Markus Brunetti - Photographs London Friday, May 19, 2023 | Phillips

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  • ‘‘Sacred buildings represent the culture of the time in which they were built, which is what fascinates me about the façades of European churches.’’
    —Markus Brunetti

    German artist Markus Brunetti (b.1965) pushes boundaries of photographic scale, detail and precision in his approach to documenting architecture. Since 2005, Brunetti has travelled across Europe with his partner, Betty Schöner, living and working in their ‘expedition truck’ (a mobile computer lab), carefully recording religious landmarks for his series FACADES. His meticulous image-making process involves photographing the façade one square metre at a time from a fixed point then over a period of weeks to even years, reconstructing it digitally by stitching up to 2,000 images together and removing all signs of modern life. ‘When capturing, I deconstruct the facades to the smallest unit’ explains Brunetti, ‘and when mounting the large images on our computer screens, we put these small details back into the big picture.’ The resulting image is a monumental, intricately detailed view with a flattened perspective like that of an architectural drawing as seen in the present work. His mesmerising depiction of Paris’s iconic Cathédrale Notre-Dame, one of the most recognisable buildings in the world, makes this an outstanding example. Given the horrific fire that tore through the Parisian landmark in 2019, Brunetti’s immortalisation of it before the fact renders this image even more poignant. The artist’s works, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City and the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle. 

     

     

    Exhibition install of FACADES at Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle, 2016.
    • Provenance

      Directly from the artist, 2015

    • Exhibited

      Markus Brunetti / FACADES: Cathedrals, Churches, Monasteries in Europe, Museum of Applied Arts Cologne, 20 August - 14 December 2014, another
      Markus Brunetti, FACADES, Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle, 19 June - 16 October 2016, another
      FACADES: Photographs by Markus Brunetti, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, 2 September - 31 December 2016, another

ULTIMATE

19

Paris, Cathédrale Notre-Dame from FACADES

2006-2015
Archival pigment print, mounted.
Image: 168 x 138 cm (66 1/8 x 54 3/8 in.)
Frame: 183.5 x 153.5 cm (72 1/4 x 60 3/8 in.)

Signed, titled, dated and numbered 2/9 in pencil on an artist label affixed to the reverse of the mount.

This work is number 2 from the sold-out edition of 9 + 2 APs. This image is sold out in all sizes and editions.

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, NORWAY

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 ‡♠

Sold for £48,260

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Photographs

London Auction 19 May 2023