Contemporary Art LONDON Evening Sale 2 July 2014

Contemporary art LONDON eveNiNg SALe 2 july 2014

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_cover sing.indd 1 12/06/14 10.22 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_cover sing.indd 2 12/06/14 10.22 Ai W. 21 Auerbach, T. 2

Banksy 11 Bickerton, A. 27 Bradford, M. 6

Flood, M. 26

gilbert & george 14 gormley, A. 12 guyton, W. 5

Hirst, D. 10 Hubbard, A. 28

Kapoor, A. 13 Kassay, J. 25 KAWS 29 Kiefer, A. 16

Mangold, R. 19 Morris, R. 18

Ostrowski, D. 1

Prince, R. 8

Ruby, S. 7 Ruscha, e. 15, 20

Smith, L. 4 Stingel, R. 3, 24

varejão, A. 23

Warhol, A. 9 Whiteread, R. 17

Zhang H. 22

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_cover sing.indd 3 12/06/14 10.22 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_cover sing.indd 4 12/06/14 10.23 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_IFC sing.indd 1 11/06/14 18.07 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63 no doppio rif.indd 4 12/06/14 09.47 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63 no doppio rif.indd 5 12/06/14 09.47 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63 no doppio rif.indd 6 12/06/14 09.48 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63 no doppio rif.indd 7 12/06/14 09.48 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 12 12/06/14 08.42

CONTEMPORARY ART

Sale information LONdON EVENINg SALE 2 JULY 2014

Auction & Viewing LocAtion 7 Howick Place, London SW1P 1BB

Auction 2 July 2014 at 7pm

Viewing 21 June-2 July Monday – Saturday 10am – 6pm Sunday 12pm – 6pm

SALe DeSignAtion In sending in written bids or making enquiries please refer to this sale as UK010414 or Contemporary Art Evening Sale.

AbSentee AnD teLephone biDS tel +44 20 7318 4045 fax +44 20 7318 4035 [email protected]

heAD of SALe Peter Sumner +44 20 7318 4063 [email protected]

ReSeARcheR Simon Tovey +44 20 7318 4084 [email protected]

ADminiStRAtoR Hannah Tjaden +44 20 7318 4093 [email protected]

front cover Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1986, lot 9 (detail) back cover Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2012, lot 3 (detail) opposite Adriana Varejão, A Grande Curva, 2010, lot 23 (detail)

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 13 12/06/14 08.42 1 DaviD OstrOwski b. 1981 F (Gee Vaucher), 2012 acrylic, lacquer and paper on canvas, in artist’s wooden frame 268.1 x 214.8 cm (105 1/2 x 84 5/8 in.) Signed and dated ‘David Ostrowski 12’ on the reverse.

Estimate £30,000-50,000 $50,400-84,000 €36,900-61,600 ♠ † provenance Ltd Los Angeles, Los Angeles exhibited Los Angeles, Ltd Los Angeles, David Ostrowski: From bad to worse, 18 October - 24 November 2012

“ I’m trying to neglect all of my painterly knowledge and ability in order to paint as a right-hander with my right hand as if it were the lef one.”

DAVID OSTROWSKI

Understated, minimal and ambiguous, David Ostrowski’s work thrives marks are apparently random. This lends the piece a sense of immediacy of the concept of artistic success and failure. Having graduated from and energy that is reminiscent of street art. The artist’s use of lacquer Kunstkademie in Düsseldorf under the tutelage of Albert Oehlen in 2009, encourages the rapid application of paint, therefore heightening the sense Ostrowski has since attempted to distance himself from his academic of spontaneous creation. The dirty, sullied appearance of the background training and instead strive towards the naivety of an untrained artist. is similarly an efect of chance; a result of the fabric’s contact with the foor of the artist’s studio. This work from Ostrowski’s recent F (Fehlermalerei) series, translated as ‘mistake painting’, exemplifes the artist’s conscious removal from Ostrowski describes his F series as exploring nothingness: “Currently conventional aesthetics and notions of artistic skill. Ostrowski described I’m doing paintings about nothing. I have no ideas, no motivation and no the process: “I’m trying to neglect all of my painterly knowledge and inspiration.” (Francesca Gavin, The Return of Abstract Art, dazedigital ability in order to paint as a right-hander with my right hand as if it were www.dazeddigital.com) The subject of this work appears to be emptiness; the lef one. I place the fast-paced agility of the hand before that of the exploring absence rather than presence. However, this emptiness is merely mind thus compounding pictorial faux-pas to create a beautiful picture.” an illusion as Ostrowski’s subject is in fact the process of painting: at once (Brent Randall, David Ostrowski – Interview, HUSK, Berlin, 28 February, parodying and challenging the medium itself. The infuence of the artist’s 2013 www.huskmagazine.com) tutor, Albert Oehlen, can be recognised in this underlying interrogation of the medium. Oehlen similarly focused on the process of painting and The result of the abandonment of cognitive choice in favour of physical its limitations, using smears and gestural lines of paint, demonstrating chance and coincidence is a gestural, accidental mark-making. In this a shared interest in challenging the medium which Ostrowski has since work, the grey sweeping line seems spontaneous and the blue and yellow commented upon.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 14 12/06/14 08.42 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 15 12/06/14 08.42 2 Tauba auerbach b. 1981 Untitled (Fold), 2012 acrylic on canvas 101.6 x 76.5 cm (40 x 30 1/8 in.) Signed and dated 'Tauba Auerbach 2012' on the overlap.

