Lot 190: BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD (1939 - ) Column and Fissure, No.1.

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD (1939 - )
Column and Fissure, No.1.

Charcoal on wove paper, 1978. 630x490 mm; 24 7/8x19 1/4 inches. Signed, titled and dated in pencil on the verso, and on the frame back.

Provenance: the artist, Paris, France; Galerie Le Point Cardinal, Paris; private French collection.

Exhibited: Documenta, Kassel, West Germany, 1978; Recent European Drawing and Painting, Australian Gallery Directors Council, Sydney, Australia, 1979, with the label on the frame back.

Barbara Chase-Riboud, who has lived in Paris and Rome since 1960, is a celebrated international artist who has reinterpreted Asian and African forms in striking assemblage sculpture. After graduating from Yale with a MFA in 1960, her work has been largely informed by living and traveling abroad. She received a Knighthood in Arts and Letters from the French government in 1996, and was awarded the 1998 Design Award for best art in a federal building by the United States General Services for her monumental 18-foot sculpture installed in the interior of the federal building at 290 Broadway, New York City. This commission grew out of the discovery that an 18th-century African-American burial ground exists under this site.

She is also known as the author of several historical novels, including the award-winning best seller Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's slave and mistress. Her sculptures are known for combining highly polished metal shapes with sheets of wax or strands of braided cord and fabric - they suggest a cultural otherness and confront gallery audiences with non-Western imagery. She has had exhibitons at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and has work in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.