PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Alexis Rockman (b. 1962)
Concrete Jungle IV
signed, titled and dated 'ALEXIS ROCKMAN 1992 "CONCRETE JUNGLE IV"' (on the reverse)
oil and wood shavings on wood
36 x 84in. (91.3 x 213.3cm.)
Executed in 1992

Provenance:
Jay Gorney Gallery, New York.
Leo König Inc., New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005.

Exhibited:
London, Serpentine Gallery, Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away..., 1994-1995 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Helsinki, Nordic Arts Centre; Hannover, Kunstverein and Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art.

Literature:
R. Cook, Breaking the Barriers: Art in the 1990s, New Haven 2003 (illustrated, p. 73).

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Specialist Notes:

Executed in 1992, Alexis Rockman’s Concrete Jungle IV presents a fetid scene of polluted urban waterways. Indeterminate veils of contamination float through the murky green waters, where the only creatures capable of surviving appear to be the most vicious of snakelike fish. This scene of oil-slicked decay recalls Bosch or Max Ernst in both its painterly style and vision of contemporary despoliation. The present work forms part of the Concrete Jungle series, which depicted the fauna of urban environments, scenes which seem to have an acute affect today given the greater visibility of such environmental crises as global warming. Known for his ‘fictions of biodiversity’, Rockman’s art serves as a stimulus to thinking across systems and disciplines. ‘Rockman’s oscillation between historical idealisations of nature and apocalyptic futures… in which humans are represented only by what they have left behind, suspend the environment of the present in some void between an imagined past of first-growth forests and passenger-pigeons, and a ruined and abandoned planet of the future’ (F. Ward, ‘Alexis Rockman’, in frieze, September 1997).

Conveying a sense of the world unhinged, Concrete Jungle IV was chosen by Damien Hirst to be included in his first curated international exhibition held at a public institution. Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away…, 1994 first exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London presented the work of fifteen artists from England, Germany, France and the U.S.

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