Luxembourg & Dayan, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
As one of the art world’s most admired provocateurs, Rob Pruitt has walked the thin line between controversy and playfulness since the beginning of his career in the early 1990s to create beguiling works that deliver something between criticism and celebration of the art world. The glistening, large-scale paintings of giant woolly pandas, first shown in 2000, represent the artist’s best-known series. Rendered in the artist’s infamous glitter and enamel medium, Untitled presents one of Pruitt’s great pandas in a costume form. Accentuating Pruitt’s ongoing signature investigation of the spectacular, the present lot depicts the panda-costume’s wearer caught mid-performance on a stage against a psychedelic black and white curtain-like backdrop. With its tiny button mouth and wide-eyed expression, this panda is just as stunned as the viewer in reaction to Pruitt’s unrelenting shock tactics.
Untitled, produced in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, serves as an emblem of Pruitt’s wide-ranging practice that in itself presents a kind of ongoing performance mocking and praising our received wisdom regarding fame and celebrity. Regarding the excesses of contemporary culture that have become his medium, Pruitt explains, “on the one hand I want to celebrate it, because it’s who we are and on the other hand I want to condemn it,” he said. “I think it’s always like a Ping-Pong match for me” (Rob Pruitt quoted in Randy Kennedy, "A Penitent Reflects on the Wilderness," New York Times, September 15, 2010). The visual tropes of Pruitt’s pandas have migrated from folk culture to the contemporary avant-garde where they are made even more fantastic and graphically seductive than their natural-world counterpart. Describing his own work as populist, Pruitt explains, “I’ve really enjoyed letting the world know that not everything is so mystified or so regulated to expertise—that you can make something really beautiful with a little ingenuity and some supplies from Michaels [craft shop]” (Rob Pruitt by James Franco, "Rob Pruitt," Interview Magazine, September 29, 2009). Pruitt pokes fun at the art world while comfortably sitting at the table with its elite.