Details
Harold Ancart (b. 1980)
Perfect Idea (2) (After You Have No Idea)

oil stick on paper mounted on panel
45⅛ x 34⅞ in. (114.6 x 88.6cm.)
Executed in 2014
Provenance
Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York.
Private Collection, New York.
Anon. sale, Christie’s New York, 22 July 2015, lot 238.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Exhibited
New York, Dominique Lévy Gallery, Hypothesis for an Exhibition, 2014.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer 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.
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Lot Essay

‘When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, 'Everything which we loved was lost. We are in a desert.. .Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!' But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.. ..which penetrates everything.’
- Kazimir Malevich


Harold Ancart’s large-scale painting Perfect Idea (2) (After You Have No Idea) is a play of balanced forces. The work is covered entirely in black oil pastel save for a small white rectangle at its centre, which has the concentrated potency of a collapsed star. Ancart will be creating new work for the upcoming group exhibition Painting the Night, 2019,at Centre Pompidou-Metz. The show takes as its premise the thematic of night, and Ancart’s work will be exhibited alongside those by Francis Bacon, Brassaï, and Gerhard Richter among others. Executed in 2014, Perfect Idea (2) (After You Have No Idea) is tactile, each swipe and smudge visible on the panel; Dodie Kazanjian called Ancart’s paintings ‘vivid and utterly unpredictable’ (D. Kazanjian, ‘Up Close and Personal’, Vogue, September 2016, n. p.). Perfect Idea (2) (After You Have No Idea) presents a geometric minimalism, an exploration into the architectural properties of space through dynamic contrasting forms.

Ancart takes the whole of modern painting’s history as the subject of his practice. With its black surface, Perfect Idea (2) (After You Have No Idea) evokes a range of abstract works including Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square, 1915 and Ad Reinhardt’s series of square black paintings executed during the 1960s. If Malevich’s blackness gestured towards utopia—canvases liberated from depicting the world—Reinhardt wanted a ‘pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless relationless, disinterested painting’ (A. Reinhardt, 'Autocritique de Reinhardt', reprinted as Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York, 1975, pp.82-3). Ancart suggests no such ideology, but blackness does not mean absence. Instead, Perfect Idea (2) (After You Have No Idea) is wholly tied to the world, figural and explosive.

Post Lot Text
This lot has been imported from outside the EU for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on the invoice. Please see Conditions of Sale for further information.

Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot. You must pay us an extra amount equal to the resale royalty and we will pay the royalty to the appropriate authority. Please see the Conditions of Sale for further information.

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