory series.

\n\n

Deftly blending the classical with the contemporary, Samson’s paintings generate a fantastic sense of supernatural fantasy. Executed in muted and yet luminous tones, Samson shrouds his canvases in a distinctive crepuscular light, endowing his figures with an enigmatic sense of self-sufficiency. Although his compositions are executed with a confident realism due, in part to the artist's tendency to work from carefully staged photographs, they nevertheless speak to a mysterious world that lies just beyond the scope of our understanding.

\n\n

Symbolism and the Supernatural

\n\n

'My work is deeply influenced by our spiritual background, superstitions, heritage, and beliefs. We don’t leave it behind. It’s still very relevant and true for us. I think that almost every African has experienced that kind of spirituality in their own family and community. I don’t know if spirituality is as much part of the everyday life anywhere else in the world, but here it is definitely part of who we are.' —Cinga SamsonIlluminated by an eerie dawn light that seems drawn out of the canvas itself, an elegantly dressed figure stands surrounded by large-headed white blooms. Delicately holding a long stem of smaller, flowered bells, the figure evokes the attitude of mourning, especially pointed when we learn of the special personal significance of the Cannas flowers that his mother used to plant around their house. Standing with his back to the glowing body of water, he seems lost in reverie, a private moment of remembrance and memorialisation, his closed eyes suggesting communion with forces unseen. In its sensitive attention to the fragility and vulnerability of the body Hlios Steet IV finds art-historical precedent in late 19th century Symbolism, Pablo Picasso’s early works and the stunningly beautiful self-portraits of Egon Schiele. However, where Schiele’s figures stare, confrontationally out at us, Samson’s protagonists refuse our gaze, his paintings ‘refining an aesthetic sensibility that extols his identity as a young African, but also deliberately withholds something from the viewer.’ⁱ

\n\n

\"Egon — Egon Schiele, *Selbstbildnis mit Lampionfrüchten(Self-Portrait with Physalis)*, 1912, Leopold Museum, Vienna. Photo © Fine Art Images / Bridgeman Images

\n\n

While Samson has is highly articulate on the deep influence of western artists on his work, what ultimately drives his practice is a deep connection to his heritage and community. As the artist explains: ‘My inspiration streams out of my youth and my desires. It also comes from my very spiritual background. I use everything around me: the source of my desires and aspirations, my relatives, my nature, my background… I dig inspiration from who I am; I am a young African male.’

\n\n

Addressing themes of youth, masculinity, and spirituality against a backdrop of post-colonial South Africa, Samson explores the complexities of community and masculinity on his own terms.

\n\n

Cinga Samson discusses the exploration of masculinity in his paintings

\n\n

Collector’s Digest

\n\n

• Phillips New York set the record price for a work by Cinga Samson with Two piece 1, which also marked the artist's Evening Sale debut in June 2021.

\n\n

• Having shown regularly in Cape Town galleries over the past decade, Samson's work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe in recent years, proving him to be a vital emerging figure in contemporary painting.

\n\n

\n• Following regular solo exhibitions at blank projects, Samson’s American debut came in 2020 with a much-anticipated solo show at Perrotin Gallery, New York. He has also participated in several group shows, including Mapping Black Identities at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2019.

\n\n

• Announcing global representation of Samson earlier this year, White Cube will present a solo exhibition of of his work in 2022.

\n\n

ⁱ Meara Sharma, ‘An Artist Who doesn’t want to Feed Western Fantasies about Africa’, New York Times, 21 February 2020, online

\n\n

ⁱⁱ Cinga Samson, quoted in “Discussion with Cinga Samson,” Perrotin, December 2018

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Admission to this sale is by ticket only.

\n\n

Please email tickets@phillips.com

\n\n

Please be aware due to restricted capacity tickets are limited

\n\n

Viewing

\n\n

6-15 October 2021

\n\n

10am-6pm

\n\n

Accepting Consignments until 10 September 2021>

\n\n

Exhibition Info

\n\n

This autumn across New York, Paris and Zurich we present highlights from our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening & Day Sales in London.

\n\n

New York

\n\n

8-12 September

\n\n

Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm

\n\n

Sunday 12pm-6pm

\n\n

ClientServicesNewYork@phillips.com

\n\n

+1 212 940 1200

\n\n

Paris

\n\n

8-15 September, 10am-6pm

\n\n

weekend by appointment

\n\n

infoparis@phillips.com

\n\n

+33 1 53 71 77 87

\n\n

Zurich

\n\n

17-24 September, 10am-6pm

\n\n

Patricia Kurath

\n\n

zurich@phillips.com

\n\n

+41 44 300 30 30

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Photo by Thai Hibbert, Thomas De Cruz Media. @thaimatic for @thomasdecruzmedia

\n\n

Between six albums and an acting career, his CV speaks for itself. In partnership with Phillips, East London's very own Kano turns his attention to new experiences in art. Ahead of the 15 October auction in London, we discuss his chosen picks from the collection, along with how he stays inspired and what it means for artists to communicate across mediums.

\n\n

PHILLIPS: Thinking of your overall practice as an artist, how does your creative process unfold? Are there any particular places you find inspiration?

