Aleks Danko Sold at Auction Prices

Painter, Sculptor

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    • Aleksander (Aleks) Danko, Australian (b. 1950), Block Bag, 1971, wood, metal, leather, synthetic polymer paint, pencil, plastic, 5 1/4"H x 12 1/8"W x 4"D
      Mar. 30, 2024

      Aleksander (Aleks) Danko, Australian (b. 1950), Block Bag, 1971, wood, metal, leather, synthetic polymer paint, pencil, plastic, 5 1/4"H x 12 1/8"W x 4"D

      Est: $500 - $700

      Aleksander (Aleks) Danko Australian, (b. 1950) Block Bag, 1971 wood, metal, leather, synthetic polymer paint, pencil, plastic Titled, numbered 7/7, edition #6, signed, and dated on the impressed plastic label. Biography from Monash.edu: Aleks Danko has an eye – and an ear – for the humour in art and in life. His earliest works, in the 1960s and 70s, toyed with sculpture and its turn towards conceptual art. But his dry wit soon found its target in the social mores of mainstream Australia, a rich vein that Danko has dug into throughout his career. Having completed a Diploma of Fine Art (Sculpture) at the South Australia School of Art, Adelaide, in 1970, Danko immediately gained attention as one of the new generation of conceptual artists. When art collector and philanthropist John Kaldor invited the ascendant Swiss curator Harald Szeemann to Australia in 1971 to survey contemporary Australian art as the second Kaldor Art Project, Szeemann included Danko in the first major exhibition of conceptual art in the country, I Want to Leave a Nice Well-done Child Here. Kaldor's first and still best-known Art Project had been Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia 1968–69. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had become famous for wrapping objects and monuments, and swathing a section of Australian coastline in erosion-control fabric was their most ambitious project to that point. A documentary photograph of Wrapped Coast and one of their ‘package' works represented them in the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in 1970. Aleks Danko was also in the triennial, and his own wrapped sculptures are clearly a humorous take on the international artists' practice. There is more to works such as The Danko 1971 Concept of Sculpture. SCULPTURE as being the elusive object HA! than simple pastiche. Danko was influenced by Marcel Duchamp, whose work he had seen in Marcel Duchamp: The Mary Sisler Collection at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1968. Duchamp's designation of ready-made objects as artworks, beginning with Bicycle Wheel 1913, had an unfolding influence on artists throughout the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the ready-made – exemplifying idea over material form – had taken on a foundational significance to conceptual artists. Danko's works from 1971 were assembled from prefabricated and found materials. Many of Duchamp's materials came from the hardware store, but Danko's found objects appear salvaged, as if they were new at the time Duchamp was shopping for a snow shovel or bottle rack decades earlier. Yet the resemblance of Danko's works to Duchamp's is strongest in the wordplay and jest of their titles. As Danko remarked in an interview with critic and surrealist painter James Gleeson, ‘the level of humour in it for me is very important, especially in those earlier works where they were sending up certain aesthetic notions'.[1] The Danko 1971 Concept of Sculpture. SCULPTURE as being the elusive object HA! is a neatly wrapped rectangular object resting on a weathered sack trolley. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Package on Hand Truck 1973 is strikingly similar. Danko borrowed Duchamp's methodology of the ready-made and Christo and Jeanne-Claude's trope of concealment to tackle the evaporation of the sculpted object; he managed to have his cake and eat it too by making an object that is effectively exiting the gallery, a ‘post-object' ready for shipping elsewhere. As the title and knowingly pompous plaque state, this is Danko's ‘Concept of Sculpture', an object that is present but wrapped and ready to be carried away. Curator Max Delany suggests that it points to the ‘failure of conceptual and post-object art to dematerialise the object and stem the tide of romantic, figurative sculpture in the expressive tradition'.[2] The title ends with an emphatic ‘HA!', a syllable that has rippled across Danko's oeuvre and rings as much with the canned laughter of 1970s' sit-coms as defiant exclamation. It is a ‘take that!' from a young artist taking a position in contemporary art at a time of enormous flux.

