Tony Oursler, Tumble, 2004. Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, New York.
In addition to the works featured below, explore further sculptures by Oscar Murillo and Pauline Shaw on offer in the online auction, open for bidding through 3 October. Selected works will be on view through 3 October at 432 Park Avenue.
Tony Oursler
Hailed by The New York Times as “a sculptor of the air with video,” Tony Oursler’s works defy easy categorization. He attended CalArts in the late 1970s, studying with John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson, eventually settling in New York and turning his endlessly curious eye toward mystical and mysterious applications of new media. His conceptual works often involve the viewers as the subjects themselves, and many of his most lauded works, like 2004’s Tumble, project video onto globular, somewhat humanoid-shaped surfaces, erasing the lines between representation and reality. His so-called doll works earned renown in the 1990s, with the present work showing how he has progressed this idea over the decades. He explained, “The dolls were electronic escapees that found their way into the world.”
Alexandre Arrechea
Alexandre Arrechea, Chrysler, 2012–2013. Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, New York.
In playfully subversive works, Alexandre Arrechea takes rigid structures and shows us another way to see them. In Chrysler, we spot the familiar Art Deco crown and spire of the Chrysler Building resting atop a snake-like contortion of the skyscraper’s body that culminates with the structure curling upon itself into the base. The work comes from NO LIMITS— a larger body of work in which the artist renders iconic New York City buildings with his idea of “elastic architecture.” In 2013, ten of these elastic works were executed at a monumental scale and displayed along Park Avenue in Manhattan. A concurrent exhibition at Magnan Metz Gallery featured several smaller iterations of the works, including this very lot.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Plant, 1987. Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, New York.
The utter triviality of everyday life can cause anguish for many, but for Peter Fischli and David Weiss — who collaborated from 1979 to 2012 — it’s something to be celebrated. Together, they view the world with an amusing objectivity that translates into works across several mediums that showcase their acerbic wit and the delight they find in the mundane. In Plant, they turn this approach towards our tendency to bring the natural world indoors by rendering a houseplant in black rubber, seemingly trapped in a state of decay. The work destabilizes any distinctions between high and low art by drawing comparisons between fine art and much more common household decorations. But above all, in its absurdity and curiosity, it just makes us smile.
Damián Ortega
Damián Ortega, Supermodernismo III, 2009. Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, New York.
Curling defiantly against its own rigid concrete composition, Supermodernismo III is highly characteristic of Damián Ortega’s witty and conceptual practice. Now dividing his time between Mexico City and Berlin, Ortega is a self-taught artist who began his career as a political satire cartoonist. His works often literally deconstruct everyday objects of modernity, challenging the myth of cultural and technological progress that has defined modern life. Here, Ortega molds concrete into a ribbed cylindrical shape, reminiscent of piping used in industrial machinery or engines. But the shape has no end, seeming to flow into itself, undermining our learned understanding of how such objects function. It is this aspect of the artist’s practice that offers us new systems within which to consider the vernacular objects of the everyday, systems that don’t just offer a new way to see and think but deconstruct what we think we already know.
Wolfgang Laib
Wolfgang Laib, Milkstone, 1976. Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, New York.
It may not immediately strike your eye, but there’s actually a beverage here. In Wolfgang Laib’s Milkstone series, pooled milk rests atop slightly indented slabs of white marble that the artist grinds by hand, deceiving the eye into perceiving a flat marble surface. For Laib, a sense of physical connection to the art object is tantamount, both for himself as a maker and for those who live with his works. The milk must be refreshed regularly before it spoils, thus requiring consistent input from the work’s caretaker and highlighting ways of considering sculpture as a temporal art. Laib’s intensely devoted, meditative conceptual practice raises questions about our consumption of resources and has rightly earned him the reputation as one of the most important sculptors working today.
Liu Jianhua
Liu Jianhua, Games, 2002. Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, New York.
Through porcelain sculptures that often incorporate found objects, Liu Jianhua explores Chinese culture through its materials, emphasizing China’s role in an increasingly global culture. To Liu, porcelain is an incredibly rich material within the context of both Chinese history and his own. He began his career in the late 1970s as a worker at the Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain Sculpture Factory before attending the Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain College, where he studied sculpture in the fine arts department. In this 2002 work, Games, Liu calls to mind the past and present injustices against women and their historic relegation to domestic labor. In it, we encounter a headless female figure surrounded by flowers and placed on a beautifully decorative porcelain plate.
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