THE ARTS ADVISORY BOARD
Susan Hayden, Chair
Collection Advisors
Ziba Ardalan
Mark Godfrey
Alistair Hicks
Nigel Hurst
Steve McCoubrey
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Julia Peyton-Jones OBE
Board
Chris Brodie
Kate Carrafiell
Arlene Cohrs
Michelle D’Souza
Lady Linda Davies
Rob Dickins CBE
Simon Eccles
Sally Greene OBE
Trystan Hawkins
Virginia Ibbott
Isaac Julien
Anish Kapoor CBE
Pearl Lam
Mariko Mori
Mark Norbury
Kate Pakenham
Oliver Prenn
Katherine Priestley
Nadja Romain
Polly Robinson Gaer
Kenny Schachter
Jane Suitor
Edward Tang
Mario Testino
Jolana Vainio
Lady Vaizey
Nicholas White
Karen Wright
Edwin Wulfsohn
“ARTS FOR LIFE” AUCTION
Susan Hayden
&
Chair “Arts for Life” Chris Brodie
Chairman
Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity
CHRISTIE’S
POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY
ART DAY AUCTION
Wednesday 26 June 2013 1pm
Christie’s, 8 King Street, London SW1Y 6QT
Viewing
Friday 21 June 9-5pm
Saturday 22 June 2-5pm
Sunday 23 June 12noon-5pm
Monday 24 June 9-5pm
Tuesday 25 June 9-4pm
SALE CODE
In sending absentee bids or making enquires, this sale should be referred to as 1135.
This is not a catalogue for the auction. This summary is provided as a courtesy to you and
does not include details regarding artist resale right, VAT and Christie’s buyer’s premium.
Please see the Christie’s catalogue for full descriptions, conditions of sale and other
important sale information regarding the auction.
For further information about the sale please contact:
Ed Tang
Specialist
edtang@christies.com +44(0)20 7389 2194
Tara Park
Auction Administrator
tpark@christies.com +44(0)20 7389 2446
For further information about “Arts for Life” please contact: Roberta Goldstein
roberta.goldstein@chelwest.nhs.uk +44(0)20 3315 6636
© Arts for Life
3
In its present incarnation “Arts for Life” evolved from an ongoing Trustee
discussion about the importance art can play in the healing process. In 2012
Chelsea Westminster Health Charity created an Arts Advisory Board to examine
how Chelsea Westminster Hospital could best integrate Arts and Health. We
determined that our goals would be twofold: to ensure that over time we honed
the Collection so that all works were of high quality and suitable for patients
and to bring together the Art community in order to raise funds for some of the
Hospital’s key programs. This year we selected “Borne”—a groundbreaking
initiative developed and run by Professor Mark Johnson the Hospital’s Clinical
Chair of Obstetrics, to research and treat the devastating effects of premature
birth which can result in brain damage and long term disability to babies.
Prematurity has become the leading cause of newborn deaths worldwide and
with the scope of this challenge in mind, the “Borne” initiative is working to help
mothers and babies both in the UK and the developing world—where 10% of
Mothers die during preterm labour.
I am proud to say that the Art community heard our call for help and responded
with unbelievably generous donations of paintings, sculptures, and prints which
will be Auctioned off as part of Christie’s main Post-War and Contemporary
Art Day Sale on Wednesday 26 June. We have curated this sale with some
incredibly wonderful and hard to find pieces by many of the leading artists of
our time.
As the mother of grown children I am still grateful every day to know that they
are healthy and safe. The proceeds of this Auction will go a long way towards
ensuring that Mothers and Babies worldwide are protected from the effects
of premature birth. Art can be transformative and the goal of this Campaign is
nothing short of “Arts for Life.”
Susan Hayden
Chair “Arts for Life”
June 2013
4
I am proud that UBS is supporting the “Arts for Life” auction for the benefit of
Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity. The selection of works seen here will form
part of a prestigious auction of outstanding contemporary art at Christie’s Post-War
and Contemporary Art Sale.
The works have been generously donated by some of the world’s most distinctive
artists to raise money for the purposes of establishing the mothers and babies
initiative ‘Borne’, which will fund vital research and treatment into premature birth,
the biggest cause of disability and death in newborn babies. Borne will not just
benefit families in the UK, but also in the developing world. I admire the vision of
Borne as a ground breaking, innovative and best-in-class development, as these are
qualities that we share in our work at UBS.
With your valued support, Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity will achieve the
Borne vision and their goal of raising £500,000 as a result of this auction.
Andrea Orcel
CEO UBS Investment Bank
5
Professor Mark Johnson, Consultant in Obstetrics
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
I have had the privilege to help thousands of parents give birth to healthy, happy
children. At the same time, I am always aware that the safe arrival of each
child is a miracle, life being so precarious, particularly at the very beginning.
My aim is always to try and make a pregnancy as safe as possible and so it will
be no surprise that my research has been dedicated to finding the best ways of
achieving this for both mother and baby. Over the last few months, I have been
working with Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity to establish Borne. Borne
means carried, and embraces both the mother, who has carried the baby, and
the baby, who has been carried. Borne’s aim is to improve pregnancy outcomes
the world over through research and education.
Our research is based on the recognition of the continuum that stretches from
before conception, through adulthood and on into the next generation. We know
that events in the womb shape a child’s destiny, either to live a full and healthy
life or a shorter life, punctuated by bouts of illness. We need to understand the
critical events that determine a child’s future. To achieve this, we have gathered
a group of scientists, obstetricians, neonatologists and paediatricians to define
the best environment in the womb and immediately after birth to achieve lifelong health. It is the recognition of the continuum that sets Borne apart and will
allow us to bring about improvement in pregnancy outcomes that will literally
last a lifetime.
Our education effort is based on a highly successful programme devised in
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, despite caring for a particularly
high-risk population of women, we have the lowest birth mortality rates in
England. In obstetrics, perhaps more than in any other field of medicine,
decisions have to be made in a split second and acted on immediately to ensure
the best outcome for mother and baby. We transfer our expertise by sending our
teams to train doctors, midwives and birth attendants in Ethiopia, South Africa
and Uganda. We anticipate that this training will be cascaded down to other
teams, improving the care given to many hundreds of thousands of mothers
throughout Africa.
I am deeply grateful to the Arts Advisory Board and all the artists who have
supported “Arts for Life”. Their hard work and generosity has given Borne the
chance to come to life.
Professor Mark Johnson
Consultant in Obstetrics
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Borne Founder
6
7
The Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has long been part of
Christie’s DNA. We opened our saleroom there in 1975, and from the
earliest days Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has cared for both
our staff and customers when needed, with great kindness, humour
and compassion. Indeed, many of Christie’s next generation have been
welcomed into the world by the Mother and Baby unit.
The Hospital has an important collection of art hung for the enjoyment
of all those who enter its doors. Art, and its ability to transform
people’s lives is what Christie’s is all about, and it is therefore natural
that we would want to support its endeavours to raise funds for this
vitally important programme.
We ask you to look at this carefully curated selection of wonderful
works, and consider how an acquisition will enhance the patient
experience and also give you great personal pleasure in years to come.