\n\n

KANO: With me, when it comes to, say, writing lyrics, my inspirations are drawn from personal experiences, whether they’re positive or negative — things I’ve gone through, my upbringing, the city I’m from. Those are the general themes that come across in most of my work. London features quite heavily. It always rises to the surface whenever I’m writing material. But overall, it’s that theme of day-to-day life that ends up in my music.

\n\n

P: Do those ideas come up throughout the day, or do you prefer to sit down and concentrate on one thing at a time? How does it all piece together for you?

\n\n

K: There will be moments throughout the day when I think of a line or an idea, but generally those experiences get absorbed and stored until I’m sitting down at home and writing, and then they come to the surface again. Creating music is a collaborative experience — I’ll be in the studio with different musicians and producers and we’ll build an instrumental track, but writing lyrics is quite a solitary experience for me. I normally take that music home and stay up late to pen all my thoughts. At times a line will pop up and I’ll work with that, but overall it’s an individual process. Music is performed in front of thousands, but often created in a room of one.

\n\n

When I’m not in the process of creating material, I often don’t think about it at all. But when I’m in the mindset of making an album, I can’t think about anything else. I think about it all day in the studio, then more on the way home. Then it’s hard to sleep at night. Sometimes I’ll be struggling with a piece or a few lines that I can’t quite get, and I’ll go to bed without finishing them and wake up with the missing words, so even then, it feels like I never stopped thinking about it.

\n\n

P: Was there a moment for you when you knew for certain you were an artist?

\n\n

K: I was probably an artist before I knew I was. I was writing lyrics and making music around 13 or 14, but giving yourself the title of ‘artist’ feels like a jump in confidence. I was still in school, doing graphic design and other creative things, but I was still making music at home. It wasn’t until I started getting into pirate radio and performing at raves that I started feeling that confidence and acceptance from people outside my immediate area. That’s when I thought, alright, I’m an artist now. From that moment on it’s all I’ve wanted to do. I started producing my first studio album at quite a young age, which was an exciting experience. And then to follow that process with touring, traveling around the country, then outside the country doing support gigs was a mad experience for me as a young person, and to experience that with my mates was something else. It’s all something I really, really loved.

\n\n

\n\n

Serge Attukwei Clottey, Fashion icons, 2020-2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

\n\n

P: You've selected a number of artworks from the upcoming Philips Contemporary Art auction. What drew you to those works?

\n\n

K: I was drawn to them for various reasons. For some it was the striking quality of their colors, for others I was interested in the techniques of the artists. But it was also about getting to know their backgrounds that drew me even closer — hearing the artists’ stories and how they represent where they’re from, or use their art to talk about issues close to them. Today was my first time seeing these works in person and really getting to get a sense of things like color and texture, depth and scale. On a phone everything’s the same size, but getting to see them up close gave me a whole new perspective with them.

\n\n

P: Are there any background stories in this collection that stand out for you?

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K: I’ve selected a piece by an artist named Aboudia from the Ivory Coast. The way he goes about his work is very inspired by the street, which is something I can clearly identify with. He takes inspiration from graffiti and materials you might find on the streets and then repurposes them in his work. It’s little things like that that I can identify with: taking something that’s used and finding a new use for it. To me that sounds like sampling in music. We take an old record and flip it in a different way. Sampling changes things so you’ve never seen it in this new light; you’ve never heard it in this way. That relationship really connects me to a piece of work.

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I think my favorite is the Titus Kaphar piece. Before today I’d only seen it in 2D, so to experience it up close and move around it and feel the depth of the work was very cool. I’ve also come to understand more about his work and how he approaches things; the way he paints historical images and puts a Black face where it wasn’t before, yet manages to make it feel like it’s always belonged there is both powerful and inspirational for me. I’m glad there are contemporary artists out there who are really using their voices and creativity to say something meaningful. The works I’ve selected follow that idea in that the pieces seem at first to be one thing, one aspect, and then they say a bit more and make you question something. It jumps from the surface of the pieces. I’ll leave here and I'll be thinking about the same thing.

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Titus Kaphar, Holy Absence II, 2014. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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P: You've been to Philips a few times. What was it like coming for the first time, and how did you feel in the galleries?

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K: Coming here for the first time was great, because at first I was on the outside looking in, literally — I wasn’t sure if you could just walk into the gallery! But knowing then that anyone could come in and see the exhibitions was great. During my first visit I came across an amazing piece by Wonder Buhle Mbambo, and when I left I looked him up on Instagram and chatted with him about his work. It’s that process of discovery that’s a continuous thing. Art is a world I’ve always respected but knew little about, so coming to Phillips and learning about the contemporary art scene and these artists has been a great experience.

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P: Here’s a trade secret: If you see people drinking wine behind a large glass window, you can just walk in.

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K: I saw a big guy in a suit at the door and thought, is it a guest list thing? I walked in and it was all good.

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Photo by Thai Hibbert, Thomas De Cruz Media. @thaimatic for @thomasdecruzmedia

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P: Thinking about the whole project, what was it that excited you about this partnership?

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K: For me it was about discovering a new world, and as an artist, being able to learn about art in a different medium that creates new connections. Being able to showcase work like that is amazing. Where I come from, not a lot of people get to do that, or even think contemporary art is accessible, but it is, and it can be. It doesn’t mean you have to own it, but you can enjoy it, and that’s what I wanted to show through this process.

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P: Do you collect art or anything else? What does collecting mean to you?