Estimate £250,000-350,000 $420,000-588,000 €308,000-431,000 ‡ provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

“ Because I spray the creased canvas directionally, the pigment acts like a raking light and freezes a likeness of the contoured materials onto itself. It develops like a photo as I paint.”

TAUBA AUERBACH

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 16 12/06/14 08.42 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 17 12/06/14 08.43 Untitled (Fold) represents one of a series of signature works by the internationally acclaimed artist, Tauba Auerbach. This introspective body of work, begun in 2009, conveys the artist’s intention of “merging opposites or conficting states – and through that, questioning the idea of a logical violation or the idea of logic in general.” (Caris Reid, Built Upon an Anagram – Interview with artist Tauba Auerbach, 11 September, 2009 www.dossierjournal.com)The New-York based painter graduated in 2003 with a BA in visual art from Stanford University. Her works have since featured extensively in major exhibitions worldwide.

The artist’s remarkable oeuvre continuously engages with the limitations of the sometimes hidden structures and systems that underpin perceptible reality. Specifcally, Auerbach is deeply concerned with the points at which theses fail and in turn produce new visual and poetic possibilities. Through her insightful exploration of such limits, the artist delicately merges both the literal and illusory. Consequently her work astutely reassesses not only the boundaries between written language and meaning, but also the binary oppositions between fatness and three-dimensionality, order and disorder. Auerbach describes her work as an attempt to expose “new spectral and dimensional richness…both within and beyond the limits of perception.” (Paula Cooper Gallery, Tauba Auerbach Float, New York, 5 May - 9 June, 2012 www.paulacoopergallery.com) Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery for a Seated Figure, c. 1470. Untitled (Fold) is an exquisite illustration of these investigations; its © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). form oscillates between the supposedly incompatible second and third The intriguing process used to produce this composition involves dimension, thus challenging the viewer to confront the distinctions between manipulating a large piece of canvas into various confgurations by rolling, image, dimensionality and content. The artist articulates her intentions ironing and pressing it, so that folds are embedded in the material. The with this eloquent series, “for the last two years I have tried to conjure resulting creases span horizontally, vertically and diagonally in a grid-like four-dimensional space. The Fold paintings are my efort to construct a pattern. It is then spread out onto a fat surface and paint is applied with portal through which to summon - or at least imagine - this inaccessible an industrial spray gun, while still retaining three-dimensional contours. hyper-spatial reality.” The present lot masterfully utilises the ‘trompe l’oeil’ This mechanical means of production elevates the creative practice to technique that leads the viewer to believe they are observing the three one beyond the artist’s hand – indeed, beyond the formulaic patterns dimensional surface of creased paper. Upon approaching, one realises underpinning this compelling abstraction. By spraying a range of tones the canvas is actually stretched taut over the supporting wooden frame. of a single, monochrome colour onto the folded object, the artist further

accentuates the ultimately convincing illusory efect. Untitled (Fold) typifes the uniquely profound meeting of artistic intention and chance so important to the series as a cohesive, unifed whole.

Speaking of the gradually refned process, Auerbach notes: “Because I spray the creased canvas directionally, the pigment acts like a raking light and freezes a likeness of the contoured materials onto itself. It develops like a photo as I paint. The record of that topological moment is carried forward afer the material is stretched fat. Each point on the surface contains a record of itself in that previous state.” (Christopher Bedford, Dear Painter …, Frieze Magazine, Issue 145, March 2012) Therefore, rather than being representative, these canvases express actual folds that occurred in time. By recording a past state onto the fnished work, this process produces paintings that exist in what the artist herself refers to as “the 2.5th dimension”. These optical thought experiments are able to destabilise our basic assumptions about the reliability of vision, and open our eyes to the delight of temporary disconnections with an observable reality. By drawing attention to the process of their own making, Auerbach’s Fold paintings refect upon the cultural paradox between illusion and abstraction and open up a space of possibility for a new kind of realism.

Although Auerbach draws much of her inspiration from mathematics and physics, her visual output intersects equally with the perennial themes of art history. Conceptually, Untitled (Fold) alludes to the ancient pictorial tradition of representing drapery and folded cloth associated with historically prominent European artists. By ostensibly avoiding narrative and making the surface itself the subject of the work, the artist emphasises, in a manner reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, the illusory nature of painting itself. Gerhard Richter, Turned Sheet, 1965. © Gerhard Richter.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 18 12/06/14 08.43 Detail of the present lot

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 19 12/06/14 08.43 o 3 Rudolf Stingel b. 1956 Untitled, 2012 electroformed copper, plated nickel and gold 118 x 120 cm (46 1/2 x 47 1/4 in.) Stamped with the fabrication mark on the bottom edge.