Jane Hay
Christie’s
8
The Saatchi Gallery’s role is to bring very contemporary art to the
widest possible audience by providing a free, innovative platform
for international emerging young artists, or more established artists
whose work has not been seen in the UK before.
These artists tend to be creative, problem solving sole traders who
reflect on the world around them and visualise their ideas by making
images or objects based on what they feel, see or think.
Nearly all of us have this ability in life to envision and create to a
greater or lesser degree; so what better way of supporting future
creativity than by helping to ensure the highest standards in care
for mothers and babies so that infants get the best possible start in
order to help them realise their full potential?
We are delighted to have the opportunity to play a part in “Arts for
Life” and help our neighbours Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
raise the funds they need for their pioneering research into and
treatment of premature birth through “Borne”.
Nigel Hurst
CEO, Saatchi Gallery
9
“ARTS FOR LIFE” AUCTION
Wednesday 26 June 2013
Christie’s, 8 King Street, London SW1Y 6QT
The “Arts for Life” Auction will be Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity’s
flagship event in 2013. Works donated for this initiative will be incorporated
within the Christie’s main Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. It is an
opportunity for the art world to join with Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to
launch a ground-breaking initiative with worldwide implications.
The goal is to raise funds for “Borne”, a new mother and baby initiative. Borne’s
aim is to translate groundbreaking research into treatments and education to
prevent disability and death in childbirth and improve the lifelong health of
mothers and babies. Professor Mark Johnson, who will lead the Borne team, is
an inspirational and world renowned consultant whose research and treatment
of babies born prematurely has been pioneering in this field. This research will
not only help people in the UK, but also in the developing world and work has
already begun with women in many parts of Africa, where there is a lifetime risk
of 1 in 21 dying in pregnancy. The programme will train and provide resources to
healthcare teams already on the ground in these parts of Africa.
Chelsea and Westminster is one of the leading hospitals in the UK, treating
more than 360,000 patients a year. It was the best hospital for clinical quality
and patient safety in the 2011 Dr Foster Hospital ranking. In 2010 Chelsea and
Westminster Health Charity was granted museum accreditation for its substantial
art collection at the Hospital, which includes a Veronese. The Charity has long
been acknowledged as a leader in the integration of arts and health.
10
THE ARTISTS
Phyllida Barlow
Edward Burtynsky
Keith Coventry
Tony Cragg
Michael Craig-Martin
Dexter Dalwood
Adrian Ghenie
Antony Gormley
Zaha Hadid
Howard Hodgkin
Shirazeh Houshiary
Chantal Joffe
Isaac Julien
Anish Kapoor
Robert Mapplethorpe
Christian Marclay
Jason Martin
Mariko Mori
Julian Opie
Grayson Perry
Paula Rego
Michal Rovner
Juergen Teller
Mark Wallinger
Clare Woods
Richard Woods
11
Shelter
Signed, titled and dated `Phyllida Barlow “shelter 2012”’ (on the reverse)
Acrylic on paper
23 x 32.1/4in. (58.5 x 82.3cm.)
Executed in 2012
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£6,000-£8,000
Photo: Alex Delfanne
© Phyllida Barlow, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth
12
Phyllida Barlow
Phyllida Barlow’s artistic career spans four decades, during which the
Newcastle-born sculptor has championed an approach to sculpture which
is robust and informal, dynamic in form and generous in scale, yet never
solemn or oppressive. Professor at the Slade school of art, she was elected
to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2011. Barlow has always stood out from
the sculptural mainstream: while other sculptors opted for high-finish
and industrial techniques of manufacture, Barlow insists on the value of
humble, everyday materials shaped and transformed by the artist’s own
physical work.
Barlow is fascinated by the sensation of mass and volume and the
experience of excess, often filling galleries to bursting-point with repeating
elements that immerse and surround the spectator. Barlow’s objects are
often playfully deceptive – polystyrene, chicken-wire and cement, for
example, become lightweight stand-ins for blocks of concrete. Barlow’s
work offers a joyfully unrefined celebration of everyday surfaces, colours
and materials, and the tactile pleasure of improvised invention.
Alongside her sculpture, Barlow paints extensively. Her paintings on
paper allow her to imagine and reconsider her sculptural work, and the
iconography of her paintings relates to questions of mass, shape, colour
and structure that inform her sculptures. These considerations are however
always grounded in the experience of everyday things: in Shelter, Barlow
outlines the form of a structure that might be found in a street or park.
Chunky and unstable, the ‘shelter’ suggests both a stubborn solidity and a
possible vulnerability. Barlow’s art turns manmade things into analogies for
both the fragility and exuberance of ordinary life.
13
Oil Spill No.4, Oil Skimming Boat, Near Ground Zero, Gulf of Mexico
Signed `Edward Burtynsky’ (on a paper label affixed to the reverse of the mount)
Chromogenic print
47.7/8 x 64in. (121.9 x 162.6cm.)
Executed in 2010, this work is number one from an edition of six
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£12,000-£18,000
© Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg & Bryce Wolkowitz, New York
14
Edward Burtynsky
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky began working in the 1980s, and
the last decade has seen his work receive growing international acclaim.
Burtynsky’s photography addresses one of the great issues of our time,
that of modern humanity’s interaction with the natural world. Burtynsky
insistently bring his lens to bear on those places where human activity
makes the most vivid – and visual – impact on the natural environment:
mines, quarries and oil refineries; motorway intersections and railway
routes; factory districts and suburban tract housing.
Burtynsky’s large-scale prints emphasise the high level of detail that is
a key aspect of the artist’s work. Burtynsky views his subjects from the
middle distance or long-range, often from elevated positions or from the air,
to produce images which connect with the classical tradition of landscape
painting. But in Burtynsky’s images, the grandeur of the natural landscape
is regularly matched or bested by the evidence of human intervention.
Burtynsky presents us with the sheer scale of the physical transformations
that human society is now capable of.
Burtynsky’s images bring to our attention the systems and processes that
make modern life possible, turning the everyday realities of industrial culture
into something both awe-inspiring yet troubling. The little vessel visible in
Oil Spill #4, Oil Skimming Boat, Near Ground Zero, Gulf of Mexico battles
not against the natural elements, but against mankind’s own unpredictable
impact on its surroundings. If there is nevertheless a strange beauty to the
patterns of oil drifting in the blue, sunlit sea, it is maybe as a reminder that
the responsibility for how we shape the world, for good or ill, ultimately
lies with us.
15
Nice - Vue de l’Escalier le Sage
Signed, titled and dated `K Coventry 2005 “NICE”’ (on the stretcher)
Oil and gesso on canvas in artist’s frame
49.3/8 x 61.1/4in. (125.3 x 155.7cm.)
Painted in 2005
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£5,000-£7,000
© Keith Coventry
16
Keith Coventry
The paintings of Keith Coventry, winner in 2010 of the prestigious John
Moores Painting Prize, are wry meditations on contemporary art and
society’s troubled relationship with the utopian aspirations and ambitions
of twentieth-century modernism. Coventry is well known for his series of
apparently abstract paintings that mimic the geometric painting of the
Russian constructivist Kazimir Malevich, but which turn out to be based
on street-signage maps of post-war London council estates. Coventry’s
work balances precisely between scepticism for the heroic and progressive
attitude of modernist culture, and a suspicion of contemporary culture’s
too-easy rejection of the modernist past.