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K: When I was young, my brother and I used to collect garage records. I don’t know where they went, but I wish I had them now. In terms of collecting art, I actually have a few pieces made by a family member — he'd never sold art before, but I saw his work and I wanted a piece, so I got it framed and up on the wall. To him it was this moment of someone else wanting to hang up his work, and that solidified the fact for him that he’s an artist. It gives that kick for him to create his next piece. It’s not always about spending millions of pounds; you can always start at any level and still get to enjoy the art.

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P: Were there any moments like that for you?

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K: It was when I made my first tune and pressed it onto a one-off dubplate. A DJ from my area played it on the pirate radio and it was like yeah, this is it, I’m in it. It solidified what I was doing as an artist. It was only at the local level, but it was big to me; you never forget moments like that. They help you move on to the next stage and give you that confidence.

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P: How do you think artists of different mediums can inspire each other?

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K: They can inspire each other a lot. You see it with film and music, how visual art and sound take inspiration from each other. It might not be immediate with contemporary art, but when you see some of these pieces, it’s very inspirational. They make you think about the process and the message and all of these things that can be used by other artists to go and create their own works. It happens in reverse, too — the artist can paint with music on in the background, or they find a song that makes them feel a certain way when working, and they then create a piece through that. It’s this back and forth, this synergy that artists share around the world. Once you’re an artist, you’re one with all of that. You’re together. We get each other. We speak the same language even though we use different techniques.

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Kano is a British rapper, songwriter and actor from East Ham, London. A significant contributor to UK music, Kano is widely considered one of the pioneers of grime music and culture. Launching in 2004 with his debut single "P's and Q’s" which was an underground hit, Kano has since gone on to release six studio albums. Made in the Manor (2016) was considered one of the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Mercury Prize and won Best Album at the 2016 MOBO Awards. Most recently, Kano’s album Hoodies All Summer (2019) was acclaimed by music critics across the board, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Mercury Prize. Alongside his music, Kano is known for his acting, most notably playing the role of Sully in Top Boy.

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\n","publishDate","2021-10-04T18:13:54.000000Z","authorCredit","Arian Murati","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY","articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/84822362/speaking-the-language-of-art-in-discussion-with-kano","auctionEditorialID",1366,"editorialID",3665,"flocklerID",84822362,{"_1634":1658,"_1636":295,"_1637":1659,"_508":1660,"_1640":1661,"_1642":1662,"_1644":1645,"_1646":1647,"_1648":468,"_1649":1663,"_461":293,"_1651":1664,"_1653":1665,"_1655":1666},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/marlene-dumas-believer-painting-sale-phillips-af091606-c633-4974-9a31-777f8074113c_s600x0.jpg","Dominic van den Boogerd looks beyond the gaze of Dumas' enigmatic portrait to uncover the cultural legacies that inspired it. ","You've Got to Have Faith: Marlene Dumas' Believer ","

Marlene Dumas, The Believer, 2005. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Written by Dominic van den Boogerd

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The present work shows a portrait of a bearded man in close‐up. Who he is, we do not know. The title of the painting identifies him as the ‘believer’. We look at him; he does not look at us. With a somewhat tiresome gaze he stares right over our heads into an unknown distance. It is hard to make out what’s on his mind. All we know is that he believes. His faith lends his appearance a spark of dignity.

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The Believer (2005), was included in Marlene Dumas’ solo exhibition Man Kind at the Paul Andriesse Gallery in Amsterdam in 2006. The show marks a key moment in the career of the celebrated South African artist who lives and works in the Netherlands. Although her work was never really about portraiture in the conventional sense of the word (she often refers to her painted portraits simply as ‘heads’), this small but coherent group of paintings and watercolors examines how portraiture in the wake of 9/11 lost its innocence. The works reflect the spirit of the dawn of the third millennium, when feelings of anxiety and insecurity, suspicion and islamophobia became widespread. Something changed in the way different ethnic communities looked at one another. As the President George W. Bush stated when he declared war on terror: you are either with us, or against us. The optimistic days of The Family of Man — Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern art celebrating global solidarity — were gone.

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The paintings of young men in the Man Kind series are all based on photographs. Some are inspired by reproductions of Palestinian posters intended to honor the memory of suicide bombers and other martyrs in the Middle East. Others refer to Moroccan boys claiming the streets of Amsterdam, gaining a public visibility their fathers — the first generation of labor immigrants in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s — never had. Looking at these faces, it is hard to tell friend from foe. They add up to a confusing company of mistaken identities and misleading stereotypes — a look‐alike is included.

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Dumas explores how the framing of such photographs in the media has led to certain interpretations, judgements and expectations. Almost overnight, the typical image of the bearded Muslim became the new face of the enemy, the next personification of evil. In The Believer and other paintings from the Man Kind series, Dumas counters the subliminal suspicion that every bearded man of North African descent is a potential terrorist, a notion widely spread at the time.

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In this respect, The Believer may well be likened to The Neighbor, 2005, a painting of similar format and from the same year that is now a highlight in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The portrait shows an ordinary looking young man with a short flaxen beard ‐ he could well be the guy next door. This neighbor however has been identified as Mohammed Bouyeri, known in the press as ‘Mohammed B.’, the man arrested and convicted for the murder of Dutch filmmaker and journalist Theo van Gogh, whom he had stabbed to death with a knife on November 2, 2004. The brutal assassination was inspired by fundamentalist religious beliefs. It caused great social turmoil within the Netherlands — heightening feelings of fear and anti‐immigrant sentiments. Considering the person depicted by Dumas in The Neighbor, nothing in his gentle and calm expression indicates that we are standing face to face with a terrorist.

