This lot is offered by Christie Manson & Woods Ltd
Christie Manson & Woods Ltd
8 King Street, St. James's, London, SW1Y 6QT, United Kingdom
Phone: +44 (0)20 7839 9060
Fax: +44 (0)20 7839 2869
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Lot Essay
With its crimson ribbons of cascading colour, punctuated by delicate lines, strands and rivulets, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Doing Well, 2001, lyrically transcends the boundaries between photography, painting and drawing. Staining the surface like rippling swathes of ink, the abstract forms unfold in sinuous movements around a central linear formation, veiled by smouldering chromatic fields that shift in and out of focus. This mesmeric and unique work is closely related to the artist’s Freischwimmer, Blushes, Peaches and Starstruck series that collectively encapsulate his dialogue with abstraction. ‘These pictures were essentially made “dry” – only with light and my hands,’ Tillmans has explained. ‘Created in the dark room without negative and without camera, they’re made purely through the manipulation of light on paper. In this respect, their own reality, their creation and their time are absolutely central to their meaning: the time that I spend with the material in which I explore and intensify different effects. This intuitive recording and application of light, while a physical process, is at the same time liberated from a linguistic or painterly gesture of complete control’ (W. Tillmans, quoted at http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2017/march/08/christies-sets-new-record-for-wolfgang-tillmans/ [accessed 23rd February 2018]). In the present work, line, colour and space are rendered inseparable, reduced to ephemeral by-products of Tillmans’ technique. Hints of figurative reality – of smoke, water and fire – lurk in its hazy pools of light. Recently celebrated in a major retrospective at Tate Modern, London, Tillmans questions how photography – stripped of its traditional apparatus – can reveal invisible, alchemical states of being that exist beyond the everyday scope of our vision.
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