Hot Wire

Details

Allen Jones, R.A. (b. 1937)
Hot Wire
oil on canvas
96 x 144 in. (343.8 x 365.6 cm.)
Painted in 1970-71.

Provenance

Private collection, Japan, 1974-2010.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, Allen Jones Retrospective, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, 1979, no. 38, illustrated.
M. Livingstone, Allen Jones Sheer Magic, London, 1979, pp. 122-123, illustrated.

Exhibited

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Allen Jones Retrospective, March - April 1979, no. 38: this exhibition travelled to London, Serpentine Gallery, May - June; Sunderland, Museum and Art Gallery, June - July; Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, September - October; and Bielefeld, Kunsthalle, November - December.

Special notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.

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Philip Harley

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Lot Essay

Marco Livingstone comments 'It is not surprising to find in Nietzsche's Zarathustra the image of the tightrope walker as mankind balanced over an abyss; the "dangerous going-across" is a journey which every person must make. The walking of a tightrope is a metaphor also in a more purely formal sense, in that Hot Wire is concerned with various aspects of pictorial balance: weight and counter-weight; light and dark; warm and cool colours; and diagonal lines of force played against a vertical/horizontal grid. Every aspect of the picture is related to notions of equilibrium. An image is never used arbitrarily by Jones: its presence is always supportive of the pictorial and philosophical content of the painting' (see exhibition catalogue, Allen Jones, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, 1979, no. 38).

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