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Like all men in the Man Kind series, the person depicted in The Believer is based on a photograph, though the exact source remains unknown. Reincarnated on canvas, the bearded man is ripped from his original context, bereft of his name, his nationality and other indicators that constitute his identity. He is now identified by his belief only — as were many prisoners during the war on terror. The rudimentary composition of the portrait resembles the granular mug shots typical of the time. What to make of him? His face seems to light up in the dark. Subtle tones of pink, blue, yellow, and green shimmer through his pale skin. Some features are marked in thin sketchy lines and short brushstrokes applied with great sensitivity, whereas the unspecified background is rendered in bold and semi‐transparent swipes of dark green and warm brown. The effect is an extraordinary equilibrium between fragility and monumentality. No matter how vulnerable and harmless he may look (note the dark rings around his eyes, the white of the eyeballs), he nonetheless seems to be unreachable, untouchable, as if shielded and protected by his beliefs.

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Respect! Forms of Community: Contemporary Art from The Netherlands, Musée Dar Si Saïd, Palais el-Badi, Marrakesh, Morocco, 2005. Photo: Gertjan Kocken

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The exhibition history of the painting shines a light on the many possible readings of this extraordinary portrait. The first group show in which The Believer was included was held in Marrakech, to celebrate 400 years of relationships between the Netherlands and Morocco. The exhibition reflected upon the heated debate on the failures and accomplishments of Dutch multicultural society via the work of Dutch artists like Erik van Lieshout, Rachid Ben Ali, Fiona Tan and others. A series of fifteen watercolors by Marlene Dumas was presented (Young Men, 2002‐2005) next to The Believer. With this room, the organizers aimed to underline the potential of painting to subvert presumptuous perceptions, adding a sociological twist to the meaning of the work.

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Two years later, The Believer was included in a group exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum, where its presence amid contemporary works by Mike Kelley, Wilhem Sasnal, and others highlighted the topicality of the work and its critical stance towards political controversies surrounding its subject. In 2008, the artist selected the painting for her acclaimed retrospective exhibition Measuring Your Own Grave, organized by two prestigious museums in the United States, placing it firmly in the ranks of her most striking works. In more recent years, the picture was included in a small but beautiful thematic exhibition in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague, dedicated to artistic takes on religious belief and superstition, including paintings by modern masters such as Odilon Redon, Piet Mondrian, and James Ensor. Within this context, The Believer found himself embedded in a pictorial tradition that seeks to give visual expression to spiritual powers that make earthly existence more profound.

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Of course, there is no right or wrong in this multitude of sociological, political, and religious interpretations. Nowadays, Dumas has stated, an image can mean "whatever." As Richard Shiff astutely observed in his catalog essay for the retrospective exhibition in America, "She [Dumas] knows that the viewer of an image brings his or her cultural indoctrination and personal history to bear on the reception of meaning, that differing cultures and histories generate a conflict of interpretations, that competing ideological structures lead individuals deep into moral confusion." In Shiff’s analysis, the words of the artist herself resonate: "When I paint ‘a terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter’ (the description depends on your point of view), my painting does not clarify politics or explain a cause. I paint my anxiety."

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It might be the uncompromising power of belief that makes this portrait so strong — as if we are standing face to face with a holy man, a visionary capable of seeing things non‐believers cannot see. On the other hand, it might well be the sparse but superb handling of paint that lends this austere composition such a powerful presence. Whatever our doubts about representation, interpretation and identity may be, The Believer makes faith in painting credible.

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Dominic van den Boogerd is an art critic and former Director of De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Among many publications, he co‐authored the Phaidon monograph on Marlene Dumas. His collected essays on painting ‘Great Temptations’ was published by ROMA in 2018.

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\n","2021-09-30T19:29:26.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/84566282/marlene-dumas-believer-phillips-auction-painting",1369,3662,84566282,{"_1634":1668,"_1636":295,"_1637":1669,"_508":1670,"_1640":1671,"_1642":1672,"_1644":1645,"_1646":1647,"_1648":468,"_1649":1673,"_461":381,"_1651":1674,"_1653":1675,"_1655":1676},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/polke-painting-sale-phillips-auction-cb643de6-ebe5-4757-94a7-6e1f5ad025f3_s600x0.jpg","Ekow Eshun explores the deeper meaning of Sigmar Polke's work against the backdrop of post-war art and Modernism's embrace of African art. ","The Lexicon of Sigmar Polke ","

Sigmar Polke, Negerplastik, 1968. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Written by Ekow Eshun

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From its jarring title to its disparate constitutive elements, Sigmar Polke’s Negerplastik (1968), is a work of ambiguous meaning. The painting depicts an African figurine, its carved facial features half hidden in shadow. Behind it is a kitsch yellow backdrop patterned with woodland creatures such as bunnies, fawns and bear cubs wearing bows. To the right a strip of medical tape is marked with squiggled lines of paint. The painting gestures obliquely to notions of race and history; to the legacy of colonialism, perhaps. But what has brought Polke to this terrain? Why is he reaching towards Africa? What does he hope to find there? The prominence of the African sculpture in the picture brings to mind the “discovery” of African art by the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. The innovations and cultural borrowings sparked by Modernism’s engagement with Africa produced exhilarating works like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). But even as European artists thrilled at their encounter with l’art negre, their view of African culture itself remained rooted in colonial stereotypes of the dark continent. For Picasso, African masks and figures were “magic things” — objects richer in supernatural mystery than artistic virtue. As the scholar Patricia Leighten notes, the Modernists “embraced a deeply romanticized view of African culture (conflating many cultures into one) and considered Africa the embodiment of humankind in a precivilized state.”

