Lot 139: Andrei Molodkin , b.1966 yes acrylic sculpture filled with crude oil

signed with initials in Latin, dated 2007 and inscribed AP I/I on the reverse acrylic sculpture filled with crude oil

44.5 by 75cm., 17 1/2 by 29 1/2 in.

Victor and Margarita Tupitsyn (eds.), Andrei Molodkin: Cold War II, Kasha Hildebrand Gallery, Zurich, 2007

The work was executed in 2007 in an edition of 5 and the offered lot is the artist's proof.

Andrei Molodkin's YE$ deconstructs the affirmative power of the word "yes" and the dollar sign, by filling it with today's most controversial and politically charged material - crude oil. By using oil in his work, Molodkin returns to modernism's roots and its attitude towards art as resource. The idea of its utilization is comparable to the utilization of oil products, and even though oil, as raw material, is an inalienable part of "modernity," it has never been mythologized by modernists. They have used other oil-mediated images?airplanes and automobiles?but no one has ever perceived oil as the "blood" that feeds world economies. The exploration of this new medium is Molodkin's contribution to the "unfinished project" of modernism. One is left to wonder if acquiring YE$ turns a nobody into a yesbody. Margarita Tupitsyn, 2007