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拍品专文
‘One of the most striking things about his work is what good company it makes. It shares a joke. It may even offer you a seat’ (Franz West)
Held in the collection of Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian since 2009, Blue Luck is a joyful interactive sculpture by Franz West. It takes the shape of a three-legged bench lacquered in a charming powder-blue. Three long projections rear up like zigzagging limbs, creating a biomorphic canopy. Invited to sit beneath them, the viewer’s body becomes an active part of the work, and the work a podium for the participant. West began producing his beloved large-scale, brightly painted tubular and bulbous sculptures in the mid-1990s, initially in welded sheets of aluminium and later in fibreglass. Many of them include places to sit. In the same year as Blue Luck, West’s first American survey exhibition was staged at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He created a monumental pair of looping forms with projecting seats titled The Ego and the Id—his largest sculpture to date—especially for the retrospective. The work was installed in Central Park, New York from 2009 to 2010.
Born in Vienna in 1947, West came of age during an era of radical performance art in the 1960s and 1970s. While he embraced their notion of a direct engagement between audience and artwork, West did not share the nihilistic bent of the Viennese Actionists, many of whom confronted their viewers with spectacles of violence and horror. He went on to develop a body of work that was instead colourful, inviting, and buoyant—if no less steeped in his city’s tradition of psychoanalytic thought. In 1974, he began to create portable mixed-media objects called Paßstücke (‘Adaptives’, or ‘Prosthetics’) that became artworks only when touched, worn, carried or otherwise activated by the viewer. West saw them as giving shape to the users’ neuroses, impeding or transforming the way they moved through the world. Over the following decades, he went on to create a diverse array of large-scale sculptures, furniture and set-design-like public installations, united in their tactility, humour and deflation of self-seriousness.
In works such as Blue Luck that can be installed outdoors, West’s rejection of the bombast of monumental sculpture comes to the fore. These colourful, playful and handmade-looking objects are, as Rosanna McLaughlin writes, ‘a far cry from the statues of imperial eagles, emperors and military commanders typical to Vienna, where he grew up. The impression of lightness is enhanced by the fact that West never attempted to disguise the hollowness of his structures—a material honesty that remains unusual in public sculpture, which still tends to rely on looking solid and expensive in order to command attention’ (R. McLaughlin, ‘The Companionable Franz West’, ArtReview, 20 May 2019). While other art-historical echoes might loom—from Giacometti’s raw human forms to Claes Oldenburg’s surreal, soft sculptures of everyday items—West’s work is equally free of the decorum and difficulty associated with the avant-garde. Blue Luck is an irresistible presence that invites wonder and touch, embodying the ethos of an artist who found endless pleasure in bringing art and viewer closer together.
For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian
‘I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art’ (Tiqui Atencio)
For Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian, art functions as a catalyst for conversation: between an artist and the world, and between the public and the society they inhabit. ‘[Artists] are the antennas of the world,’ Tiqui says, ‘picking up on the energy and transforming it into their own vocabulary for us to appreciate, to see, to feel.’ For the Venezuelan-born collector and tastemaker, those conversations began in her early 20s, when her beloved aunt and uncle started taking her to galleries and museums all over the world. Enthralled by the works of art that she saw, Tiqui set out to learn as much as she could, sparking what would become a lifetime endeavour.
The product of these visits, along with countless other conversations, is a dynamic collection that encapsulates the artistic zeitgeist of the past few decades. Following the sale of selected works in New York, Paris and London earlier this year, Christie’s is delighted to present a large and outstanding group from the collection in London this October. Spread across the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale and Post-War & Contemporary Art Day and Online Sales, these works capture Tiqui’s immersion in the British art scene at the turn of the millennium. Among them are exceptional works by Damien Hirst, including Never Mind (1990-1991)—one of the artist’s earliest Medicine Cabinets—and the rare parallelogram-shaped Pharmaceutical Painting Nalorphine (1995). Works by Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and others are brought into dialogue with international artists including Franz West, Fischli & Weiss and Sarah Morris. The group also pays tribute to Tiqui’s love of Latin American art, with works by artists such as Carlos Garaicoa, Oscar Murillo and Ernesto Neto.
Tiqui’s highly refined eye has led her to become a sought-after advisor to museums around the world. Together she and Ago have served on influential committees including the International Council of the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Tiqui’s passion to communicate the joys she has found in art has also resulted in several critically acclaimed books, including Could Have, Would Have, Should Have (Art/Books, 2016), For Art’s Sake: Inside the Homes of Art Dealers (Rizzoli, 2020), and Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake (Rizzoli, 2024).