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Is Polke’s painting too a superficial appropriation of Africanness? And is it therefore of a piece in context with recent controversies about depictions of race in art? Open Casket (2016), the white artist Dana Shutz’s portrait of the murdered black teenager Emmet Till, drew vocal criticism when it went on show at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” wrote artist Hannah Black in response. Other artists, such as Kelley Walker, whose 2016 exhibition in St Louis featured civil rights era photographs of black people smeared with melted chocolate, have also drawn ire. Probably the closer analogy to the questions about race and representation that Negerplastik seems to raise lies with Phillip Guston’s paintings of cartoonish Ku Klux Klan figures, some of which date from the late 60s, like the Polke picture. Nervous at how the Klan images would be received by the public, a major Guston retrospective was postponed last year by the four museums planning the exhibition. But Guston did not approach his provocative subject glibly. The pictures draw their disquieting force from his frustration at the inability of abstract art to address the fraught social climate of the 1960s. Polke’s painting emerges from a similar impatience with the limitations of Modernism. Negerplastik takes its title from the book of the same name by German art critic Carl Einstein. Published in 1915, Negerplastik was the first academic work to treat African sculpture as art as opposed to ethnographic curio, laying the foundations for the study of the topic as a critical pursuit. But its shortcomings as a piece of scholarship are glaring. The text is written without corroborating footnotes or bibliography. Images of sculptures bear no identifying information on where, when or by whom they were made. And Einstein leaves unchallenged his era’s condescending view of Africans as “people of an eternal prehistory.”

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There’s a chance Polke may have used Einstein’s title ironically. Born in Germany in 1941, the artist grew up witness to how Nazi ideology had perverted German society. The experience left him with a profound antipathy to seductive narratives of order or progress. Art, he felt, was a way to fight “against the madness of facts.” Polke might have seen in Negerplastik another attempt to impose restrictive order on a culture brimming with inventiveness. But there’s also another reading of the painting I want to entertain, in which Polke’s intention is to pay oblique homage to Einstein. In 1968, the same year he made Negerplastik, Polke also produced a number of paintings satirizing the aesthetic conventions of abstraction. Those works include his masterpiece Modern Art (1968), which turns the smears and swirls of Abstract Expressionism into decorative motifs. In the year of “revolution in the air,” Polke implies that Modernism has run its course. Its capacity to startle society into new ways of seeing has been reduced to empty stylistic gestures.

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Sigmar Polke, Polke als Astronaut (Polke as Astronaut), 1968. Promised gift of a private collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne / DACS 2021 Sigmar Polke

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The latter 1960s also saw Polke work on a set of paintings for which he substituted patterned fabric for canvas. Pictures like Beans (1965), Woman at the Mirror (1966) and Polke as Astronaut (1968) feature the type of cheap printed textiles found in domestic environments. Their use evokes the archetypal interior of petit bourgeois German homes. Perhaps here Polke was registering his contempt for the veil of propriety and denial that German society had drawn down over Nazi period in the era of post-war prosperity. Negerplastik’s backdrop of yellow fabric patterned with twee woodland creatures makes it kin to this series. But the careless lines of paint drizzled on top of the medical tape also relate it to Abstract Expressionist pastiches like Modern Art. In Negerplastik the impotence of Modernism becomes all the more shaming for being set against the failure of Germany to reckon with its wartime past.

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As for Einstein, a follow-up book on African art provided the scholarly depth missing from Negerplastik and his reputation as a critic continued to grow through subsequent years. A communist sympathizer in the 1930s, his writing was animated by a fervent belief in the potential of art to help shape a better future. But with fascism’s rise in Europe, he became disenchanted by its inability to engage with society. “To make art today is basically a pretext for avoiding danger,” he wrote. In 1936, Einstein went to fight with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II his communist beliefs made him a target of the Nazi regime. Trapped in occupied Southern France in 1940 and facing capture by German troops, he chose instead to take his own life by jumping from a bridge. Given the breadth of his erudition — his personal library contained tens of thousands of volumes — Polke may well have known about the later course of Einstein’s life. In which case, we can see in Negerplastik both as a caution against complacency in art and society and a testament to a figure whose final act was performed in resistance to the forces of oppression.

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Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, overseeing the most prestigious public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the ICA, London. He is the author of Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize, and Black Gold of the Sun, nominated for the Orwell prize. His writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times and The Guardian. He is a Contributing Editor at Wallpaper magazine.

