Laure Mary-Couégnias - New Now New York Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | Phillips
  • The work of Laure Mary-Couégnias occupies a unique position at the intersection of Naïve Art, Pop Art and Surrealism. The Visitor, painted in 2021, is the first work by the artist to arrive at auction. It is a resplendent example of the artist’s ability to thrust the relationship between humans and nature to the forefront of her compositions. While highlighting the ways in which humans build and alter spaces to serve our needs in the name of comfort, the artist illuminates the link between humanity’s efforts to create social structures for leisure and its treatment of nature to create these structures.

     

    René Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938.
    René Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938, The Art Institute of Chicago. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2023 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


    “Surrealism creates metamorphosis and forces you to revise the world. There is the attraction of a rendezvous without rendezvous, of an agreement superior to the desires in a universe about which we know so little. But do we always get what we want? The embodiment of thought cannot conceive of a greater mystery and becomes a survivor of normality. I learned to preserve my sorrows and joys, sometimes indifferent, sometimes brutal, to finally express what was most authentic in me: weakness and tenderness.”
    —Laure Mary-Couégnias

    The Visitor depicts a seemingly banal living room—emerald-painted walls, with a cast of afternoon sunlight and a single black leather chair facing a brick fireplace. Central to the composition is a charging black bull, upsetting the initial impression of mundanity. Conjuring imagery of bullfights, the beast is situated opposite the lounge chair, which suggests a standoff between the two. The absurd battle in The Visitor is reminiscent of René Magritte’s Time Transfixed, a playful depiction of a train emerging from a fireplace. Both images rely on this sense of disruption to conjure an impression of confusion and enigma. While the train and chimney in Time Transfixed are seemingly related to the theme of burning, the bull and chair share the same skin.


    Mary-Couégnias notes the tension in her images as a driving theme in her surreal scenes: “the absence of a human figure in an image does not mean that there is something missing because for this image to exist, then it is necessary to have someone look at it. And so, the portrait takes life without the subject knowing themselves that they are the main character of the scene they are looking at.”  This close examination of the viewer and subject lends a profound sense of delicacy to the artist’s oeuvre. 


    i Laure Mary-Couégnias, quoted in Gwynned Vitello, “Laure Mary-Couégnias: The Allure of Twilight,” Juxtapoz, Fall 2022, online.

    • Provenance

      Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Los Angeles, Richard Heller Gallery, Laure Mary-Couégnias: Escape Lane, June 26–July 31, 2021

    • Literature

      “Escape Lane: A Conversation with Laure Mary-Couégnias,” Juxtapoz, June 29, 2021, online (illustrated)

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The Visitor

signed "Laure Mary-Couégnias" on the overlap; further signed, titled and dated "The Visitor 2021 Laure Mary-Couégnias" on the reverse
oil on canvas
43 1/2 x 63 in. (110.5 x 160 cm)
Painted in 2021.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for $33,020

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 8 March 2023