Estimate £400,000-600,000 $672,000-1,010,000 €493,000-739,000 ♠ provenance Gagosian Gallery, Paris

“ I’m demonstrating that, using diferent surfaces, we can produce very diferent environments.”

Rudolf StinGel

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 20 12/06/14 08.43 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 21 12/06/14 08.43 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63 no doppio rif.indd 22 12/06/14 09.49 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63 no doppio rif.indd 23 12/06/14 09.49 “ I wouldn’t know where to say intervention stops and destruction begins.”

RudolF STINgel

the work of the visitors in this seminal exhibition. The result of this casting process is a visually opulent work. The visual intricacy and seductive material are somewhat contradicted by the banality of the grafti-like marks. The aggressive physicality of incising the original material is aptly translated into the copper surface, as it appears that the smooth, seamless metallic surface has been defaced by acts of destruction, thus blurring the lines between art and vandalism. This apparent dichotomy is further complicated: by casting the grafti in copper the marks are glorifed and transformed into a permanent monument to the destructive acts of members of the public. Whilst artists including Tàpies and dubufet have similarly explored the relationship between art and grafti, and fne art and the un-trained artist, they have not relinquished artistic control in the same manner that Stingel does in this piece. The destruction of the surface also recalls the work of Yves Klein, John latham and Robert Rauschenberg who similarly played with the destruction versus creation paradigm.

Through inviting the public to create rather than to simply observe, Stingel democratizes the act of painting, thus distancing himself from the mythology of the artist-genius. There seems to be a touch of irony in his commentary on the process of art making, as demonstrated by his publication Instructions (1989) which was an illustrated guide to creating a contemporary painting. Stingel’s use of mundane materials further

lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio, 1963. © lucio demonstrates his challenge of traditional notions of hierarchy of painting. Fontana/SIAe/dACS, london 2014. Photo © Bridgeman Images. In this sense, his art as been linked to Italian Arte Povera but infected with the infuence of American abstraction: a testament to his personal relationships to both countries.

Rudolf Stingel’s work is characterized by his interrogation of the medium of painting – redefning and pushing its boundaries. Stingel refers to his work as ‘painting’ regardless of the materials he uses, which have ranged from carpet to Styrofoam across his extensive oeuvre. Untitled, from 2012, is no exception, despite consisting of copper, the work takes on the feeling of a painted work particularly, in the surface texture. This work epitomises Stingel’s highly visual yet conceptual approach to art, bringing together aesthetic qualities of the surface with postmodern concerns regarding the status of painting.

Born in 1956 in Merano, Italy, Stingel initially worked in a photorealist style as a commercial portrait artist until the 1980s when he began to work in a neo-expressionist manner. In 1987 he moved to New York, where he is still currently based, and his work transformed again as he turned toward his current preoccupations of redefning painting and its relationship to space and audience.

Untitled derives from his mid-career retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The Whitney Museum, New York in 2007. For this exhibition Stingel created a unique participatory space, transforming the traditionally neutral, ‘white cube’ museum into an interactive space. He covered the walls with a layer of refective aluminium-faced insulation material – a material he chose deliberately for its fragility. Visitors were lef free to scratch, inscribe and transform the metallic surface in any way they wished, resulting in an array of grafti-like

gestures. Stingel then cast fragments of these incised surfaces into copper, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charles the First, 1982. © The estate of thus capturing and reproducing in exact detail, and permanently recording Jean-Michel Basquiat / AdAgP, Paris and dACS, london 2014.

Stingel thus broke the perceived ‘aura’ of the painting and the museum “ It is of course Modernism’s for his 2007 retrospective, transforming the visitor from observer to collaborator in the act of creation. the artist commented on this abstract space that should breakdown of conventional protocol: “the abstract shell appeared to be perfect in a provocative way and apparently invited [each individual] obliterate all disturbing sounds to manifest [his impulse]. numerous motives appear to have led to this behaviour; the neutrality of the installation paired with the anonymity of and isolate each object.” the visitors certainly plays a role.” By inviting such visceral engagement Rudolf Stingel with the work, Stingel encouraged the visitor to reconsider the fundamental qualities of painting - surface and material - rather than to consider it in purely visual terms.

the relationship between painting and museum or gallery was also transformed – the foiled insulation material was created as a seamless extension of the architectural space, thus merging architecture and and the work and the historical event in which this piece was created. painting in a unique manner. By doing so, Stingel questions the the intrinsically temporal nature of the work again demonstrates the autonomous status of painting as it is reliant upon the walls of the potential of painting to represent a dimension beyond the purely visual. museum. the aluminium foil surfaces therefore become akin to wallpaper rather than painting through the interdependent relationship between Untitled is therefore a monument, for the breakdown of the seemingly painting and architecture. Stingel explored this relationship in his 2013 sacred status of the art museum, championing the freedom of the public installation at the Palazzo grassi for the Venice Biennale. Here Stingel to express themselves. the anonymous doodles, signatures and words, used carpet to create an immersive space which merged physical space ‘ConfidenCe’ inscribed clearly down the centre, epitomize Stingel’s and fne art in a unique way. attitude to painting: “one could say, i allow painting, but not by my assistants who carry out my concept but by a public that inscribes its this copper cast renders time palpable – the painting becomes a living, own individual response in a material way into the work.” (Rainer Zittl, rather than a static object. time is evoked through both the marks The Trickster, Bonami, p.35). Stingel’s fresh perspective on painting themselves, which record the physical interaction between museum-goers demonstrates the endlessly radical possibilities of the medium.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 25 12/06/14 08.43 4 Lucien Smith b. 1989 Boys Don't Cry, 2012 acrylic on unprimed canvas 243.8 x 182.9 cm (95 7/8 x 72 in.) Signed ‘Lucien Smith’ on the overlap.

Estimate £40,000-60,000 $67,200-101,000 €49,300-73,900 ‡ provenance OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles Private Collection, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner

“ The Rain Paintings in my head serve as backdrops for situations between people and/or objects, very much like backdrops in a play.”

LuCIeN SmITH

Boys Don't Cry, from 2012, is the monumental canvas by young While executing the Rain Painting Series, Smith isolated himself from American artist Lucien Smith, from a highly sought afer series of the hectic experience of everyday city life, temporarily relocating his abstractions inspired by the sensory experience of falling rain. The studio to rural Hudson, upstate New York. This literal separation from the spontaneous, seemingly efortless efect is the result of the artist’s urban metropolis signifes a return to nature and imbues the series with careful experimentation with paint fred at the canvas using an antique an intimate sense of the artist’s emotional and intellectual engagement. fre extinguisher. This technique literally replicates falling drops of Smith’s instinctive incorporation of the fre extinguisher could arguably rain as a point of departure, cultivating the dialogue between the be compared to Jackson Pollock’s controversial drip paintings, where intellectual concept and the material execution. paint was dripped or poured onto the canvas in an apparently random yet intuitively purposeful manner. The artist himself explains, “frst, I had to fgure out the ratio of water to paint to get the drops consistent… And then I had to fgure out the angle Bold, abstract and thought provoking, Smith’s work presents the and distance- there were so many factors. I ended up working inside a viewer with a haunting vision of the universal loneliness inherent to the canopy tent so I could gauge my distance from the canvas.” (Christopher human condition while also ofering an unlimited possibility for personal Bollen, Lucien Smith, Interview www.interviewmagazine.com) In this interpretation. This particular lot is intended for visual and thoughtful introspective composition, cascading drops of paint merge towards the interaction and thus directly challenges passive spectatorship. “The Rain centre of the canvas, conveying an infnite impression of depth. Focusing paintings in my head serve as backdrops for situations between people on the symbolic juxtaposition of black and white, Smith constructs a and/or objects, very much like backdrops in a play. They become activated dramatic contrast accentuated by the purity of those colours. when something is placed in front of them; only then do their scale and size come in to efect.” (A. Simpson, Rising Artist Lucien Smith is Making it Rain, Bullett, 27 September 2012 www.bullettmedia.com)

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 26 12/06/14 08.43 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 27 12/06/14 08.44 O 5 Wade Guyton b. 1972 Untitled, 2007 Epson ultrachrome inkjet on linen 214.2 x 175.7 cm (84 3/8 x 69 1/8 in.) Signed and dated ‘Wade Guyton 2007’ on the overlap.

Estimate £500,000-700,000 $840,000-1,180,000 €616,000-862,000 ‡ provenance Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris exhibited Paris, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Wade Guyton, 26 April - 7 June, 2008

“ It seems that the history of modern or contemporary art as we know it is itself a history of art defning its contours.”

WADE GUYTON

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 28 12/06/14 08.44 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 29 12/06/14 08.44 Sol LeWitt, Black with White Lines, Vertical, Not Touching, 1970. © 2014 Sol LeWitt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Untitled, from 2007, is the “ostensibly black monochrome” work by Wade “ The process of drawing didn’t Guyton that employs a pared down visual vocabulary and an Epson printer to investigate the relationships between technology, printing and painting. make sense to me. The labour Guyton abandoned traditional drawing and painting techniques in favour of digital printing early in his career, realising that “the process of drawing didn’t match up to what I was didn’t make sense to me. The labour didn’t match up to what I was trying to do. And I thought the printer could make these things better than I trying to do. And I thought could.” (Carol Vogel, Painting, Rebooted, the New York Times, Art and Design, 27 September 2012). Rather than a brush and paint, his tools are the printer could make these an Epson printer, Microsof Word and Adobe Photoshop – commonplace things better than I could.” technology. Although his works are made using a printer, Guyton refers to those on linen as ‘paintings’ rather than prints, implicitly testing the limits WADE GUYTON of the medium. The defnition of painting is further challenged by the lack of direct relationship between the artist and art work, undermining the traditional concept of artistic skill. Guyton works in dialogue with result of the printed linen rolling onto the studio foor, causing the pure 20th century artists who similarly challenged the traditional codes of black ink to be sullied by dirt and dust. The white line running through painting. Daniel Buren, for example, sought to challenge the tradition of the centre of the work further indicates the process behind the work, as painting by repositioning painting as process or manufacture rather than this line marks where Guyton folded the linen to allow the large swathe of as representation. material to ft in the printer. The painting is therefore as much a product of chance as of the predetermined image Guyton created on his computer. Guyton’s work plays on the disparity between the image created on In this sense, this image can be seen as a visual record of the process, as the screen and that produced by the printer; between the idea and its Guyton comments: “The works on linen are a record of their own making materialisation. The relationship between the two is confounded by which at times can include accidents in the printing or in the physical act Guyton’s use of primed linen rather than paper, resulting in a struggle of making them, like when I drag a canvas across a studio foor.” between material and printer which is made visible through the smudges, (Carol Vogel, Painting, Rebooted, the New York Times, Art and Design, skids and uneven distribution of ink. Further accidental marks are the 27 September 2012).

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 30 12/06/14 08.44

These chance marks and skids also cause the image to be only ‘ostensibly’ a black rectangle. The subtle nuances in the work, which can only be observed close to the painting, imbue the work with a sense of impulsive creation and painterliness. The use of the monochromatic form again draws upon modernist abstraction. Malevich’s iconic Black Square is also ostensibly a pure black shape, with nuances visible upon close confrontation with the work. For Malevich, the black square was a concentration of art’s essence, representing a new beginning in the tradition of painting, for Guyton, the square reveals the impossibility of perfection in the painted or printed image.

There is a great deal of self-conscious irony involved in using a printer, designed to reproduce images with precision, to create an image that is so obscure. Guyton acknowledges that he is pushing technology beyond its capabilities: “The resulting images aren’t exactly what the machines are designed for - slick digital photographs. There is ofen a struggle between the printer and my material - and the traces of this are lef on the surface: snags, drips, streaks, mis-registrations, blurs.”(Amze Emmons, Wade Guyton: Action Printer, Printeresting, 18 July, 2009 www.printeresting.org).

The intersection between technology and art is here part of a larger art historical debate, recalling Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Agnes Martin. Warhol similarly toyed with the relationship between technology and art, commenting that “Paintings are too hard. The things I want

to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems.” Whilst Warhol Mark Rothko, Untitled (Black on Gray), 1969/70. © 2014 Kate Rothko Prizel & sought to be a machine-like creator himself, Guyton assigns creative Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York responsibility to the machine. (Amze Emmons, Wade Guyton: Action Printer, Printeresting, 18 July, 2009). America. The marks produced by the printer are familiar to everyone in Although Guyton’s paintings are made via unfamiliar means, his work is this digital age, and Guyton’s work can be understood as exploring the visually familiar. As already suggested, comparisons can be drawn with Pop relationship between the physical and digital realms in today’s society. Art, Minimalism and Constructivism, as he employs the formal vocabulary of modernism in his work. Visually this work can therefore be understood This work therefore raises a number of intriguing questions, challenging as an elegant study of the minimal, monochromatic form, revisiting 20th the viewer to reconsider the nature of painting and its relationship to century experiments in abstraction, drawing on the likes of Frank Stella, digital images. Whilst the unusual methods Guyton employs indicate his Mark Rothko and Sol LeWitt. However, Guyton’s work is unmistakably interest in contemporary issues of debate around the role of technology, contemporary, and can almost be seen as a documentation of 21st century visually his work recalls a rich history of abstract art.

Frank Stella, Untitled from Black Series II, lithograph on paper, 1967. © Frank Stella / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 31 12/06/14 08.44 O 6 Mark Bradford b. 1961 An Opening On The Lef, 2010 mixed media collage on canvas 121.9 x 152.4 cm (47 7/8 x 60 in.) Initialled, titled and dated ‘“An Opening on the lef” 2010 M’ on the reverse.

Estimate £400,000-600,000 $672,000-1,010,000 €493,000-739,000 provenance Sikkema Jenkins, New York

“ I am drawn to ways of working that are very tactile with a certain physicality.”

MArk BrAdfOrd

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 32 12/06/14 08.44 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout1_01Bradford_32-33.indd 1 12/06/14 09.14 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout1_01Bradford_32-33.indd 2 12/06/14 09.14 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout1_01Bradford_32-33.indd 3 12/06/14 09.14 Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1949. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Rita and Taf Schreiber Collection, Given in loving memory of her husband, Taf Schreiber, by Rita Schreiber © 2014 Jackson Pollock.

