Harold Ancart - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Day Sale in Association with Poly Auction Hong Kong Thursday, December 3, 2020 | Phillips
  • "When it comes to painting, the only thing that matters is the outcome, but the outcome is also what you should never think of while you paint." —Harold Ancart

    Belgian-born Harold Ancart’s painterly abstractions rebel against the notion of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Recalling being told at art school in Brussels that ‘painting is dead, sculpture is dead, everything is dead,’ Ancart fought against pressure to produce ‘strange political, post-Conceptual work’ and decamped to the United States where he thought ‘people here would embrace things less with the brain and more with the chest’. i

     

    Ancart always begins with the drawn mark, and the sensory effects of Untitled hinge not only upon the uncanny, half-remembered dreams conjured up by the sparse, jagged composition, but also the tactile materiality of its surface. Flickering powerlines expand and contract across monolithic nightscape, fragments of distant landscapes felt rather than seen. The role of the wanderer characterises Ancart’s oeuvre: explorations through lands unseen, with liminal areas unmarked by painterly gestures that speak of a sense of yearning for elsewhere.

     

    Ancart’s work is now in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton and the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong, among others. Represented by David Zwirner, Ancart lives and works in New York.

     

    i Harold Ancart, quoted in Dodie Kazanjian, ‘How Small-Scale Paintings Became the Art World's Big New Trend’, Vogue, 29 August 2016, online.

    • Provenance

      Private Collection, Stockholm
      Ibid Gallery, London
      David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

Property from a Prominent European Collection

130

Untitled

2012
oil stick on paper, artist's frame
175 x 118.9 cm. (68 7/8 x 46 3/4 in.)
Executed in 2012.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
HK$1,200,000 - 1,800,000 
€153,000-230,000
$154,000-231,000

Contact Specialist

Danielle So
Associate Specialist, Head of Day Sale

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Day Sale in Association with Poly Auction

Hong Kong Auction 4 December 2020