Meredyth Sparks (b. 1972)
(i) Untitled (Gudrun with Red Lines)
(ii) Untitled (Gudrun with Painting)
(i), (ii): signed and dated 'M Sparks 2007' (on the reverse)
(i) digital scan, aluminium foil, glitter on digital print
(ii) digital scan, aluminium foil, glitter on digital print on mylar
(i) 60¼ x 38¼in. (153 x 97cm.)
(ii) 60⅜ x 40in. (153.3 x 101.7cm.)
(i), (ii): Executed in 2007, this work is unique

Provenance:
Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris.
Private Collection, London.

† Please see our Conditions of Sale for definitions of cataloguing symbols.

Specialist Notes:

Executed in 2007, Untitled (Gudrun with Red Lines) and Untitled (Gudrun with Painting) are two of Meredyth Sparks collages which explore subcultures through the appropriation and re-imaging of photographs of well-known 1970s and 1980s underground rock icons such as The Clash or David Bowie and press images of political activists of the same time.

Sparks chooses her found imagery and blows it up on a large, life-size scale before digitally altering the images herself. She then applies collage elements to the surface, allowing the qualities of aluminium foil and glitter to play with the abstract and figurative elements that exist within her image already. Sparks herself refers to the process of selecting visual fragments, of sampling, deleting or either digitally or manually transferring them to new visual contexts as ‘subtraction’. This manipulation of positive and negative forms obfuscates whatever narrative element had initially existed within the original image.

The present works take as their photographic basis an image of Gudrun Ensslin, the German Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist. A chronological sequence of photographs taken in prison after Ensslin’s arrest in the summer of 1972 were published in 1974 in Stern and Speigel magazine. They capture her frame by frame as she passes the viewer in sandals and stockings, holding a white envelope in one hand and slipping it into her skirt pocket. The same suite of images captivated Gerhard Richter, who included them in his Atlas and later re-imaged them as closely-cropped portraits in his Confrontation paintings of 1988. Sparks went back to the original photographic series held in Richter’s Atlas, scanning his photographs complete with his added crop marks, arrows and repainted parts – and overlayed them with her characteristic abstract-geometric patterns of aluminium foil and glitter. In so doing Sparks both highlights the formal elements of the image itself while at the same time dissociating it from its original meaning. The geometric forms also recall the formal language of Malevich’s suprematist compositions, which espoused that art—form—should transcend subject matter or narrative.

(i)Untitled (Gudrun with Red Lines) and (ii) Untitled (Gudrun with Painting) are one of our sale specialist, Amanda Lo Iacono’s, sale highlights. Read more about this and her other picks here.

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