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\n","2021-09-30T19:48:24.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/84563789/the-lexicon-of-sigmar-polke",1370,3663,84563789,{"_1634":1678,"_1636":295,"_1637":1679,"_508":1680,"_1640":1681,"_1642":1682,"_1644":1645,"_1646":1647,"_1648":468,"_1649":1683,"_461":186,"_1651":1684,"_1653":1685,"_1655":1686},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/fautrier-paintings-sale-phillips-auction-d7f03b06-4899-4af9-b7b8-bde9bb673717_s600x0.jpg","Imagining some of our favorite artists in concert. ","If Artists Were Instruments ","

Jean Fautrier, I'm Falling in Love, 1957. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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The 15th of October has some notoriety in the world of music. It's the date when, in 1960, The Beatles first recorded as the Fab Four lineup with Ringo Starr on drums. Exactly five years later, Jimi Hendrix signed his first record deal. With Phillips' 15 October 20th Century & Contemporary Art auction on the horizon, we've assembled a group of artists for an impromptu jam session. The band's all here, we're tuned up and ready to go. Let's see if we can make something beautiful happen.

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Mimmo Rotella, Il Jazz, 1956. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Mimmo Rotella: Double Bass

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A master of décollage, the practice of tearing away, ripping apart, and deconstructing pieces from existing pictures, Mimmo Rotella presents an experimental approach to layering and abstract figuration with Il Jazz, a standout example of the post-war Italian artist's signature style. In the chaotic interplay between color and form, we sense a polyrhythm of primary hues and even make out the shape of a double bass to the left of the compostion. The black backdrop feels very much in line with the wide, ephemeral space of the pocket. We experience a visual guide to jazz itself.

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Jean Fautrier, I'm Falling in Love, 1957. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Jean Fautrier: Saxophone

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We can imagine Jean Fautrier's I'm Falling in Love in a purely sensual manner, as the work has a clear physicality suggesting the female form — but the musicality of the piece cannot be understated (its name belongs to a series of works titled after famous jazz tracks of the era). Imagine a scene Fautrier himself may have witnessed countless times: a dark jazz club, a spotlit saxophone player a few feet above the crowded room. Without words, without declaration, he gestures to the band in a fluid, whirling movement, parting the smoky air into a circular current, leaving it to linger there as a momentary vortex while the music continues.

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Issy Wood, Eggplant / car interior, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Issy Wood: Looping Device

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There's really only two places one can find quilted seats these days. Funeral homes, for starters. The other is the private room at a strip club. Sex and death in these contexts, though seemingly disparate, embody the kind of object-oriented discomfort that serve as references for Issy Wood's darkly humorous painting, and indeed find a perfect synthesis for a third location, the interior of a car. The work itself is quite suggestive — the position of the two seats with one a bit further back, the other angled slightly forward towards the focus of the gear shifter. The peripheral shading implies night. The scene embodies a masculine fantasy, at its heart a truly comical desire: domination and danger rolled into one. The most human of acts in a potential coffin. A machine shell, pistons and bumpers, gears and hardware churning and firing around the flesh. The radio is on. This human manipulation of a contraption finds its parallel in the looping device.

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Flora Yukhnovich, Tondo, 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Flora Yukhnovich: Cello

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To appreciate Tondo, we must first appreciate Bach. The stirring brushstrokes and depth of color in Flora Yukhnovich's painting signal a examination of Rococo in a contemporary setting of kitsch and pastiche, and in a musical context, we are immediately drawn to the atmospheric style that blends a weightless feeling with deeply saturated tonality. This combination of delicacy and heft, of dryess and submersion can only be given a voice by the cello. Consider two of most well-known cello pieces ever composed, Suite No.1 in G Major, and Air on the G String — both written by Bach, whose musical intervention was so ubiquitous that the period from his death in 1750 to the rise of the classical period of Mozart and Beethoven twenty-five years later, was a reaction to what many considered his kitchy, old-fashioned style. This reaction was called Rococo. Consider then, the common praises for Air on the G String: how light it feels, how lustrous and sublime, and for Suite No.1 in G Major: how deep, full, and expansive a sensation it brings. Interpreting the melting space between the two sounds, in a very self-aware way, we have Tondo.

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Katharina Grosse, Ohne Titel, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Katharina Grosse: Synthesizer

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Katharina Grosse's Ohne Titel is a just as much a sonic exercise as it is a visual piece. The long, jagged lines and interrupted shapes offer the viewer a choice of following a single note until its end point or taking it all in as a series of acrimonious chords, coming and going as they please and evolving through a progression. Even still, the notes blend into each other and streak across the piece like feedback from an amplifier, or better yet, modulations from a synthetizer. Like painting, synthesizing is both the act and the result. It can take on diverse elements through sequences and alter notes to the point of pure abstraction. The instrument can be as standout or as indistinguishable as it wants to be, and its ability to shapeshift sounds allows the synth to find a home in every conceivable genre. Inversely, it's no surprise that so many synth-based bands make use of bright, abstract art. Pick a quadrant of the work and find hidden an album cover: top left could be Neon Indian's Psychic Chasms, top left, Deep Cuts by The Knife; likewise bottom left might be Glasser's Ring, and bottom right Alt-J's Awesome Wave.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Gallery Tour

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Join Kate Bryan, Head of Evening Sale, on a personal tour of our London galleries ahead of our 20th Century and Contemporary Art auctions. From the dizzy heights of Sigmar Polke and Marlene Dumas to the rising stars of today, the auction preview includes a diverse mix stunning artworks.

