John Armleder - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 16, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Art & Public, Geneva; Galerie Piltzer, Paris; Private collection, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay

    John Armleder has been a prominent figure in the art world for the last forty years working across a wide range of media from painting, sculpture and installation. The present lot, a colourful untitled canvas from 1994, is a magnificent example of the Swiss artist's acclaimed series of Pour Paintings. Started in the middle of the 1980s, this body of work sees Armleder lose himself like the Abstract Expressionists in the act of painting. With its subtle tonality of falling drips of paint, this powerful work exudes a unique painterly quality- the end result offering a mesmorizing and harmonious visual account of a physical and visceral encounter between the artist, his paints and his canvas.
    'As a consequence of the diverse experiments with quotation and repetition, with abstraction and its emptying, in the Pour Paintings Armleder on the hand departs from geometrical formalism in order, on the other hand, to take his leave far more fundamentally from the production of the picture: paint, industrial enamel, chemicals and similar substances are poured from the upper picture edge over the canvas. Between Morris Louis' sublte spillings of paint and Andy Warhol's Piss or Oxidation Paintings, these pictures formulate a painterly hybrid between luxuriant surface and paint running greasily across the canvas, between minimal compositionand process-oriented painting technique. Not only do the previously and carefully seperated paints, just as with Louis, become mixed along pouring-paths that are only roughly determined, but the heterogeneous spectrum of the paint media provokes, in addition, unpredictable chemical reactions.' (M. Engler, Everything is not enough- between chaos and five o'clock tea, in John M Armleder: not enough, Hannover, 2006, pp. 9-10)  

24

Untitled

1994
Mixed media on canvas.
190.5 x 100.5 cm. (75 x 39 1/2 in).
Signed and dated 'John Armleder 1994' on the overlap.

Estimate
£20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for £40,850

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

17 Oct 2009
London