Held in the collection of Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian since 2009, Blue Luck is a joyful interactive sculpture by Franz West. It takes the shape of a three-legged bench lacquered in a charming powder-blue. Three long projections rear up like zigzagging limbs, creating a biomorphic canopy. Invited to sit beneath them, the viewer’s body becomes an active part of the work, and the work a podium for the participant. West began producing his beloved large-scale, brightly painted tubular and bulbous sculptures in the mid-1990s, initially in welded sheets of aluminium and later in fibreglass. Many of them include places to sit. In the same year as Blue Luck, West’s first American survey exhibition was staged at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He created a monumental pair of looping forms with projecting seats titled The Ego and the Id—his largest sculpture to date—especially for the retrospective. The work was installed in Central Park, New York from 2009 to 2010.
Born in Vienna in 1947, West came of age during an era of radical performance art in the 1960s and 1970s. While he embraced their notion of a direct engagement between audience and artwork, West did not share the nihilistic bent of the Viennese Actionists, many of whom confronted their viewers with spectacles of violence and horror. He went on to develop a body of work that was instead colourful, inviting, and buoyant—if no less steeped in his city’s tradition of psychoanalytic thought. In 1974, he began to create portable mixed-media objects called Paßstücke (‘Adaptives’, or ‘Prosthetics’) that became artworks only when touched, worn, carried or otherwise activated by the viewer. West saw them as giving shape to the users’ neuroses, impeding or transforming the way they moved through the world. Over the following decades, he went on to create a diverse array of large-scale sculptures, furniture and set-design-like public installations, united in their tactility, humour and deflation of self-seriousness.
In works such as Blue Luck that can be installed outdoors, West’s rejection of the bombast of monumental sculpture comes to the fore. These colourful, playful and handmade-looking objects are, as Rosanna McLaughlin writes, ‘a far cry from the statues of imperial eagles, emperors and military commanders typical to Vienna, where he grew up. The impression of lightness is enhanced by the fact that West never attempted to disguise the hollowness of his structures—a material honesty that remains unusual in public sculpture, which still tends to rely on looking solid and expensive in order to command attention’ (R. McLaughlin, ‘The Companionable Franz West’, ArtReview, 20 May 2019). While other art-historical echoes might loom—from Giacometti’s raw human forms to Claes Oldenburg’s surreal, soft sculptures of everyday items—West’s work is equally free of the decorum and difficulty associated with the avant-garde. Blue Luck is an irresistible presence that invites wonder and touch, embodying the ethos of an artist who found endless pleasure in bringing art and viewer closer together.
For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian
‘I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art’ (Tiqui Atencio)
For Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian, art functions as a catalyst for conversation: between an artist and the world, and between the public and the society they inhabit. ‘[Artists] are the antennas of the world,’ Tiqui says, ‘picking up on the energy and transforming it into their own vocabulary for us to appreciate, to see, to feel.’ For the Venezuelan-born collector and tastemaker, those conversations began in her early 20s, when her beloved aunt and uncle started taking her to galleries and museums all over the world. Enthralled by the works of art that she saw, Tiqui set out to learn as much as she could, sparking what would become a lifetime endeavour.
The product of these visits, along with countless other conversations, is a dynamic collection that encapsulates the artistic zeitgeist of the past few decades. Following the sale of selected works in New York, Paris and London earlier this year, Christie’s is delighted to present a large and outstanding group from the collection in London this October. Spread across the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale and Post-War & Contemporary Art Day and Online Sales, these works capture Tiqui’s immersion in the British art scene at the turn of the millennium. Among them are exceptional works by Damien Hirst, including Never Mind (1990-1991)—one of the artist’s earliest Medicine Cabinets—and the rare parallelogram-shaped Pharmaceutical Painting Nalorphine (1995). Works by Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and others are brought into dialogue with international artists including Franz West, Fischli & Weiss and Sarah Morris. The group also pays tribute to Tiqui’s love of Latin American art, with works by artists such as Carlos Garaicoa, Oscar Murillo and Ernesto Neto.
Tiqui’s highly refined eye has led her to become a sought-after advisor to museums around the world. Together she and Ago have served on influential committees including the International Council of the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Tiqui’s passion to communicate the joys she has found in art has also resulted in several critically acclaimed books, including Could Have, Would Have, Should Have (Art/Books, 2016), For Art’s Sake: Inside the Homes of Art Dealers (Rizzoli, 2020), and Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake (Rizzoli, 2024).