Installation Art For Auction

Christie's Contemporary Art department is presenting an exciting, challenging and dramatic sale in February 2001. The pre-sale exhibition will be staged at a stunning newly converted space at 14 Wharf Road, London, N1. The 15,000 square foot, three-storey warehouse space will superbly compliment the works of art to be sold. Among the highlights of the Contemporary Art sales is a special section dedicated to Installation Art with important examples by Tracy Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

In Contemporary Art today, the term 'installation' is almost as commonly used as painting, sculpture and photography. Yet it is only in the last decade that it has been used to describe a kind of art which rejects concentration on one object in favour of the consideration of the relationships between a number of elements - the interaction between things and their contexts.

"Installation has no boundaries. It is an environment created for a site. In Installation the sense of space is in active dialogue with the things and people it contains. Installation asks direct questions - Has art lost all the social and emotional impact it used to have?", states Graham Southern, head of Contemporary Art at Christie's London. "Artists find themselves surrounded by a growing and technologically advanced media, which in many ways has captured the traditional role of fine art. Perhaps for this reason installation stands as the champion of the current creative development in art, incorporating the outside world and engaging the audience directly and dramatically."

Highlights of the sale include work from Tracy Emin, a leading figure in the contemporary art world. Her ambitious and dramatic Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, an installation consisting of 14 paintings, 78 drawings, 5 body prints as well as numerous art supplies, painted items, household items and furniture, was executed in 1996 in the Galleri Andreas Brändström, Stockholm (estimate: £30,000-40,000).

Emin went to Stockholm to challenge her six year painting block and for two weeks locked herself in a secluded space created inside the Galleri. Completely naked, Emin would sleep, eat and simultaneously create her exhibition, while the public would watch through sixteen fish-eye lenses in the walls. For the first three days she looked at the canvases and talked to her friends on the phone and it was not until the critic Carl Freedman advised her to 'paint something she would like to own' that she began to create artworks. These include an idiosyncratic version of Edvard Munch's The Scream and images based on drawings by Egon Schiele. Her paintings became autobiographical self-portraits of intimate details of her existence and the installation is an invitation by the artist to share in the often painful details of her life as she makes the viewer a literal voyeur, intruding on personal space.

To create Five Revolutionary Seconds II (pictured above), 1995, Sam Taylor-Wood used a camera rotating 360 degrees in five seconds to create an overwhelming 26 foot long photograph (estimate: £40,000-60,000). By flattening space that was originally a rotating movement, linking different perspectives and viewpoints in the same horizontal plane, the photograph conveys the uneasy feeling of an endless succession of disconnected actions that actually occurred at the same time and place.

"My 'Five Revolutionary Seconds' series is really about giving photography a different sense of time," Taylor-Wood said in a recent interview. "You almost have to travel along and start to construct a possible narrative". The viewer cannot see the work in its entirety at one time so has to walk back and forth as though watching a film and is accompanied by a soundtrack of live recorded conversations and ambient noises.

A further work by Taylor-Wood, Pent Up, 1996, is from a 5-screen laser disc projection with sound, shot on 16 mm film and from an edition of three (estimate: £30,000-40,000). The installation consists of the five projected images, which sit side by side, their edges abutting on one long wall. On each 'screen' the viewer encounters the private universe of a seemingly isolated individual. Throughout the ten-minute video, each character rants and raves aloud. Filmed in a single, unedited take, each character exists in a humid environment, and the overall impression is one of intense, aching loneliness, if not true mental illness.

A major installation by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled, 1993 (Cure) invites you to eat, drink, chat, make music and play with puppets (estimate: £25,000-35,000). If you need an escape from the world at large, the installation invites you to meet for a free cup of tea in his orange tea-tent.

The artist disrupts traditional expectations by physically involving the viewer/visitor. Questions arise - it is uncertain whether the tea-tent is no longer a tea-tent but rather a piece of art, and whether as a piece of art it would stop being such in order to fulfill the role as tea-tent. The present work is subtitled 'cure' which possibly refers to the tea-party as a healing process. The artist presumably also believes that the tea-tent can act as both a cure for the elitism of the art market and as a way of bringing art to the public. The artist will not be present at Christie's view but the spirit of the installation will be fully recreated and the finest of a selection of tea imported from Tiravanija's native Thailand will be served! Obviously, Christie's are being extremely thorough, ensuring that even the smallest details are not overlooked.

Works by leading American artists include Jeff Koons' Wild Boy and Puppy, 1988, from an edition of three (estimate: £280,000-380,000). One of the artist's most banal scluptures and executed in porcelain, the sculpture represents a bizaare encounter between three cartoon characters, 'Odie' from Garfield, 'Pumuckl', the little boy from the German children's television programme and a smiling cartoon honey bee sitting in a gift basket. By elevating these fantasy icons of kitsch, Koons questions the role of art in a modern capitalist and consumer-driven society and forces the viewer to re-evaluate the way in which they judge 'quality'.

Further highlights include an important work by Damien Hirst, Untitled (Birthday Card), 2000 (estimate: £150,000-200,000); one of Gary Hume's first figurative paintings, Love Loves Unlovable, 1994 (estimate: £25,000-35,000) and Gilbert and George's Dusty Corners No. 6, 1975 (estimate: £50,000-70,000). Other artists represented in Christie's sale include Louise Bourgeois, Antony Gormley, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Shirin Neshat and Andres Serrano.

14 Wharf Road, N1
Reaffirming our commitment to the heart of contemporary art in London, Christie's innovative use of a new space will mean that once again the presentation of our pre-sale exhibition will take place in a daring and dynamic fashion. The building is directly adjacent to the renowned Victoria Miro Gallery, one of London's most internationally recognised contemporary art galleries. Wharf Road, Hoxton, is at the centre of the burgeoning community of artist studios and galleries east of central London. The auction of Contemporary Art will take place in the usual location at Christie's King Street on 8 February 2001.

Sale Schedule