Nice – Vue de l’Escalier Le Sage is one of a series of paintings in which
Coventry has carefully transcribed works by the French Fauvist painter
Raoul Dufy. But instead of the light and fluid washes of bright colour of
Dufy’s originals, Coventry’s copies are painted solely in black, and the
image itself is detectable only in the shifting application of the heavily
impastoed black paint. Coventry’s Nice is a bleakly humorous subversion
of an artist whose work is often dismissed for its complacently decorative
indulgence and superficial vision of a leisured and carefree world. But as
is often the case in Coventry’s work, we are prompted to consider our own
position in judging the aspirations of the art of the past. Blacking out such
a sunny world appears as a hostile and self-destructive act, but it allows
us to reflect on contemporary culture’s wider ambivalence towards the
unselfconscious pursuit of happiness.
17
Different Point of View
Incised with the artist’s initials and stamped with the foundry mark `T.C’ (on the bottom)
Bronze
23.1/4 x 8.7/8 x 9in. (59 x 22.8 x 23cm.)
Executed in 2011
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£70,000-£100,000
© Tony Cragg
18
Tony Cragg
British artist Tony Cragg is one of a generation of sculptors who radically
redefined and reenergised sculpture during the 1980s. Winner of both
the Turner Prize and the Venice Biennale in 1988, Cragg is known for his
inventive use of ordinary materials and objects, working in every material
from plastics to wood and glass, to his later works in bronze of the last
decade. Cragg’s work suggests an ongoing fascination with how organising
processes, whether organic or artificial, happenstance or rational, might
produce new and unlooked-for forms. Cragg’s early work came out of a
process of scavenging for, accumulating and sorting found objects. Extreme
accumulation of particular things – such as his stacking of sandblasted glass
bottles, or surfacing the flowing contours of a sculpture with thousands of
six-sided dice – characterises Cragg’s Different Point of View as the almost
alchemical transformation of the ordinary into the remarkable, something
static that becomes endlessly dynamic.
Having proved the sculptural potential of the most diverse range of
materials, from around 2000 Cragg turned his attention back to that most
classical of artistic materials, bronze. Cragg’s approach is characteristically
interested not in bronze’s weighty durability but in its capacity for recording
fine detail truthfully, while permitting forms which are as fluid and transitory
as the bronze is fixed. Cragg’s bronze sculptures, such as Different Point of
View, take the human body as a reference point, as their flowing forms
are closely dependent on the viewer’s perspective. Among the sculpture’s
tower of constantly evolving contours, profiles of human faces emerge and
disappear as the viewer moves around it. Cragg’s art is a celebration of the
power of organic, human and artistic renewal.
19
Untitled (Magenta/Purple)
Signed and dated `Michael Craig Martin 2009’ (on the reverse)
Acrylic on aluminium
36 x 23.7/8in. (91.6 x 60.9cm.)
Painted in 2009
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£5,000-£7,000
© 2013 Michael Craig-Martin, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
20
Michael Craig-Martin
Dublin-born, raised in America and settled in Britain since 1966, Michael
Craig-Martin is an influential artist and teacher, having been instrumental
in fostering the generation of ‘young British artists’ who emerged from
Goldsmiths College, where Craig-Martin taught. Craig-Martin’s art has its
roots in conceptualism, the artist being a key figure in the conceptual art
scene in London during the 70s. Craig-Martin’s work is concerned with the
relationship between ideas, objects and images, an approach brilliantly
realised in his notorious 1973 work An Oak Tree, in which the artist
presented a glass of water on a glass shelf, alongside a text in which the
artist explained that he had transformed the glass into an oak tree, without
having altered its material and visual properties.
Such playful paradoxes are continuously at work in Craig-Martin’s later
work, with its characteristic use of black outline to describe generic objects,
left blank or filled with flat colours. These paintings or wall drawings, often
room-sized, present us with objects that, while familiar, have no particular
or individual identity, existing rather as archetypes or ideal versions of
the objects they represent, while their changing combinations test how
meaning is assembled and reassembled in imagery. In recent years CraigMartin has brought vividly unrealistic colour to his line-objects, such as the
bright pinks of Untitled (Magenta/Purple) examining how such variables
condition our sense of the images present. Here a carton, safety pin, and a
bunch of bananas are superimposed. Seen together, they might provoke an
idea of their common, conceptual properties; of openness and receptivity,
alongside closure and concealment.
21
Marie -Thérèse
Signed and dated `Dexter Dalwood 2009’ (on the reverse)
Oil on canvas
13.7/9 x 18in. (35.5 x 45.8cm.)
Painted in 2009
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£4,000-£6,000
© Dexter Dalwood
22
Dexter Dalwood
Turner Prize nominee Dexter Dalwood paints scenes of interiors and
outdoor spaces that, while often rich in detail, are always lacking in any
human presence. Dalwood’s paintings are enigmas, with only their titles
offering some kind of key. Dalwood’s titles often refer to historical figures
– politicians, presidents, pop stars, radicals, revolutionaries, spies, artists
and authors – or identify their scenes as places of historical import: places
such as Hitler’s bunker, Greenham Common, Yalta or the Bay of Pigs.
Such people and places are already well documented, and form part of
contemporary culture’s shifting and unreliable memory bank, but Dalwood
chooses to use painting as place to reimagine and fantasise about how
history is transformed into myth.
Dalwood’s collage-like, brightly coloured and vaguely cartoonish style itself
plays games with painting’s own history, knowingly absorbing stylistic
reference from the history of modernist and classical painting. Dalwood’s
painting makes subtle references to painters such as Paul Nash and John
Everett Millais through to Matisse, Picasso and Delacroix. Dalwood’s
apparently naïve style has a disarmingly pleasant atmosphere, even though
we quickly realise that often terrible or momentous events have, or are
about to occur.
Dalwood’s painting Marie-Thérèse presents us with the further mystery
of identifying which person by that name might be the painting’s subject.
Perhaps it is Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s lover and companion, hinted
at by the strangely distorted mirror, which Dalwood has borrowed from
Picasso’s 1935 painting Fille dessinant a l’interieur. The bare floorboards
and open window suggest a lonely apartment that has been abandoned –
an empty space filled with pathos when we realise that Walter committed
suicide, only four years after Picasso’s death in 1973.
23
Feeling Material XXXVI
Signed, titled, dedicated and dated `Feeling Material for Arts for Life Anthony Gormley (on the reverse)
Carbon and casein on paper
29 7/8 x 43 7/8in. (76 x 111.6cm.)
Executed in 2010
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£15,000-£20,000
© Antony Gormley
24
Antony Gormley
One of the most active contemporary artists working around the globe from
Anchorage to Rio de Janeiro on museum shows and ambitious city and
landscape installations. His Angel of the North is now a landmark work, and
the artist’s standing figure installations have been greeted enthusiastically
by the public, not least his Another Place installation consisting of 100
life-size cast-iron figures, now permanently sited on Crosby Beach on the
Merseyside coastline. For thirty years, Gormley’s art has taken as its subject
the human body sited in space. Taking as a reference the dimensions of his
own body, Gormley’s works are considerations of the body as a particular
kind of place and space, not simply an object among others but an entity
that connects to and actively articulates the landscape and world it inhabits.
