Details
Maurizio Anzeri (b. 1969)
Penny
embroidery thread on found photograph
914 x 718in. (23.5 x 18cm.)
Executed in 2009
Provenance
Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2009.
Exhibited
London, Michael Hoppen Gallery, Starting with a Photograph, 2009.
St Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, Newspeak: British Art Now, 2009-2010 (illustrated in colour, p. 16). This exhibition later travelled to London, Saatchi Gallery.
Adelaide, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now, 2011, p. 46 (illustrated in colour, p. 49).
London, Saatchi Gallery, Iconoclasts: Art Out Of The Mainstream, 2017-2018 (illustrated in colour, p. 57).
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

Born in Italy in 1969, Maurizio Anzeri sews and embroiders onto found photographs to examine how people use their own bodies as graphic illustrations. ‘I work with sewing, embroidery and drawing to explore the essence of signs in their physical manifestation,’ he says. ‘I take inspiration from my own personal experience and observation of how, in other cultures, bodies themselves are treated as living graphic symbols. I then use sewing and embroidery in a further attempt to re-signify, and mark the space with a man-made sign, a trace. The intimate human action of embroidery is a ritual of making and reshaping stories and history of these people. I am interested in the relation between intimacy and the outer world’. Starting with a lost or discarded photograph, Anzeri begins by covering it with tracing paper and then drawing on the face until the image he wants develops. He then begins stitching over the drawn lines in a bid to introduce what he says is an extra dimension to the work. ‘When I begin the stitching something else happens,’ he says, ‘drawing will never do what thread will.’

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