      Ripley Auctions
    • Aleks Danko (b. 1950)
      Feb. 15, 2022

      Aleks Danko (b. 1950)

      Est: $300 - $500

      Untitled mixed media on paper

      Shapiro Auctioneers
    • ALEKS DANKO (born 1950) Songs of Australia: Volume 15 - The House that John and Wendy Built (Another Stolen Generation Mix-Up) 2003...
      Jun. 28, 2021

      ALEKS DANKO (born 1950) Songs of Australia: Volume 15 - The House that John and Wendy Built (Another Stolen Generation Mix-Up) 2003...

      Est: $20,000 - $30,000

      ALEKS DANKO (born 1950) Songs of Australia: Volume 15 - The House that John and Wendy Built (Another Stolen Generation Mix-Up) 2003 ink and pencil on paper (9) and (15), accompanying screenprint, and plywood sculpture 70 x 100cm (each, sheet), 22 x 20cm (image), sculpture: 216cm (height) PROVENANCE: Sutton Gallery, Melbourne 2003 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITIONS: Clemenger Award of Contemporary Art, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004 OTHER NOTES: Working across a diverse range of media including performance art, sculpture, and works on paper, Aleks Danko creates artworks that challenge the social, political and cultural identity of Australia. Whilst his works often address a serious and thoughtful message, they are also full of irony, humour and wit. Danko is often described as one of Australia's most important conceptual artists, although he rejects that association seeing his art as a parody of conceptual art. Born to Ukrainian refugees, Danko identifies himself as both Australian as well as the "other" or outsider. At the time of his graduation from art school in 1971, the Australian art scene was in a transformative state, breaking with formal terms of late modernist painting and sculpture to pave the way for a new generation of artists eager to service the mind, not just the eye. Danko did not abandon the object altogether, but rather reconceive how the object might reveal new ideas. Greatly inspired by Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades, Danko admired how he had managed to uphold humour and irony over artistic skill in his work, and so he began to draw humour out of dark situations. Danko produced 16 Songs of Australia works beginning in 1996 following the election of John Howard when he said he was "looking forward to creating a caring, comfortable and relaxed society". Danko then began collecting slogans, statements, headlines, and comedic responses to address issues such as xenophobia, racism and nationalism, weaving these in throughout his Songs of Australia series. The decade across which Danko produced this series was marked by such occurrences such as the rise and fall of the One Nation Party, the Wik decision, the Tampa crisis, the Bali bombings and more. Danko has long used the image of a stylised house in his work, a symbol of mindedness and complacency in Australian society. A house can be a home - a place of safety and love; but also a place of darkness and confinement. The House that John and Wendy Built alludes to the story of Peter Pan in which the Lost Boys built a small house around where Wendy had fallen after arriving in Neverland. A 'Wendy House' now typically refers to a playhouse for children. The red face is also a recurring motif in Danko's work. First appearing in his work Taste in 1988, the face was originally inspired by William Hogarth's Plate 1, 'The Sculptors Yard', from the book The Analysis of Beauty, 1753. In the image, bottom right, we find Hogarth's childish face that Danko now appropriates within his works as the brainless, disembodied head of the village idiot. He especially utilises the face to signify a mindlessness, often grouped together to resemble the ignorant mob and conformity of the crowd. Olivia Fuller Head of Art

      Leonard Joel
    • Aleksander Danko (born 1950) Incidental 1989 mixed media
      Nov. 27, 2011

      Aleksander Danko (born 1950) Incidental 1989 mixed media

      Est: $300 - $500

      Aleksander Danko (born 1950) Incidental 1989 mixed media remnant of old label inscribed '10 / ALEKSANDER DANKO / Incidental- in matters of taste it is folly to be / wise, 1989' on verso Provenance: Watters Gallery, Sydney Private Collection, Sydney 59.5 x 90.5cm

      Bay East Auctions
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