An Opening on the Lef, executed in 2010, is a stunning example from In An Opening on the Lef, Bradford masters his trademark additive and the oeuvre of Mark Bradford, an American who is named one of the top subtractive process of collage and decollage which allows him to create talents at the forefront of redefning the notion of painting today. By a grid-like composition that evokes the aerial view of Los Angeles, whose marrying high art with popular culture, Bradford creates large scale structural integrity is being challenged. The artist paints, bleaches, canvases that are true examples of Post-Modernism, in a diferent and tears, sands and embellishes his materials that through improvisation more labour-intensive way than other artists like Wade Guyton who and accident make up utopian abstractions that are not only formally opted towards the process-based painting. Usually of monumental scale, inventive but that are also able to transmit the real sense of everyday life. the canvases are created with the use of paint and collage elements The mesmerising quality is in abundance for the viewers to grasp. The taken from everyday life: the found posters and billboards, hairdresser’s use of bright colours on the multi-layered surface give a luminosity to the permanent endpapers (he grew up in his mother’s hairdresser salon) - painting which exhales a raw energy and complex beauty. Through his all traces of the city where he fnds them - creating the urban map of his native Los Angeles. This results in a highly textured surface that is extremely gestural and abstract but that has an unbelievably utopian quality: “I wanted to take an actual moment in history and then abstract “ I think that the idea of accretion it and pull it apart and then put it back together again. The painting is like a puzzle.” (Christopher Bedford, Against Abstraction, in Mark Bradford, or accumulation is no diferent exh.cat., Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2010, p. 24). than modern day Rome, where Bradford has emerged over the past decade as one of the most skilful and exciting artists of his generation, leading to his receipt of the MacArthur archaeologists have found layers “genius” award in 2009 and a travelling mid-career retrospective the of ancient cities. In my work, following year that was organised by Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio that travelled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; ofen the viewer can only see the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Based in South Central Los Angeles, top layer which is not translucent, the artist brings the street art elements into his paintings through which he continues his investigation of class, race and gender in the United but the weight and the energy States. Wittily dubbed “if not the best painter working in America today then certainly the tallest” by Guy Trebay of the New York Times, Bradford of what’s underneath there creates a body of work that is less of a commentary on consumerism, but rather gives voice to the specifc conditions that shape communities. will pulsate.”

MARk BRADFORD

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout1_01Bradford_32-33.indd 4 12/06/14 09.14 paintings, Bradford conveys the collage-like way of Los Angeles itself, where growing up as an African-American and being part of the integral community he experienced frsthand the challenges of social integration, the pressing issue for a collage-like society not only locally but rather globally. In his painting, Bradford maps our culture of today, by showing its fragility and complexity: “Maps to me are such fragile systems, because at the moment of a war, at the moment of gentrifcation, they change. So they’re the most infexible, fexible thing I can think of. They imbue you with this security, and at the same time they’re deeply, deeply fawed. They document the history of power; they document the history of wars. Maps document lots of lies... Maps to me are tricky and insidious, and they’ve always fascinated me” (T. Golden, Mark Bradford: The Other Side of Perfect, October 2006, www.worldclassboxing.org).

Bradford’s canvases evoke the masters of classical abstraction, in particular the works of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. However, here the abstraction is taken to another level through the use of the collage elements that are products of the mass culture, making his painting as ever socially grounded. The high art temple that painting has been for centuries is masterfully tweaked to incorporate the ever changing world: “Bradford sets out to represent and refect on the conditions of the moment, making images and objects that better represent the era than any documentary photography.” (The Painting Factory: Abstraction afer Warhol, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 96). This ability to grasp and masterfully refect the time we live in is what makes Bradford’s work so appealing.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 33 12/06/14 08.44 O 7 Sterling ruby b. 1972 SP33, 2008 acrylic and spray paint on canavs 317.5 x 472.4 cm (85 5/8 x 185 7/8 in.) Initialled, titled and dated 'SP33 S.R 08' on the reverse.

Estimate £500,000-700,000 $840,000-1,180,000 €616,000-862,000 † provenance Metro Pictures, New York

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 34 12/06/14 08.44 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout2_03Ruby_34-35.indd 1 12/06/14 09.14 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout2_03Ruby_34-35.indd 2 12/06/14 09.14 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout2_03Ruby_34-35.indd 3 12/06/14 09.14 Sterling Ruby’s work is regarded as a reaction to and rejection of the minimalist artistic tradition. He has been proclaimed by contemporary art critics as one of the most interesting artists to emerge in the twentieth century due to his examination of the psychological sphere in which expression confronts constraint. Ruby’s works are clearly infuenced by the ubiquity of urban grafti and the artist’s works ofen appear defaced, camoufaged and disfgured. The artist has cited a diverse range of infuences and sources in his oeuvre; such as psychological diseases, hip-hop culture, public art, waste, decline and consumption.

