Lot Essay
Annie Cabigting's painting Whiteout (Af ter Asher) takes off from the groundbreaking work of American conceptual artist Michael Asher. Known for his site-specific interventions in museums, galleries and exhibition spaces, Asher's works "take the form of subtle yet deliberate additions, subtraction, alterations," reconfiguring and interrogating both material and immaterial spaces and how we interact with them. Cabigting quotes his Untitled work made in 1974, wherein Asher removed the wall separating the exhibition space from the back room of the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, exposing the otherwise hidden business operations of the gallery.
Asher encourages a re-thinking of how we inhabit space, or more pointedly he addresses ways in which cultural institutions present themselves and the objects in their collection. In a similar vein, much of Cabigting's works question the complexities of looking and how artworks are privileged, recorded, and reproduced throughout art history. Her photoreal ist paint ings are exclusively based on documentation of iconic works by other artists, such as Francis Bacon, Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Craig-Martin, Mel Bochner, Martin Creed, Poklong Anading, and her mentor Roberto Chabet, whose notorious work Tearing Into Pieces was appropriated by Cabigting in her first solo exhibition 100 Pieces, for which she won the Ateneo Art Award in 2005.
Photography plays a crucial role in Cabigting's practice. She comments on the dialectics of seeing, simulacra and representation by depicting artworks often in the state of being viewed or sometimes on their own. She enlarges and reproduces the images, which she gathers from artbooks, catalogs, other photographers, or sometimes from her own shoots, in a methodical grid-by-grid manner. Cabigting's paintings however must not be taken as straightforward representations of the artworks themselves. Rather her work is a systematic reconstruction of their photographic histories in order to examine and subvert the cycles of visual consumption.
Asher encourages a re-thinking of how we inhabit space, or more pointedly he addresses ways in which cultural institutions present themselves and the objects in their collection. In a similar vein, much of Cabigting's works question the complexities of looking and how artworks are privileged, recorded, and reproduced throughout art history. Her photoreal ist paint ings are exclusively based on documentation of iconic works by other artists, such as Francis Bacon, Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Craig-Martin, Mel Bochner, Martin Creed, Poklong Anading, and her mentor Roberto Chabet, whose notorious work Tearing Into Pieces was appropriated by Cabigting in her first solo exhibition 100 Pieces, for which she won the Ateneo Art Award in 2005.
Photography plays a crucial role in Cabigting's practice. She comments on the dialectics of seeing, simulacra and representation by depicting artworks often in the state of being viewed or sometimes on their own. She enlarges and reproduces the images, which she gathers from artbooks, catalogs, other photographers, or sometimes from her own shoots, in a methodical grid-by-grid manner. Cabigting's paintings however must not be taken as straightforward representations of the artworks themselves. Rather her work is a systematic reconstruction of their photographic histories in order to examine and subvert the cycles of visual consumption.