Gormley’s sculptural works have their roots in the artist’s prolific
work on paper, which develop the forms which later become threedimensional sculptures. Gormley’s images present the human body as
a set of boundaries and limits, which are nevertheless permeable to its
environment. If Gormley’s early works presented the body as a kind of
container or vessel, his more recent works present it as a concentration of
force-fields, energized and dynamic. Throughout Gormley’s work is a sense
of the human body as existentially connected to the world and the cosmos.
In Feeling Material XXXVI the human figure appears as a stick outline
of tightly wound lines, which are focal points of a more diffuse cloud of
sweeping, spiraling vectors.
25
Kloris
Glass reinforced plastic with high gloss lacquer finish and steel baseplates, in two parts
(i) Kloris Petal F 15.3/4 x 48 x 29.7/8in. (40 x 122 x 76cm.)
(ii) Kloris Petal G 15.3/4 x 80.3/8 x 28.3/4in. (40 x 204 x 73cm.)
Executed in 2013, this work is number two from an edition of twelve plus two artist’s proofs
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£35,000-£45,000
© Zaha Hadid
26
Zaha Hadid
Dame Zaha Hadid is one of today’s most significant and innovative architects
and designers. The Iraqi-born architect, who trained under and then worked
with Rem Koolhaas, set up her practice in London in 1979, taught at the
Architectural Association and has since held numerous chairs and guest
professorships at universities around the world. Since the early 80’s she has received growing recognition for her
revolutionary buildings, characterised by a complex interaction of spaces
which flow into each other, and which eschew forms of regular organisation
for a more dynamic encounter of fluid and dynamic architectural forms.
Winner of the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011, she was the first woman
to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. Hadid’s work was recently
in the public eye when she was commissioned to design the London 2012
Olympics Aquatics Centre, whose curving roof was one of the architectural
highlights of the Olympic park. Other recent commissions include the
MAXXI art museum in Rome and the Broad Art Museum in Michigan, while
2013 will see the opening of the Hadid-designed Serpentine Sackler
Gallery, in London’s Hyde Park.
Hadid also works extensively in interior design and product design,
producing designs for furniture, lighting and other objects, pieces that often
play with the interrelated fields of art, architecture and design. Kloris is a
system of related, petal-like objects which functions as seating. Originally
presented as part of an exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York
in 2008, it embodies the architect’s commitment to researching new
forms of architectural and urban space. Organic in form and hybrid in
function, Kloris allows for the viewer to decide on its use and purpose.
27
Indian Summer
Signed and dated `Howard Hodgkin 2013’ (lower left); signed with the artist’s initials and dated `HH 97’ (lower right)
Etching handcoloured with watercolour by the artist
11.3/8 x 14.3/8in. (29 x 36.6cm.)
Executed in 1997 and handcoloured in 2013, this work is unique
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£4,000-£6,000
© Howard Hodgkin
28
Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin has been a significant figure in the history of British
painting since the 1970s. British representative at the Venice Biennale in
1985, and winner of the Turner Prize in 1992, Hodgkin’s informal yet striking
paintings and prints defy easy categorisation. Avoiding the use of merely
figurative elements, Hodgkin’s works are instead virtuoso investigations
into how an arrangement of painted strokes can evoke a sense of space
and light, while invoking the emotional associations an individual has for
particular places and certain times.
Hodgkin’s early paintings seemed to share in the pop sensibility of the
1960s – bright, clean abstraction full of flat colour and hard edges. But
from the early 70s, Hodgkin turned to a more lyrical style, in which the
paint-loaded brush produced a richer, more material mark. Hodgkin’s highly
considered layering of paint strokes – the painter is known to take several
years to finish a painting – produces a strong sense of recessive depth,
producing the window- or stage-like quality characteristic of his works.
Hodgkin is a prolific and masterful printmaker. In his lithographs and
aquatints, the artist’s signature use of wide, flowing brushstrokes is
translated into the vivid clarity of the printer’s ink; the transparency and
translucency possible with printing inks allows for a different perspective
on Hodgkin’s interest in depth and layering within the image, as the artist
exploits the optical mixing of colours that can be achieved on the printing
press. Summer was a print commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York in 1997. It involved etching and aquatint from two copper
plates, with carorundum from two aluminium plates printed in six shades of
green, with hand colouring in cadmium orange and cadmium yellow acrylic.
Sixteen years later, now in his eighties, Hodgkin has reworked an extra
proof of Summer by applying two brushstrokes of transparent black acrylic
paint. He calls the resulting, unique work on paper Indian Summer. It is a
fine example of Hodgkin’s fascination with the evocative nature of colour
but it now also highlights his enduring preoccupation with mortality – warm
orange and yellow bars slant across a cool green ground and frame, an
effect intensified by the slanting black veil, capturing the tension between
mellow heat and impinging autumn that the title suggests.
29
Untitled
Signed and dated `Shirazeh Houshiary 04’ (on the reverse)
Acrylic and graphite on paper
15.5/8 x 15.5/8in. (39.6 x 39.6cm.)
Executed in 2004
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£12,000-£18,000
© Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong
30
Shirazeh Houshiary
Iranian-born artist and Turner Prize nominee Shirazeh Houshiary is one of a
generation of British-based artists that includes Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg
and Antony Gormley, which is associated with the renewal of interest in
sculpture during the 1980s. Deeply interested in the culture, philosophy and
spirituality of her Persian roots, Houshiary makes sculptures, paintings and
drawings that refer to the relationship between geometry and spirituality
as it is found in Sufi teaching. For Houshiary, the geometric forms of Islamic
art are brought into dialogue with the secular and rationalist traditions of
Western modernist geometric art. By relating the two, the artist reveals
how Western abstract art is also involved in questions of the transcendent
might be represented. Her use of lead and gold in certain sculptural works
carry alchemical connotations, referring to the possibility of transformative,
altered states.
In her intensely refined works on paper, Houshiary works with complex
ordering principles which produce evanescent, cloud-like accumulation
of marks. In works such as Untitled, these marks coalesce to bring about
luminous, intangible impressions of squares or other rudimentary forms,
either brightly glowing or emerging from a deep, primordial darkness. The
evolution of point, line, circle and square signifies a generative, living force
that in Houshiary’s work cannot be separated from a spiritual or meditative
dimension. As such, the artist’s work allows us to consider the fundamental
nature of our aesthetic response to the experience of such purified forms.
31
Vita
Signed, titled and dated `Chantal Joffe “Vita” 2012’ (on the stretcher)
Oil on canvas
16 x 12in. (40.5 x 30.4cm.)
Painted in 2012
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£4,000-£6,000
© Chantal Joffe, courtesy Victoria Miro, London
32
Chantal Joffe
In the mid 1990s, Chantal Joffe came to attention for her loosely informal
and playfully awkward figure paintings, almost exclusively of women and
children, transcribed from a wide range of photographic sources: clothing
catalogues, fashion magazines, celebrity weeklies and pornography. Rather
than compete with the seductive and persuasive realism of photographs,
Joffe’s paintings challenge the barrage of photographic media we encounter
daily with the more modest but personal act of painting. Her quirky, ironic
reworking of photographs originally intended to sell and seduce creates an
uncanny sense of tension – between our recognition of the photograph’s
original genre and intention, and Joffe’s reworking, which both celebrates
and gently ridicules the image’s original aspirations. In Joffe’s paintings we
become acutely aware of the faintly ridiculous nature of much style and
fashion photography, of how it seeks to appeal to and exploit our vanities
and insecurities.
