Lot 262: John Latham (1921-2006)

John Latham (1921-2006)
Return to Jalna
book, glass and silicon
6 in. (15.3 cm.) high
Conceived circa 1990-2003.

Gifted directly by the artist to the present owner.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
Return to Jalna is a free-standing sculpture comprising a many-edged shard of glass with a hardback copy of Mazo del la Roche's Return to Jalna protuding at an angle on the glass. The book has been cut in half and bound to the glass surface with semi-translucent silicon adhesive.
Books share with the human mind an imaginary realm and, in this way, an individual book in a Latham relief may represent a human character who is observing the world. As a consequence of these properties, books have a dual status in time and space as simultaneously static objects perceivable in an instant and the containers of abstract realms requiring extended time to be apprehended.
Latham first used glass panels to replace the canvases on which his book-based relief compositions were made in 1982. During the rest of the 1980s and the early 1990s almost all his book-based works were freestanding sculptures in which planes of glass provide the support.

In June 1991 Latham commented, 'In the last few years I've used glass to represent nothing, and it is an appropriate material to do this. It's very hard, you can see through it, so it's not an object. In photographs its difficult to puzzle that there's anything there at all. But when you place a book through it, that is by contrast, very much like the extended world, like a person with a whole history that goes down a line' (N.Wenger & S.Batiste, Interviews with the Artists, London, 1996, pp. 152-6).