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\n","2021-10-05T18:36:00.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/84879153/if-artists-were-instruments",1373,3667,84879153,{"_1634":1688,"_1636":295,"_1637":1689,"_508":1690,"_1640":1691,"_1642":1692,"_1644":1645,"_1646":1647,"_1648":468,"_1649":1693,"_461":253,"_1651":1694,"_1653":1695,"_1655":1696},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/max-ernst-paintings-phillips-auction-house-354c8d9f-cc13-4034-b790-1d45a37b5523_s600x0.jpg","Astrophysicist Ravit Helled examines 20th century breakthroughs in planetary science alongside contemporary works by Max Ernst. ","Max Ernst Among the Stars ","

Max Ernst, Delicate Arch (Zion National Park), 1936. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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The practice of art and the science of the cosmos combined in the surreal works of Max Ernst through his creative fascination with German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel. In 1861, Tempel discovered a planetoid and named it after Maximillian II, King of Bavaria. Ernst, in turn, would become engrossed in Tempel's unique approaches to astronomy, finding a kindred spirit in the relationship between science and the surreal; in the exploration of the limits of human perception of the universe. The stars continued to align when Ernst and director Peter Schamoni collaborated for a 1967 documentary on the life and work of Tempel, The Unlawful Practice of Astronomy, which began an artistic relationship betwen the director and the artist. Through his close friendship with Max Ernst, Peter Schamoni assembled an exceptional collection that serves as a lasting memento and retrospective of one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.

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Written by Ravit Helled

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We are part of the cosmos, but we are small and the universe is huge. It is important to open our eyes and hearts to better understand our place in the the grand picture, how insignificant, fragile and short-lived we are, how fascinating space is, and how we can be inspired by it. Perhaps astronomers and artists are not that different after all — they both aim to see beyond the visible and find a meaning to what’s around us.

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Max Ernst, Ohne Titel (les hommes ne le sauront jamais), circa 1921. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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1926: A Breakthrough

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Although the Sun is just one of billions of similar stars in our galaxy, it is special to us because it provides the energy for nearly all living things on Earth. Our Sun has shone for four and half billion years and will continue for another seven billion. Its main source of energy was a mystery until Albert Einstein showed that matter itself is pure energy and Arthur Eddington demonstrated how atoms could fuse together in stars, liberating this energy. In 1926, Eddington published calculations that revolutionized our understanding of the structure of stars and how they evolve in time. He showed that there is an intricate balance between gravity that holds stars together and nuclear energy that prevents them from collapsing. This work led to the relation between the masses of stars and their brightness, allowing astronomers to estimate their ages. This in turn led to the first limits on the age of our universe, which had to be older than the oldest stars that are 13 billion years old. The leap in our understanding of the workings of stars was a crucial milestone for astrophysics and our investigation of the cosmos.

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Max Ernst, Kachina, le chien de Peggy Guggenheim, circa 1942. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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1930: Planet X

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At the beginning of the 20th century, astronomer Percival Lowell thought that the irregular movements of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune could be due to a more distant, hypothetical planet X. In 1930, 14 years after his death, Pluto was discovered at the Lowell Observatory and officially added as the ninth planet of the Solar System. Its status as a planet lasted over seventy years, until the 2005 discovery of a larger object beyond the orbit of Neptune known as Eris, which initiated discussions on how planets in the solar system should be defined. After vivid and emotional debates culminating in a vote among professional astronomers, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced in 2006 that Pluto was no longer a planet, and classified it instead as a “dwarf planet.” One of the criteria for an object to be a planet is that it has to have cleared its planetary environment — in other words, it must be the dominant object in its orbital region. This is not the case for Pluto, which is part of the Kuiper belt, a region full of large rocky, icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit. It was only in 2015 that we had our first close-up images of Pluto’s surface, showing that it is active with a liquid ocean that could even host life.

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Max Ernst, Hawaï, 1952. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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1957-58: The Age of Exploration Begins

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1957 represents the dawn of the Space Age. That year, the Soviet space program launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, triggering the space race. The following year, the United States launched its first satellites into space, including Vanguard 1, which still orbits the Earth today. Political dimensions aside, the space race triggered important technological and scientific developments, from communication and Earth monitoring satellites to landing humans on the moon and the remote exploration of our solar system. Today there is a new space race, as many nations plan return trips to the moon and beyond. We also have private companies and the beginnings of space tourism. These breakthroughs raise their own important questions, such as who owns space? What are we capable of achieving in terms of space exploration? Will we colonize space? How are we going to be affected by these efforts? Are there limits we should not cross?

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Max Ernst, Déchets d'oeuvres, 1968. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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1969: To the Moon and Beyond

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Our planetary system is the remnant of the formation of the Sun. While today we know that planetary systems are common in the galaxy, just about two decades ago, the Solar System was the only known planetary system. Already in the late 1700s it was suggested that our planetary system was formed as a result of the collapse of a gaseous cloud. The collapse of this cloud was thought to lead to the formation of the young Sun, which was surrounded by a disk, from where the planets formed. Only in 1969 did the Russian astronomer Victor Safronov publish his theory on the “Evolution of the protoplanetary cloud and formation of the earth and the planets” in Russian. This work, which introduces key questions linked to the origin of planets, was been translated into English three years later. This theory represents the beginning of extensive research on the origin of the Solar System and planetary systems around other stars.