If Joffe’s early work carried an implicitly feminist critique of the mass media
and the way it typified and coded how women should appear to others and to
themselves, her paintings of more recent years are more intimate portraits
of people around her. Named or anonymous, Joffe’s recent subjects are
the ordinary, everyday individuals that we are, rather than the stylised and
unreal figures that inhabit the media. Women, boyfriends and girlfriends,
mothers and children – such as the little girl of Vita - Joffe’s paintings are
studies in tenderness and intimacy, guardedness and reticence, and of the
tentative pleasure of looking and being looked at, recorded as honestly as
possible in paint.
33
Yishan Island, The Bridge (Ten Thousand Waves)
Endura Ultra print face-mounted on aluminium
47.1/4 x 63in. (120 x 160cm.)
Executed in 2010, this work is number one from an edition of ten plus two artist’s proofs
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£18,000-£22,000
© Isaac Julien, courtesy Victoria Miro Gallery, London
34
Isaac Julien
Turner Prize nominee Isaac Julien is one of Britain’s leading artists working
in film. His films and multi-channel video installations combine the genres
of documentary, fiction, cinema and installation art, in a complex and poetic
consideration of identity, ethnicity, sexuality and politics. Julien came to
attention with his 1989 film Looking for Langston, followed by the critically
acclaimed drama Young Soul Rebels in 1991. Continuously moving between
mainstream cinema and the world of visual art, Julien’s film and video
work has reached ever further across the globe in its exploration of the
forgotten moments and marginalised subjects of history; from gay icons
to the diaspora of globalisation, Julien creates a many-layered storytelling
which digs beneath the superficial accounts of mainstream culture.
Yishan Island, The Bridge (Ten Thousand Waves), is a landscape photograph
drawn from Julien’s multi-screen video installation Ten Thousand Waves,
which had its world premiere at the Biennale of Sydney in 2010. Taking
as its starting point the story of the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned
in Morecambe Bay in 2004, Julien’s nine-screen installation shifts from
the sands of Lancashire to the Yangtze River in China. For Ten Thousand
Waves, Julien has collaborated with some of China’s leading artists and
performers, including the legendary Maggie Cheung and visual artist Yang
Fudong; Ten Thousand Waves weaves fact and fiction with Chinese history,
legend and landscape in an ode to human migration.
35
Untitled
Fibreglass and paint
20.1/4 x 19.1/4 x 10.5/8in. (51.5 x 49 x 27cm.)
Executed in 2010, this work is from an edition of six plus two artist’s proofs
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£150,000-£200,000
© Anish Kapoor, courtesy Lisson Gallery
36
Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, whose remarkable
sculptures and public commissions, such as Orbit (2012) for London’s
Olympic Park, Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago, and Marsayas (2002) at Tate
Modern have brought him worldwide recognition. Winner of the Turner
Prize in 1991, the Indian-born sculptor rose to prominence in the 1980s.
Kapoor’s early sculptures made lavish use of vivid powder pigment to
colour otherwise abstract forms, and the artist has subsequently worked
with a diverse range of materials such as stone, polished and mirrored
surfaces, wax and P.V.C, while making increasingly large-scale works
that blur the distinction between architecture and sculpture. Whatever
their medium, Kapoor’s sculptures present us with shapes and surfaces
so purified that we might lose ourselves in them –in voids and cavities
so smooth that it is impossible to fix on their actual dimensions, or in
curving, reflecting forms that distort and reflect the world, or by using
colours of singular depth and intensity.
Kapoor’s sculptures probe the limits of visual perception and our
relationship to physical space, often producing a sense of void or
nothingness that has spiritual or meditative connotations. Untitled (2010)
continues the artist’s work with reflective surfaces and irregular forms that
defy easy conceptualisation. Both highly reflective and darkly coloured,
Untitled’s shape is hard to define, seeming to warp and swell as we look
at it. Hanging on a wall, it nevertheless seems to float independently of
its environment, as if it were a lens through to another world, rather than
a material thing in this one.
37
Alistair Butler
With the Estate of Mapplethorpe stamp; titled, numbered and dated
`UNTITLED, 1980 8/15’ (on the reverse)
Silver gelatin print flush-mounted on card
Image: 14 x 14in. (35.5 x 35.5cm.)
Sheet: 19.3/4 x 15.7/8in. (50.2 x 40.3cm.)
Executed in 1980, this work is number eight from an edition of fifteen
Provenance
Donated directly by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
Acquired from the above by the present owner
£6,000-£8,000
© Robert Mapplethorpe
38
Robert Mapplethorpe
The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the most
celebrated and controversial artists of his time. An important figure in the
New York cultural scene of the 1980s, Mapplethorpe mixed with artists
and musicians, who he frequently photographed. Musicians such as Patti
Smith (his onetime partner), Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop, and artists Andy
Warhol and Louise Bourgeois all posed for his camera.
Mapplethorpe’s mature work of the 1980s is an unbridled exploration of
beauty, desire and eroticism. His nuanced large-format, black and white
images of flowers, nude male and female bodies, and his own self-portraits, reworked classical ideals of beauty with a sexual, hedonistic energy. Living in the creative exuberance of gay culture in 80s New York,
Mapplethorpe continuously tested the dividing line between eroticism
and pornography through his images, frequently touching on the moral
and political tensions at play in America at the time. In his homoerotic
photographs of black men, for example, Mapplethorpe produced a vividly
gay aesthetic for the photographic nude, but also toyed with how racial
divisions and conflicts intersected with the politics of sexuality.
Alistair Butler (1980) is one of number of images of the young dancer.
Taken in strong contrasting light that puts emphasis on Butler’s thigh and
buttock, the image is compositionally balanced, static yet tense. Stepping
forward, the man’s forearm is loosely poised in front of him, creating an
ambivalent play between modesty and immodesty, between what is seen
and what is desired.
39
False Advertising
Each: signed and dated `Christian Marclay 1994’ (on the reverse)
Offset print, in five parts
(i) 16.3/4 x 12.3/4in. (42.9 x 32.7cm.)
(ii) 35.3/8 x 20.3/8in. (90 x 51.9cm.)
(iii) 23.3/8 x 11.3/4in. (59.5 x 30cm.)
(iv) 27.1/8 x 20in. (69 x 51cm.)
(v) 13.3/8 x 19.5/8in. (33.9 x 50cm.)
Executed in 1994
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£8,000-£12,000 (Five together)
Photo: Ben Westoby
© Christian Marclay, courtesy White Cube
40
Christian Marclay
Swiss-American Christian Marclay recently drew widespread plaudits
for his extraordinary 24-hour video work The Clock (2010) in which an
encyclopaedic sequence of old movie clips, all containing the visible
presence of clocks and watches, all chart the passing of real time. Since the
1980s, Marclay has developed a witty, energetic and insightful encounter
between contemporary art and popular culture. An art student in the late
70s drawn to the energy of the New York music scene, Marclay is credited
as one of the first to experiment with the musical possibilities of record
players as improvisational instruments, mixing and manipulating several
turntable decks simultaneously.
