Koller View 2/21

15 FOR FURTHER INFORMATION POSTWAR & CONTEMPORARY Silke Stahlschmidt stahlschmidt@kollerauctions.com ONLINE CATALOGUES www.kollerauctions.com Organic mosaic Preview of the PostWar & Contemporary Art auction on 1 July 2021 Born in Antwerp in 1958, Jan Fabre is one of the most innovative and diverse artistic personalities on the contemporary art scene. With ‘Adsum qui feci’, he created a unique piece of art: a large-format mosaic composed of thousands of beetle shells that iridesce depending on the lighting and angle of view. It appears almost immaterial, becoming a vast reflector of green, blue and orange light. With his baroque choice of ma- terials, the artist refers to the icons of his birthplace, from Rubens to Jordaens, while revealing his close connection to nature (Fabre studied botany as well as art). The beetle shells covering the canvas form a clock, symbolising the transition between the earth- ly dimension and eternal life. The flanking dogs could represent loyalty, devotion, and perhaps submission. Both the medium and the imagery point to Fabre’s central theme – the perpetual metamorphoses of Nature as signs of life’s transience. Peter Fischli and David Weiss transformed incon- spicuous everyday objects, such as a brick wall, into a 24-part series of shiny black rubber castings (‘Wall’), which they presented to the public in 1986/87 under the title ‘Rubber Sculptures’. Removed from their original context and translated into a different mate- rial, the everyday objects take on a life of their own as works of art. Markus Lüpertz’s sculptural works cast in bronze oscillate between painting and sculpture, thanks to their expressive colouration; here the surfaces be- come three-dimensional painting supports. Their enormous physical presence stems from their ar- chaic, raw forms, a monumental aspect even in smaller formats, and the immediate and insistent visual contact between object and viewer. The deep anchoring of Lüpertz’s pictorial world in tradition- al models from Hellenic antiquity is unmistakable; but before they can become repetitive he shatters them, in a manner both masterful and restless, thus raising questions about contemporary ideals of beauty. A strong identification with ancient myths and clas- sical Greek philosophy also characterises the work of Theodoros Stamos, an American with Greek roots who belongs to the first generation of Abstract Ex- pressionists. His expressive colour field painting, pur- sued over decades, culminates in the ‘Infinity Fields’ of his late work, represented in the July auction by a large-format painting from the ‘Lefkada’ series. With its freer surfaces and dynamically applied lines, this series appears less austere than some of his earlier works, such as the ‘Sun Boxes’ of the 1960s. Jan Fabre (1958). Adsum qui feci. 2016. Beetle shells on canvas. 164 x 220 cm. Estimate: CHF 100 000/150 000 © 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich