DACS Foundation Auction Harry Adams Maria Lalic Hurvin Anderson Loraine Leeson Charles Avery Liliane Lijn The Gift of Art Gilane Tawadros Jordan Baseman Melanie Manchot David Batchelor Harland Miller Rut Blees Luxemburg Tim Noble and Sue The roots of the word ‘gift’ and ‘giving’ lie in the Old English word ‘giefan’. The origins of making artworks go even further Derek Boshier Webster back, to pre-historic times, and yet almost every culture has Frank Bowling Humphrey Ocean bestowed gifts on later generations in the form of wall paintings and sculptures, some of which have endured for Stephen Carter Seb Patane tens of thousands of years. The practice of being an artist is Gordon Cheung Richard Patterson inherently one that involves creating works of art that go out into the world and touch the lives of hundreds, thousands and, Maria Chevska Vong Phaophanit sometimes, millions of people. It is therefore vitally important Billy Childish William Pye that we look after our shared cultural heritage. Fiona Crisp Ged Quinn The DACS Foundation Auction has relied entirely on the Angela de la Cruz Sophy Rickett generous gifts of more than one generation of artists who have donated artworks to support the establishment of the new Cathy de Monchaux Helen Sear Foundation, which is intended in turn to make the work of Jeffrey Dennis Yinka Shonibare MBE artists accessible to the widest possible public and to benefit future generations. The first major project of the DACS Antony Donaldson Nicholas Sinclair Foundation is Art360: a pilot programme to digitise and make Tracey Emin Andrew Stahl publicly available the archives of 100 leading visual artists. Working with the Art Fund, Arts Council England, Henry Ryan Gander Georgina Starr Moore Foundation, Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Michael Ginsborg Sarah Staton Archives, Art360 will safeguard the legacies and archives of British artists and estates well into the future. Mona Hatoum Trevor Sutton David Hepher Estelle Thompson At the very earliest stage of planning the DACS Foundation Auction, we approached the artist Susan Hiller, who was one Susanna Heron Amikam Toren of the founders of DACS in 1984 alongside fellow artists and Susan Hiller Suzanne Treister lawyers. We were delighted when Susan agreed to discuss our ambitious plans to establish the Foundation and to mount Patrick Hughes David Tremlett this inaugural auction, which is intended to raise funds for its Albert Irvin OBE Julie Umerle programme of activities. Andrzej Jackowski Sophie Von Hellermann Her scrutiny of what we hoped to achieve and how we would Ann-Marie James Richard Wentworth organise the auction was both forensic and philosophical, Tess Jaray Laetitia Yhap Chantal Joffe tracing the contours of issues that needed to be brought into A Brief Inventory of Donated Works relief in a cultural and political moment when the limits of Mark Waugh philanthropy are being redrawn and when artists are being continuously asked to donate works for auction in aid of a variety of good causes. Her sage advice was that the DACS Foundation sounded like a wonderful idea but she cautioned The system of modern accountancy was a Renaissance us about the reality of auctions and the potential impact that invention and has been linked to the studio of Leonardo da they have on artists and the valuation of their works. An Vinci. However, the true inventory of value is implausible and auction catalogue, she advised, was an essential tool for incomplete. The short notes that follow introduce the precious ensuring that both artists and collectors could benefit from gifts donated to the DACS Foundation Auction. the auction scenario. The gift of art is its resistance to description. The Expulsion: With some simple principles agreed, Susan proceeded to Man Leaving the Ice Field (2015) portrays the geography of design a unique paper on which to print her call to arms. It ice on which we imagine there are no bees. We see explorers was a compelling invitation from an artist who understands breaking the ice and being exposed by the landscape in that the value of artists does not reside uniquely in the prices Men Breaking Ice (2015); in Flower and Buds (2014) we see that their works command but more importantly in the value flowers that look like poppies. Yet these pictures conjured of their legacy and contribution to culture. from beeswax and oil are also a conceptual ruse, an edition of original paintings by Harry Adams. Each flower is not The artists featured in this catalogue have all responded very unique but one of a series. Harry Adams is not a man but generously to our invitation; however, we recognise the moral a multiplicity. dilemma faced by successful artists today, who have to choose carefully which of the many auctions they are able to support. Complex urban