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Lot 166: Nioc

Est: £10,000 GBP - £15,000 GBPSold:
Christie'sLondon, United KingdomJune 06, 2008

Item Overview

Description

William Pye (b. 1938)
Nioc
steel and chrome; unique
70 in. (178 cm.) high
Conceived in 1973.
To be sold with sculptor's own carrying storage apparatus.

Artist or Maker

Notes

VARIOUS PROPERTIES
Artist's Resale Right ("droit de Suite"). If the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
'In the seventies I began to feel the need to experiment with forms that were more precarious, which relied upon forces of tension and compression to find their balance and poise. This was the initial rationale for introducing stainless steel cables. Like so much experimentation, this departure revealed unforeseen opportunities and directions to explore, not least the sheer beauty of light caught on shafts of glittering stainless steel wires.

Illusion inhabits all areas of art through distortion and the manipulation of colour and perspective. I quickly recognised how cables deployed in space can suggest to the discerning eye illusions of depth and distances where planes appear to recede or converge (Xeeque). Preoccupation with these revelations underpinned much of my work in the seventies and eighties. I had and still have no hesitation in adopting those illusory devices normally associated with work in two dimensions, and integrating these into my sculpture, be it a simple perspective intervention or an anamorphic projection.

The majority of my tubular pieces were three legged tripods, that have the same stability that we see in a traditional milkmaid’s stool.

Nioc (Coin) was a private commission for a corner site in a London apartment. I was pleased with the simplicity of this piece, how it occupies the space between floor and walls, held upright and balanced by a single point pivoted off the wall, how its planes and angles defy one’s perception when viewing from different positions.

It was professor R. L. Gregory'’s boo Eyeandd Brain, when it first came out, that suggested how I might manipulate illusions of perspective into my work. Just as lines drawn on a sheet of paper can allude to shapes and planes, so can tension cables do much the same, with the added ambiguity of three dimensional space.'

Private correspondence with the artist, April 2008.

Auction Details

20th Century British Art

by
Christie's
June 06, 2008, 11:00 AM WET

8 King Street, St. James's, London, LDN, SW1Y 6QT, UK