Provenance
Private Collection
Catalogue Essay
‘Is it a painting or is it a photograph? Technically it’s a photograph. It’s a photograph because it’s photographic paper. But obviously I think about them as paintings, because they refer to the history of painting right? I also have to think about them as sculptures, because every part of the process is part of the project. They’re sculptures because they play on the idea of what should be hanging in a gallery. In that sense they’re also kind of ready-mades.’ (Cory Arcangel quoted in an interview by Mary Heilmann www.interviewmagazine.com/art/cory-arcangel/ accessed 09/09/2015)

Cory Arcangel’s computer-generated works explore the infiltration of digital technology in popular culture and challenge the viewer’s preconceptions on its position within the hierarchy spectrum where art dominates the highest status. Creating his Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations series using Photoshop, Arcangel prints his iridescent colour-field works on a scale that emulates Abstract Expressionist paintings by Barnet Newman or Mark Rothko. With canonical art history in mind, Arcangel plays upon nostalgia in an age of perpetual technological regeneration. Though each work Arcangel creates is unique, by offering the Photoshop specifications and mouse positions necessary to create the work as the title, the Gradients become a digital ready-made.

Cory Arcangel

Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Russell's Rainbow" (turn transparency off), mousedown y=25300 x=17600, mouse up y=4300 x=17600

2009
c-print face mounted to Diasec, in artists frame
sheet 278.2 x 182 cm (109 1/2 x 71 5/8 in.)
framed 287 x 190.5 cm (112 7/8 x 75 in.)

Estimate
£120,000 - 180,000

Sold for £158,500

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

London 14 October 2015 7pm