Lot 364: EMILY SUNDBLAD

Algus Greenspon Gallery. May 2011. Emily Sundblad "Que Barbaro". 212-255-7872. Opening Hours: Tues-Sat 10-6. algusgreenspon.com

80 x 47 in. (203.2 x 119.4 cm.)

Oil on canvas.

2011

Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York

Emily Sundblad is well known in the art world as an artist, performer, curator and cofounder of Reena Spaulings Fine Art. She is a central figure in a widely respected group of artists whose seditious and conceptually rigorous work is among the most important being made today.

The artist has said of her 2010 show–“If you leave me I will destroy you”–at Mexico City’s House of Gaga Gallery: “In conversations with my dealer colleagues, a mental and physical experience of being simultaneously created and destroyed by our jobs is a recurrent theme. Collaboration involves a tricky politics of togetherness where business loses its distinction from love, and where co-dependency breeds dreams of betrayal.”

The painting being auctioned is a self-portrait with text announcing the opening of Ms. Sundblad’s exhibition–her first solo show in New York–at Algus Greenspon on May 8, 2011, six days prior to the auction. The painting’s display and sale at Phillip’s is an ad for the artist’s show and a work whose absence will be included in the gallery exhibition. Given such concordance, the artwork becomes two artworks, both a painting and a performance.