Lot 342: DAVID ALTMEJD

THE NEW NORTH

145 by 53 by 42 in. 368.3 by 134.6 by 106.7 cm.

wood, foam, expandable foam, resin, paint, Magic-sculpt, Magic-Smooth, epoxy, glue, mirror, horse hair, quartz crystals and wire

Executed in 2007.

Tilburg, De Pont museum of contemporary art, Lustwarande 08 - Wanderland, De Oude Warande, June - August 2008

Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Double the size of an average man, David Altmejd's The New North, is a compellingly industrious fusion of painted flesh, fur, bristly colored stalactites, mirror and quartz. This authoritative figure inherently possesses a formidable presence, conveyed not only by scale, but due to the shallow voids that imbibe its persona. Gouged recesses are lined with fragments of mirror, crystals and glittery colored stalactites. Rather than representing death, Altmejd's Giant represents something otherworldly, and within its corporeal abstraction, the grotesque becomes transcendental. "I think of decay not in a negative way, but in the sense of creating a space for things to start growing," (David Altmejd as quoted by Catherine Hong, "Beyond Tomorrow," W: The Art Issue, November 2007, p. 212).

The veritable showstopper in the 2007 Venice Biennale, the present work was Altmejd's first foray after the stunning success of the show. Two years later, his fantastically abstracted Giants are already vividly ensconced into the Contemporary Art World psyche. The Guggenheim Museum's Nancy Spector, who navigated a major acquisition of the artist's work, states that Altmejd has, "a really unique aesthetic vocabulary, combining the horrific and the sublime." (Ibid, p. 214). The sprawling Giants have been argued to be a sort of "nature morte" for a voyeuristic and fashionista postmodern generation, and New North, whose partial corporeality is exploratively alchemistic, converges both flora and fauna in a manner that is positively alluring.