samplings of images are rhythmically The artists who have donated artworks to the DACS Foundation distributed across the works of Hurvin Anderson. Rich and Auction have been motivated by the vision and ambition of saturated colours are often deployed in blocks to isolate details the Foundation and its planned programme. We hope that and create an immersive cartography that contains familiar collectors will be equally inspired to support the auction so objects turned into iconic symbols: the barber’s chair, the we can help sustain future generations of artists and facilitate swimming pool or power pylon. Construction (2013) seems to public access to unique archival materials. draw us in through a rain-soaked window of bright yellow lights but could equally be fabric glimpsed out of the corner We are hugely indebted to all the artists who have supported of an eye. The enigma of the image dances before us in the DACS Foundation Auction so magnificently. Their dazzling sequences: orange, yellow, green and blue. commitment to us is a powerful mandate for the DACS Foundation by those at the centre of all our activities. The geographies explored by artists are infinite and their horizons and fissures more vertiginous than those in nature. This sublime is rendered with poetic precision in the work by Charles Avery: Untitled (As I look into space I meet the eye of my creator, as she is watching me, as I am in her eye) (2003–9). The line of the horizon explodes in razor-sharp 4 ecstasies of flight from a figure walking into a sunset. The collectively titled Phantom and commissioned by Tate Liverpool. image allows the viewer to become lost in contours that lead The modernity that exploded after colonial independence is the eyes astray. witnessed in the photograph as a time yet to come, a history still suspended like a dream. The camera captures the spectres that lurk in the details; the French theorist Roland Barthes said that photography returns Spectres of a different type are at play in A ghost haunting us through its exposures to the corporeal trauma of ‘That has a painting (2010), by Derek Boshier. His work came to been.’ In a series of five photographs, Sabunchi (1–5) prominence during the 1960s when he became associated (2013–14) by Jordan Baseman, we see a landscape scarred with British Pop Art, making works such as Birthday (1962), by industrial exploitation in the early twentieth century. The which employs a jigsaw sky and floating alphabets alongside scenes are rendered in a soft palette of browns and ochre talking bears. His later works with pop icons The Clash with strong blue skies but the images linger with a haunting and David Bowie are symptomatic of a visual vocabulary melancholy. Jordan spent time in this landscape with local delighting in metamorphosis and accelerated tropes of heavy-metal musicians, whom he likened to groups from the mainstream culture. The history of painting is retold in various Midlands such as Black Sabbath, who also made sonic narratives that try to plot and fix its smudged contours. transpositions of their environment. When Frank Bowling was elected to the Royal Academy in The gravity and transparency of things is often celebrated 2005 he was the first black artist to be invited to become an and subverted in the works of David Batchelor. The white Academician. The absurdity of that fact does not blight the square and rectangles in his Found Monochromes (1997– beauty of his canvases and his work Retired Oriental 2015), exhibited recently at the Whitechapel Gallery, alert Philosopher out jogging (2012) might remind us that it was us to the uncanny voids and frames that creep into the urban through conversations with Clement Greenberg in New York terrain. Edges from puzzles left unassembled are found and that he emerged as an erudite writer on abstraction and the inserted into new locations, and colours are often more vivid aesthetic collisions of the emerging political philosophies of the when isolated. In Colour Chart 65 (pink) 65, 03.09.13 jigsaw of the ‘Black Atlantic’. Asked about the superimposition (2014), the specifics of the chromatic detail are potentially of meanings onto his canvases in the brochure for his solo unreliable; the image suggests that pink blancmange might exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, from better describe the painted shape that floats over a black 4 November to 6 December 1971, Bowling responded: moustache or Liquorice Allsort. An interrogation of colour in ‘I feel very political about a lot of issues, and I’m certainly the everyday landscape invites us to enjoy the composition of political about what it means to be an artist, an artist who minimal elements in a vocabulary that rigorously pursues happens to be black, as such, and I think a lot of the things subtle nuance.