Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting

Details

Peter Davies (B. 1970)
Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting
signed, titled and dated 'Peter Davies 1998 'Fun with the Animals Joseph Beuys Text Painting'' (on the stretcher)
acrylic on canvas
131 7/8 x 83 7/8in. (335 x 213cm.)
Painted in 1998

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1998.

Literature

E. Booth-Clibborn, R. Timms, et al (eds.), Young British Art: the Saatchi Decade, London 1999 (illustrated in colour, p. 552).
M. Holborn (ed.), 100: The Work That Changed British Art, London 2003, p. 218 (illustrated in colour, p, 217).
C. Saatchi (ed.), Saatchi Gallery: Loan of Art, London 2006 (illustrated in colour, p. 70).
E. Booth-Clibborn (ed.), The History of the Saatchi Gallery, London 2011 (illustrated in colour, p. 363).

Exhibited

London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Die Young Stay Pretty, 1998.
London, Saatchi Gallery, New Neurotic Realism Part II, 1999.

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 20% is payable on hammer price and buyer's premium

Brought to you by

Stefano Amoretti

samoretti@christies.com +44 (0)20 7752 3323

Lot Essay

From ‘Hot 100’ charts listing favourite artists to busy abstractions and baffling flow charts, Peter Davies’ playful work exhibits a distinctively vibrant and colourful style of contemporary conceptual art. Combining text with formalism, and painting on a monumental scale with a striking technicolour palette, Davies establishes a mode of conceptualism that is immediately engrossing and entertaining. Taking the form of a colossal and flummoxing flow chart, Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting (1998) links Joseph Beuys to a multitude of other artists via an illegible network of buzzwords and phrases. ‘It requires the complicated linear thinking of a late-night drinking game’, Patricia Ellis has noted, but ‘Davies [also] presents an art history on a functional level: it’s about as close to science as it gets.’

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