Phillips de Pury’s London Evening sale will feature works from the Valencia collection. The day sale is a single owner auction. Besides some information on the lots (included below) Phillips offers very little explanation for what’s in the sale. Maybe that’s because the deadline for the sale just closed yesterday. Maybe more will come out in coming weeks:
Ilia & Emilia Kabakov’s, The Painting on an the Easel, 1998, estimated at £400,000-600,000. The Painting on an Easel is a powerful manifestation of Kabakov’s ability to question the history of artistic practice and challenge the traditional perspective. The painting appears to be effortlessly positioned at eye level, it shows a landscape: an idyllic Russian village on a summer’s day. However, typical to Kabakov it’s not what it seems and the viewer’s eye is pushed beyond the realm of the canvas to the easel that is suspended from the ceiling. The subject matter and the painting itself thus appears to lose substance or meaning as an object of contemplation and instead takes on an air of the unlikely or the absurd, the impossible existence of an ‘ideal’ Soviet landscape. To Kabakov, the installation aspect in The Painting on an Easel is the most important Installation aspect very important. The easel emphasizes the flatness of the painting and yet joined together, the three-dimensional element is difficult to ignore, as it allows the work to be viewed from all angles.
Rudolph Stingel’s, Untitled, 2002, estimated at £300,000-500,000. Over the last three decades, Rudolf Stingel has built an impressive oeuvre demystifying the idea of the work of art and the creation process. Stingel challenges the viewer to reconsider their preconceived notions about what constitutes a legitimate source of art through the very act of its origin and creation. He challenges the idea of the hand of the artist by including others in the creation process in some of his works. Clearly influenced by Arte Povera, Stingel turns on its head the traditional structure of painting by using ordinary ubiquitous materials to create objects of fine art. The present lot is the result of a performative installation in which members of the public were allowed to deface the surface of temporary Celotex walls installed in public spaces. The resulting destruction and accumulation was then fragmented into many segments and then reassembled as a finished work of art to be exhibited in a gallery or museum. The additive and subtractive marks found across Stingel’s reflective surfaces become poignant tableaux of contemporary life elevating the mundane and the everyday to high art.
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