Among the disparate forms in Ruby’s practice; including ceramics, painting, collage and video, his canvases remain the most formally abstract. Each work is titled using the initials SP, which denote the method of spray painting, followed by a particular number unique to the specifc work. The large-scale, colour-feld canvases are made with acrylic and spray paint and utilise a varied, almost hallucinogenic colour palette, which ranges from deep black to acid pinks and greens. The artist connects his involvement in the abstract movement with the themes he depicts in his paintings. Drawing inspiration from the sociological implications of urban vandalism and demarcation, he associates the power struggles involved in gang behaviour to the demolishment of clear order and loss of original meaning and authority pertinent to abstract art itself.

“ My intention is to work with as many media as a kind of schizophrenic labour strategy… Works may not look the same James Abbott Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, 1875. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA / Gif of Dexter M. Ferry Jr. / Bridgeman Images formally… but there is a lineage that links everything I do together.”

STERLING RUBY

SP33, created by the artist in 2008, is an abstract piece that uses these Ruby’s explanation of the work as a symbol of transience highlights the characteristic techniques. The painting features two blocks of bold colour, importance of its indefnite meaning. The vibrant and eclectic work, surmounted by a repeated, black linear pattern, distorted and blurred through its manipulation and contortion, belies an unfnished sensation. in a circular formation in the centre third of the canvas. As characteristic This lack of a completed aura can be taken to evoke either some sort of all Ruby’s paintings, it is executed using spray paint on a large- of structural breakdown or the beginning of some new, tantalising format canvas. It features a restricted palette and diferent application possibility. In this way, his works can be interpreted as a form of assault techniques on various, accumulative levels. The depicted colours give on both materials and social power structures along with the introduction the piece an unnatural almost otherworldly appearance. This efect is of a solution that remains just out of reach. The way in which the emphasised in the manipulation of the image, resulting from the blurring obscured elements of the piece do not hinder the fnal aesthetic beauty technique, which disturbs the tranquillity and cohesive quality of the of the painting presents an artistic solution to the destruction of the work. The work is evocative of the kind of image that is perceived when contemporary world. Ruby introduces the possibility for the disclosure looking through a telescope. The distortion of the image is an intentional of aesthetic harmony within a mutilated whole. “Yes, I defnitely feel that technique that aims to increase the ambiguity of the work. Ruby states: ‘beauty’ is a contemporary question. But I probably prefer to look at it “I want it to be transient, even if I don’t know if that’s a quality. My work this way, which is to view it by diferent standards. It’s interesting to see is not goal driven. It’s not to get to an end point. You have this drive how beauty is represented and how diferent takes on beauty can be so and that keeps you going, but the drive isn’t necessarily based on a dichotomous and diferent. I like to think about art as being similar to defnitive defnition or a defnitive endpoint. Like: I want to reach a goal poetry: it can’t be proven. It just exists and there’s an aura about it that and accomplish this, so that it’s completely explained. I don’t actually people get or don’t get. Beauty has to do a lot with that.”(Utopia Parkway fnd that to be interesting. There’s a perception of that, in all of the work, Interview with Sabine Ruby, I Like The Fact That Art Can’t Be Proven but it’s actually about the cyclical aspect of it. About the fact that it’s www.utopiaparkway.wordpress.com). never attained. That it’s never an endpoint. That seems very dramatic and kind of upsetting, but in my mind it’s very desirable. And beautiful, to a certain extent.” (Utopia Parkway I Like The Fact That Art Can’t Be Proven, www.utopiaparkway.wordpress.com).

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout2_03Ruby_34-35.indd 4 12/06/14 09.14 Claude Monet, Waterlilies at Sunset, 1915-26. © Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris, France / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images.

“ It’s interesting to see how beauty is represented and how diferent takes on beauty can be so dichotomous and diferent. I like to think about art as being similar to poetry: it can’t be proven. It just exists and there’s an aura about it that people get or don’t get. Beauty has to do a lot with that.”

STERLING RUBY

This ephemeral gesture in Ruby’s paintings becomes the subject matter of the works themselves and categorises them as compulsive acts of expression. The art critic Bob Nickas has described Ruby’s work as a ‘dichotomy of repression and liberation’ (Nickas 2009, p.220). They channel the conficts between individual impulses and mechanisms of the collective whole; depicting the moment of upheaval and its fnal outcome. Yet, in their post-humanist, contemporary qualities and subsequent feeling of continuum, they can be interpreted as the illustration of a coping strategy; a positive and alluring image of reality. “My generation is going through this dilemma of how beauty is prescribed. There’s this kind of aesthetic of degradation, of deterioration as a type of beauty. Like an

entropic beauty. That’s perhaps very gothic or very baroque, to a certain Mark Rothko, Violet Center, 1954. © 2014 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher extent. But it’s also a type of formalism or a type of negation on all of Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Mayor Gallery, these diferent things that have happened prior to here and now.” London / Bridgeman Images.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 35 12/06/14 08.45 8 RichaRd PRince b. 1949 My Life as a Weapon, 2007 acrylic and collage on canvas 203.2 x 303.5 cm (80 x 119 1/2 in.) Signed and dated ‘R Prince 2007’ on the reverse.