Such work established Marclay’s interest in the use of found fragments,
whether aural or visual, and determined the act of assemblage and collage
as a central concern of the artist’s work. Marclay makes new works from
the fragments of others, whether in the form of sculptures made from
spliced vinyl records, album covers of pop stars stitched together to form
bizarre hybrid figures, or in his increasingly ambitious video works, in which
he plunders the archives of movie history, such as The Clock or his 2002
Video Quartet, composed exclusively of sequences where film actors are
making music or singing.
False Advertising (1994) is a set of five posters, each apparently advertising
the forthcoming performance of a certain ‘Christian Marclay’ on 28th May
1994, which Marclay originally posted around in Geneva. But each poster
presents quite different kinds of performers: a guitar singer-songwriter
type, a heavy metal star, a classical violinist, a jazz saxophonist and a folk
singer. Impossibly all playing on the same night, Marclay’s fictional personas
highlight how much our experience of music is intertwined with codes of
design, style and cultural status. By mimicking the conventional signs of
each musical genre, Marclay playfully undermines them, suggesting a more
uncertain and experimental world of artistic possibilities.
41
Zinc
Pure pigment on canvas
11.3/4 x 12.1/2in. (30 x 32cm.)
Painted in 2010
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist, courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris / Salzburg
£7,000-£10,000
© Jason Martin
42
Jason Martin
British Painter Jason Martin is one of a generation of artists who studied
at Goldsmiths College in the wake of the ‘Britart’ wave of artists such as
Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Taking inspiration from both minimalism
and abstract expressionism, Martin makes paintings whose subject is the
paint itself – how it can be manipulated and applied, and what effects
such a surface might produce. Martin’s paintings are always monochrome,
a single chosen colour applied with custom-made brushes, on Perspex or
aluminium. In his early painting these brushes would be used to sweep
the paint surface with swirling, shifting striations which, by Martin’s
virtuoso manipulation, would produce warped patterns of reflected light,
akin to the effect of light falling on the grooves of a vinyl record. Producing
intense optical effects of curve and motion, Martin’s paintings redefine
the relationship between image, painting and sculpture to produce create
gestural effects full of dramatic emotional charge.
In his more recent paintings, such as Zinc (2010), Martin continues his
investigation of paint’s material possibilities, but has switched from the
very thin to the very thick: instead of oil paint applied to a polished support,
Martin mixes pure pigment into a paste-like sculptural medium which
allows for an exaggerated impasto. Swirls and curves course through
the painting, in waves that suggest the passage of a paintbrush, and yet
these appear as if they were magnified and sculpted representations of
brushstrokes, provoking the paradoxical notion that the work is a sculpture
of painting – a representation of the act of painting, rather than painting as
an act of representation.
43
Wave UFO (Model)
Lucite
14 x 15 x 37in. (35.5 x 38.1 x 93.9cm.)
Executed in 2002, this work is from an edition of ten plus one artist’s proof
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£15,000-£20,000
© Mariko Mori
44
Mariko Mori
Japanese artist Mariko Mori has, since the 1990s, played with how
ideas of wonder, otherness and spirituality might continue to exist in a
world defined by technology and consumer culture. In her early work,
Mori invented and assumed fantastical female characters that mixed
the obsessions of Japanese manga culture, science-fiction and hightech fashion. Mori’s robot-girl-alien characters exaggerated the synthetic
aspect of pop culture’s stereotyping of the roles adopted by women, while
pointing to how such artifice might become a tool of empowered selfinvention. For Mori, being able to step outside one’s ‘self’ is a form of
liberation.
In the last decade, Mori has increasingly drawn into her work elements of
Eastern spiritual tradition, reworking these into a futuristic iconography
of transcendence, utilizing the imagery of temples, goddesses or
Neolithic stone circles. Mori’s interest in ancient religion, spiritual
themes and meditative practice aligns with contemporary desires to
escape the materialist preoccupations of secular society, and the artist
gives shape to this in works that often deploy translucent or luminous
materials with sophisticated, interactive digital elements. Wave UFO
(Model), cast in Lucite, is a scaled model of Mori’s extraordinary 2003
sculpture-cum-installation Wave UFO, a huge, spacecraft-like pod in
which visitors can enter.
45
Goat Girl IV
Signed and inscribed ‘Paula Rego unique proof’ (lower edge)
Etching extensively handcoloured with watercolour by the artist
Plate: 19.1/2 x 14.3/4in. (49.5 x 37.5cm.)
Executed in 2010 and handcoloured in 2012, this work is unique
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£5,000-£7,000
© Paula Rego, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art, London
46
Paula Rego
Over a career spanning four decades, the Portugese-born painter Paula
Rego has won critical acclaim for her emotionally powerful and unnerving
paintings and works on paper. Rego conjures a strange and complex world
in which folklore, personal biography, literary reference and political and
psychosexual themes are combined in an atmosphere of grotesque and
often comic surrealism.
Rego’s early work fused influences from earlier abstract art and surrealism,
in often energetic and sometimes violent compositions whose contorted
biomorphic figures made reference to her personal life as well as the
political situation in Portugal, at that time ruled by the authoritarian regime
of Antonio Salazar. At the beginning of the 1980s, Rego turned to the more
strongly figurative style she is known for today. Rego’s elaborate, cartoonish
illustrative style, based on lengthy preparatory studies using props and
models, looks back to the dark visions of Goya, as well as eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century caricaturists such as Hogarth, Gilray and Tenniel.
Rego’s images are invariably of women or girls who – as in Goat Girl IV are often found in the company of dolls, mannequins, animals and other
monsters. Depicted in claustrophobic interiors or in night-time landscapes,
Rego’s women are strong and defiant in the face of the dreamlike
predicaments they find themselves in. Exploring the darker recesses of
female experience - of care and longing, desire and jealousy – Rego’s art
revels in the adversity – emotional, sexual and political – that women
continuously confront and strive to overcome.
47
Dark Lights
Signed `Michal ROVNER’ (lower right); numbered and dated `Ed. 1/6 2012’ (lower left)
Cibachrome print
Image: 18.3/4 x 33.3/8in. (47.5 x 84.8cm.)
Sheet: 26 x 43.7/8in. (66 x 111.5cm.)
Executed in 2012, this work is number one from an edition of six plus one artist’s proof
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist, the Pace Gallery
£8,000-£12,000
© Michael Rovner, courtesy the Pace Gallery.
48
Michal Rovner
Israeli artist Michal Rovner works in video, sculptures installation and
drawings – her works are meditations on the experience of collective
and common humanity, on how we relate ourselves to the past of human
society, and to the political and territorial identities of the present. The
artist, who represented Israel at the 2003 Venice Biennale and created a
major installation for the Louvre in 2011, is known for her hypnotic and
troubling works in which masses of tiny human figures are seen as if from a
great distance, and which move, in choreographed lines or masses, across
wide open spaces. Composed and edited, Rovner’s human figures converge,
coalesce and part company, often resembling the marks of handwriting or
music notation. In many works, Rovner’s images are projected onto slabs of
stone, and associations with archaeology and the history of the landscape
are an important aspect of the artist’s visual poetics. At the Louvre, the
artist assembled stones that she had collected from destroyed houses from
sites in Israel, Syria and the West Bank, to build walled enclosures that
recall the ruins of ancient temples.