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Max Ernst, Portrait de Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, 1965. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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1974: A Message to the Stars

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The question of whether extraterrestrial life exists has been keeping scientists and philosophers busy well before we detected the first extra-solar planet. Only recently we have learned that small planets are common in the galaxy, suggesting that life in the universe is not a rare phenomenon, at least statistically speaking.

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In 1974, a message to space, known as the Arecibo message, was sent to the star cluster M13, near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The Arecibo message included 1,679 binary digits, and was sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The message included basic information about human race, such as the fundamental chemicals of life, the formula for DNA, and graphics of the Solar System and the Arecibo telescope. The search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the universe and Earth-like planets are ongoing, and we seem to be closer than ever to finally answer the question: “Are we alone?”

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Ravit Helled is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Institute for Computational Science, Center for Theoretical Astrophysics & Cosmology, University of Zurich. Helled’s scientific work concentrates on planet formation and evolution, planetary interiors, and extrasolar planets. She is an international expert in planetary modeling, and uniquely addressing the link between planetary formation, evolution, and internal structure, as well as linking exoplanetary studies with solar system science. Professor Helled is strongly involved in space exploration and is a key member in several ESA and NASA space missions.

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Max Ernst, Pyramid Lake, 1946. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Thibault Stockmann, International Specialist, Paris

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Pyramid Lake is a very fine example of a Surrealist landscape by one of its leading figures. To me, it bears on the one hand a very calming and peaceful quality, but on the other, it has a sense of angst and tension suggested by the dark clouds gathering over an empty landscape composed mainly of rocks and water. I find it masterfully executed with the artist’s signature techniques of decalcomania and frottage, which reveal a myriad of subtle intertwining colors.

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Wren, 2011. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Tamila Kerimova, Head of Day sale, London

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Wren strikes me as a wonderful example of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s signature intervention in the history of portraiture. Her palpable brushstrokes imbue the figure with a charismatic dynamism that asserts her distinctly contemporary approach to capturing the human condition. She uses the traditional medium of oil paint to depict fictional subjects drawn from her imagination. Wren’s typically poetic title shrouds the subject in an ambiguity heightened by the nondescript monochromatic background of the work. I am drawn to the bright white of the subject’s eye as it flashes in contrast against the darker hues of the painting, enlivening the figure, and imbuing the painting with a timeless quality. Yiadom-Boakye’s remarkable work was presented in a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Tate Britain earlier this year, asserting her virtuosic approach to contemporary portraiture.

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Sigmar Polke, Negerplastik, 1968. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Tobias Sirtl, International Specialist, Munich

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This work by Sigmar Polke is a magnificent example of his amazing sense of humor, like no other German artist ever had, in my view. His comedic visual language is sharp, observing and intelligent, but without taking itself too seriously and always pointing at his own kind. The painting is one of the last works from the early and much coveted Stoffbilder series to come to market, its vitality and subtle complexity marking it out as a truly exceptional piece. Previously on a long-term loan to the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the present work has an exceptional exhibition history, included in both the 1976 mid-career retrospective, and in the highly anticipated Alibi’s: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, in 2014.

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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Champs de Sainte-Claire, 1958. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Carolina Lanfranchi, Senior International Specialist, Milan

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I love the airy and dreamy quality of the chromatic language in this work, which at the same time maintains a strong geometric organization in its architectural elements. In the balance between these two opposite concepts, I find this work both calming and vibrant. Considered by many to be Portugal's "greatest contemporary painter," Vieira da Silva's unique approach to depicting space in her work eschews traditional devices of perspective. Instead, she dissolves positional relationships into elements of form, giving Vieira da Silva's use of perspective a hazy, ruminative quality.

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Gerhard Richter, Abstrakt 474-1, 1981. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Marianne Hoet, Senior Specialist & Deputy Chairwoman, Europe, Antwerp

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Created in 1981, Abstrakt 474-1 is an early example of Gerhard Richter’s engagement with abstraction. I am immediately pulled to the dazzling sweeps of yellow and the way the contrasting fields of icy blue exude a vitality that gives the work a visceral presence. See how the ayers of peaked impasto are laid upon the softly gradated background, evidencing the artist’s virtuosic handling of paint. The work illustrates Richter’s distinctive use of the squeegee to spread layers of paint across the canvas to create highly textured surfaces. In Abstrakt 474-1, the squeegee is used to add further textural depth to the painting, providing key accents within the dynamic energy of the composition.

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Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2015. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Clara Rivollet, International Specialist, Paris

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At the crossroad between figuration and abstraction, Etel Adnan’s intimate compositions encompass at once the sensations of memory and subjective perception. I am reminded of Nicolas de Staël by Adnan's skillfully articulated geometric shapes that exude a vital energy. Such as her own Sainte-Victoire mountain, the Mount Tamalpais, as seen from her home view in Sausalito, California, often appears in her compositions with shifting lights and weathers. In addition to her painterly practice, she is widely renowned for her writings, poems and plays in Arabic, French and English. About the different modes of expression, she has stated: “It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.”

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7

Cinga Samson

Hliso Street IV

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

Cinga Samson