Estimate £550,000-750,000 $924,000-1,260,000 €677,000-924,000 ‡ provenance Gladstone Gallery, New York Private Collection Phillips de Pury & Company, London, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 12 October 2011, lot 16 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

“ At frst I didn’t really understand the joke but I thought it had something to do with ‘substitution’. It was perfect. Abstract.”

RiChARd PRiNCe

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 36 12/06/14 08.44 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout3_05Prince_36-37.indd 1 12/06/14 09.15 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout3_05Prince_36-37.indd 2 12/06/14 09.15 UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout3_05Prince_36-37.indd 3 12/06/14 09.15 Bruce Nauman, Sweet Suite Substitute, 1968. © Bruce Nauman / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014.

Richard Prince is one of the most original and controversial artists of “ It is interesting how people our time, transforming art through a myriad of styles and modes of expression, including sculpture photography, graphic design, and writing. who were once fairly radical His innovative and hard-hitting works played an instrumental role in infuencing such artists as Jef Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Barbara Kruger. can become, later in life, kind

Prince’s Joke Painting series began in the late 1980s, when he wrote his of conservative, and not just in frst handwritten joke on a piece of paper and hung it up, realizing that terms of politics - how, if you’re he would have been envious if another artist had beaten him to it. His early works, all handwritten, grew into more substantial pieces when he an artist, you can start out being began to incorporate the jokes with bold text, colour, and images, ofen without any connection one to the other. Prince’s jokes, which tend to somewhat avant-garde and then meld seeming banality with satire, ofen poke fun at family, religion, and his relationships with women. The humor of these once cartoonish jokes end up doing landscapes.” seems to have all but disappeared in their new guise as conceptual art. “Some jokes are hand-written, others are silk-screened; the letters follow RiCHARD PRiNCe each other on a straight line or on a wavy line, are centred or placed at the bottom of the image, like captions, repeated, superimposed…Sometimes, the jokes are looped, as though they were told one afer the other, as in stand-up comedy, and linked to one another with a simple ‘one more’, ’another one’ or ’okay’. At other times, a malfunction seems to occur, like a broken record, and the same joke is repeated twice on the same painting.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_Foldout3_05Prince_36-37.indd 4 12/06/14 09.15 In general, the same jokes are repeated from new series to the next on all possible supports.” (V. Pécoil, Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 128).

My Life as a Weapon, 2007, consists of a text on a collage of sof-porn photographs of women lying in seductive poses, the illusory crudeness both mitigated and enhanced by specks of pink, blue, and yellow paint. “The painted, as against the photographic, world of Richard Prince is neither preconceived nor harmonious, linear, stable or continuous. Instead, it is a place of discrepancy and displacement, of contradictions and misunderstandings (much like reality in general). We could even speak of the absurdity of these works, the zone where irreconcilable elements on the pictorial surface initiate the signifcation. Herein, the spectator is confronted by a confusing and enigmatic frame of reference. Indeed, Prince’s fgurative paintings are about reconstructing reality, or fabricating parallel realities.” (Introduction to the exhibition Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 20 January–29 April 2007)

From a distance, viewers are unable to perceive the background’s detail, leaving them with the impression that it is nothing more than one colour washing into another. Upon closer inspection, however, the audience is able to make the invited connection between the repeated line of “My wife is turning into a nun. I get none in the morning, none in the afernoon, and none at nite” and the come-hither background. Prince once again turns things on their head, given that the risqué, in advertising and elsewhere, is always in the forefront. With the images decontextualised, isolated and cropped, the artist imbues them with a new signifcance, their grouping becoming more important than their individual representations. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Think Twice), 1992. © Barbara Kruger 2014.

My Life as a Weapon is an iconic example from the oeuvre of this cutting- edge artist. It particularly represents the artist’s shifed interest from appropriated images to text. This challenging of traditional notions of originality and authorship in relation to works of art, places the artist at the forefront of postmodernist practice. Throughout his creative development, Prince has investigated the oblique position of sexism, racism and

“ I don’t see any diference between what I collect and what I make… It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will (a lot of times) end up in the work.”

RIcHARD PRIncE

psychosis in American subcultures and mass media and their role in the construction of American identity; refecting upon the mythical status of cowboys, bikers and celebrities; and most recently, the satirical allure of pulp fction. These works force the viewer to confront the mythology of the American Dream, the commodifcation of the individual and the stereotypical characterisation of the female subject. His ambiguous engagement with a range of taboo subjects has consistently provoked debate about the degree to which he is criticizing or collaborating with the material to which he refers. The autobiographical tone of this Ed Ruscha, So It Is The Amazing Earth, 1984. © Edward Ruscha 2014. particular lot takes it to another level, revealing attitudes and tensions Photo: Bridgeman Images. that are usually kept buried beneath the surface of social interactions.

UK_CTA_EVE_JUN14_2-63.indd 37 12/06/14 08.45