In the image of the Cypress tree, a tree rich in cultural and historical
associations throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East, and whose
tall, swaying form presides over Rovner’s landscapes in a series of videos
and photographs. Dark Lights is one such image, depicting three Cypress
trees silhouettes, standing before a darkened landscape, in which one
can make out tiny walking figures. Rovner’s haunting image presents us
with a poetic meeting-place of human life memory, place and time in an
imaginary future.
49
Kitten, Canada
Cibachrome print
Image: 15.7/8 x 24.1/4in. (40.5 x 61.5cm.)
Sheet: 20 x 24.1/4in. (51 x 61.5cm.)
Executed in 2001, this work is number eight from an edition of ten
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£4,000-£6,000
© Juergen Teller
50
Juergen Teller
Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation,
Juergen Teller has for over a decade criss-crossed energetically between
the art world and the worlds of fashion and style photography. The
London-based German photographer’s informal, unstaged way of working
has redefined the conventions of fashion photography, allowing a sense
of the personal and emotional connections between the photographer
and his subject to appear in fresh and unpredictable ways. Like highly
tuned snapshots, Teller’s images capture dynamic moments in the lively,
unselfconscious interaction he develops with his sitters, which have
included celebrities ranging from Kate Moss and Lily Cole to Kurt Cobain
and Vivienne Westwood.
Teller’s approach to picturing informal and personal moments in the lives of
his subjects extends to his own friends and family – Teller’s work constantly
moves in and out of autobiography, his style of photography carefully tuned
to the changing pace of his life as he documents it. Alongside his more taut
and confrontational commercial photography, Teller has produced more
meditative works, of the English countryside, or of his son growing up, or
of his mother Irene, in the woods near Teller’s childhood home in Germany.
Kitten, Canada epitomizes Teller’s skill at finding emotional depth in
everyday situations without resorting to sentimentality. Wary and attentive,
the kitten is poised somewhere between its natural independence and its
obvious vulnerability. Teller’s subjects, whether young and hopeful or old
and world-worn, are always ready to live life to the full.
51
Self Portrait (Freehand 6)
Signed and dated `M.J Wallinger 2013’ (on the reverse)
Oil on canvas
19.1/2 x 15.3/4in. (49.6 x 40cm.)
Painted in 2013
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£10,000-£15,000
© Mark Wallinger, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery
52
Mark Wallinger
Mark Wallinger is one of Britain’s most consistently unpredictable and
inventive contemporary artists. Turner prize nominee in 1995 and winner
in 2007, Wallinger is best known for his 2001 Fourth Plinth commission,
the sculpture of Christ entitled Ecce Homo, and State Britain, his 2007
recreation of anti-war protestor Brian Haw’s protest placards, installed
inside Tate Britain. Active since the late 1980s, Wallinger’s work initially
turned around questions of British culture, national identity and social
class, in works which blended equal measures of conceptualism and
humour – as with his purchase of a working racehorse, which he renamed
A Real Work of Art.
More broadly, Wallinger’s work is an investigation into what conditions
our sense of self and identity, a question which draws in many themes,
from politics and religion to physical site, urban context and social history.
His Self-Portrait paintings, a series Wallinger began in 2007, and the first
paintings he has made in over a decade, are all of the capital letter ‘I’, as
it appears in different typographical fonts, such as Garamond, Helvetica
or Times Roman. Wallinger is interested in how typographical fonts are
expressive and can be described as having their own ‘character’ – light
or playful, traditional, modern, authoritative or quirky – much in the same
way as a person might try to represent themselves in a self-portrait. In
a few of the series, as with Self Portrait (Freehand 6), Wallinger paints
the outline by hand, producing a form which seems more ambiguous and
uncertain, suggesting that personal identity is always shifting and subject
to reinvention and rediscription.
53
Last Laugh
Signed, titled and dated `Last Laugh Wood 2012’ (on the reverse)
Oil on aluminium
27.1/2 x 19.5/8in. (69.8 x 50cm.)
Painted in 2012
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£4,000-£6,000
© Clare Woods, courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London
54
Clare Woods
Clare Woods came to attention at the beginning of the millennium, for dark,
psychologically tense paintings that suggest the natural landscape while
verging on abstraction. The artist has realised a number of recent important
exhibitions and public commissions, among them an important solo show
at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2012, and her extraordinary mural work for
London’s Olympic Park.
Woods’s landscape paintings have their origins in photographs the painter
takes in woodland areas, after dark or at twilight. Woods’s paintings,
painted in enamel or oil paint on aluminium, do not present us with a
clearly recognisable image of nature in the middle-distance, but instead
combine identifiable elements – branches, grasses or reflecting water –
with less natural, gestural streaks and areas of colour. The shallow space
of the paintings, combined with their unreal and sometimes hallucinatory
tones, draws us into a world which, while initially hinting at familiar detail,
steadily turns into a more emotionally charged and absorbing experience of
colour, light and form. Drawing on the darker aspects of life that remain just
below the surface of the everyday, Woods is interested in English folk myth,
pagan traditions and fairytales, forms of culture in which ritual is linked to
the natural landscape.
In more recent paintings, such as Last Laugh, Woods has moved from the
often very large landscape format she is best known for to smaller portrait
formats. In these paintings, Woods’s layered and swirling paint suggest
organic and vegetal forms, but also coalesce in ways which hint at the
shape of a head or face, half perceived and yet perhaps merely a figment of
our overactive imaginations.
55
Dirty Chairs
2013
(i) signed, titled, dated twice and inscribed `Richard Woods 2013 “DIRTY CHAIR Nov-March” (on the underside)
(ii) signed, titled, dated twice and inscribed `Richard Woods 2013 “DIRTY CHAIR Feb-April” (on the underside)
(iii) signed, titled, dated twice and inscribed `Richard Woods 2013 “DIRTY CHAIR Jan-March” (on the underside)
(iv) signed, titled, dated twice and inscribed `Richard Woods 2013 “DIRTY CHAIR Mar-April” (on the underside)
Wood, oil and glue, in four parts
Each: 24.1/2 x 28.3/8 x 24.3/4in. (62.4 x 72.3 x 63cm.)
Executed in 2013
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
£4,000-£6,000
© Richard Woods Studio
56
Richard Woods
Richard Woods is well known for his paintings, interior installations and
architectural projects, in which the artist deploys his instantly recognisable
hand-printed, luridly coloured patterns which mimic the knots and grain of
cut wood or the flagstones of crazy paving. Mixing and clashing art, graphic
design, furniture and architecture, Woods’s work plays provocatively with
the codes of decorative taste, of popular enthusiasms versus high-culture
refinement, in which the authentic and traditional are usurped by the
cheery superficiality of pop culture and mass production.
Woods’s signature patterned surfaces, which are cartoonish impressions
of the material they represent, are like wildly exaggerated versions of the
MDF laminate flooring that is installed in homes across the country. A
material that, though made of wood fibres, is often printed with an image
of ‘real’ wood. Woods’s art addresses the nature of this artifice, which
also informs modernist design’s commitment to ‘truth to materials’.
Dirty Chairs is one design from a number of furniture pieces Woods has
created which pastiche classics of twentieth century modernist design.
Dirty Chairs bears an uncanny resemblance to Gerrit Rietveld’s 1934 ‘Crate
Chair’, an austerity-era design that Rietveld intended to be made easily
from cheap crate wood. The design of the surfaces of Dirty Chairs suggests
wear and tear, even though the chairs themselves are pristine, and Woods
presents us with the odd paradox of a new object that has a ‘worn-in’
look – an ironic comment on the notion of ‘honest materials’, and on how
the attractive, authentic patina of age and use is itself perhaps only ever
skin-deep.
57
AUCTION ITEMS FOR 24 JUNE DINNER
Dino Crawling.4
Silkscreen on painted wooden board
2010
2’02” x 3’37” (61.8 x 103cm)
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist
© Julian Opie, courtesy Lisson Gallery
58
Julian Opie
Julian Opie’s images and animations have become instantly recognisable
icons of contemporary British art. Opie, who studied at Goldsmiths
College in the early 1980s, is known for his clear, stylised interpretation
of contemporary life, in which detail and shape is often reduced to flat
colour and bold outline, and where the world and its people are distilled to
universal, anonymous essentials. In his portraits and figures, he captures
something of how people communicate their sense of self through clothing,
posture and hairstyles.
It is in his portrait works that, over the last fifteen years, Opie has most
vividly explored the ambiguity between individuality and anonymity. Opie
invites us to project our intuitions about the character and emotions of his
sitters into a bare minimum of graphic notation.
Dino Crawling. 4 is one of a series of four individual paintings of a colleague’s
new-born baby. With a circle in place of a head like an information sign, but
with a more naturalistic body, it is the baby’s determined sense of movement
that brings his character to life. The image is cleanly silkscreened onto a
powder coated fibreboard panel much like a kitchen surface or a public sign
while colour, image and scale suggest a painting hanging on a gallery wall.
59
The Silent Thief
2012
11.8 x 8.2in. (30 x 21cm)
To be sold by PACE LONDON (020 3206 7600) with proceeds to be donated to Arts for Life.
Provenance
Donated directly by the artist, the Pace Gallery
© Adrian Ghenie, courtesy the Pace Gallery
60
Adrian Ghenie
The young Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie has steadily gained a following
over the last six years for his shadowy, disconcerting paintings that recall the
darker recesses of twentieth-century European history. The artist emerged
from the lively artistic scene that developed in Cluj, Romania, where Ghenie
studied, and where he subsequently co-founded the art space Plan-B, a
gallery that represents Romanian artists and supports research into the
history of Romanian art. Ghenie has had important recent solo exhibitions
at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, and at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in
Bucharest.
From fascist and communist dictators to the figures and events of the artistic
avant-garde, Ghenie’s sepulchral vision of dusty back rooms and faceless
apparatchiks acts as a paradoxical memorial to a world now long gone.
Ghenie’s paintings are full of erasures, scrapings and overworking, as if the
artist is intent on dramatizing the process of remembering and forgetting,
especially of a period in which regimes worked hard to rewrite history. This
is strikingly apparent in Ghenie’s portrait paintings in which anonymous,
official-looking men have their faces obliterated by thick, smeared paint.
These paintings, often subtitled ‘pie fight’ suggests a comic and absurdist
riposte by the painter to these oppressive authority figures.
Ghenie’s paintings are the result of extensive preparatory works on paper,
where the artist mixes collaged elements from photographic sources with
other media to establish the image he will later paint. Other works on paper
stand alone, such as The Silent Thief. Here an inscrutable hooded figure
sits calmly in an armchair, oddly at home given his appearance – an image
that mixes menace and incongruity in a surreal political comment on power,
subterfuge and complicity.
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Terre Geroise
Donated by the artist to the Hospital
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PHOTOGRAPHER
JANET PEARCH
All the images for Borne have been kindly shot and produced by photographer
Janet Pearch.
Janet Pearch studied photography at Central St Martins and at the School
of Black and White photography, where she mastered the skill of darkroom
and digital printing. Inspired by Ansel Adams Janet has spent years
documenting the dramatic landscapes in Southern France and in particular
has captured the infamous Col de Tourmalet, Col d’Aubisque and Mont
Ventoux during the Tour de France. Through her photojournalistic style, she
has become accustomed to the local culture of the region, and her portraits
and landscapes reflect her deep love of the rural area. Her style is enigmatic
with virtually little or no manipulation on her works. Her recent exhibition
entitled ‘Terre d’accueil’ in South West France, explored the local’s who live
in the small bastide villages. Surrounded by stunning rolling hills, with the
Pyrenees as a backdrop, Janet was able to capture the beauty of this rustic
community. Janet works as a freelance photographer and has worked for
the BBC, amongst many others. She has also exhibited in Sarrant, Solomiac
& Monfort in France and in The Crypt at St Martin in the Fields.
Terre Gersoise – one of her images taken from her recent exhibition
‘Terre d’accueil, illustrates the intense and vivid background of this rural
community. There is juxtaposition between the rich fabrics of the natural
landscape with the telephone line of the modern world. The tractor seems
to almost balance in between the two, undecided which world he should
enter. Taken in the late afternoon this spectacular landscape reminds us of
the strength of this fertile brown soil, which deep furrows lead us to even
greener pastures.
Text by Janet Pearch.
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SPONSORS
GALLERIES
team &
Suppliers
THE SPONSORS
THE GALLERIES
Anthony Reynolds Gallery
Flowers Gallery
Haunch of Venison
Hauser & Wirth
Lisson Gallery
Lehmann Maupin
Marlborough Gallery
Modern Art
Pace Gallery (London)
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Victoria Miro
THE TEAM
Monika Kurtova
Debbie Pearce
Tikki Cash
Rebecca Matts
Kirsten McSherry
Katie Moore
Mili Patel
Freddie Patterson-Morgan
THE SUPPLIERS and OTHERS WHO HELPED
Alan Cristea
John Jones
Gagosian Gallery
Purple PR
White Cube
Thanks to all of the above who have helped
make “Arts For Life” a success
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Chelsea and Westminster
Health Charity
Registered Charity no1067412
CHELSEA AND WESTMINSTER
HEALTH CHARITY
Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity is the official charity for the Chelsea and Westminster
NHS Hospital. We change the lives of 360,000 patients treated at Chelsea and Westminster
Hospital every year; funding projects which enhance the care, comfort and support offered
to them and their families. The Charity has long been acknowledged to be a leader in the
integration of the arts in health to improve patients’ care and experience. In 2010 the Charity
was granted museum accreditation for its substantial art collection at the Hospital.
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Artist texts by JJ Charlesworth
Borne photography by Janet Pearch
Catalogue design by Vincent William Gagliostro
Reproduction of the texts is permitted only with the
written permission of the authors and the publisher.
© Copyrights for reproductions of the works of art
are by kind permission of the artists.
All rights remain with them.
The safe
arrival
of every
baby
is a
miracle
Registered Charity no1067412
Every mother has the right to a healthy pregnancy,
regardless of where she lives
Chelsea and Westminster
Health Charity