Impress your friends, baffle your neighbours with Contemporary art
11 October 2023 In 1976, the British media reeled when the Tate Gallery purchased a pile of bricks for £12,000.
You’ll need the right place for it, but what a statement. Bozidar Brazda’s Eat Fetish (2007) features an IKEA table suspended upside down with steel chains. It was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in 2010 and is offered at Sloane Street Auctions for £1500-2500.
The sculpture was in fact the work of minimalist Carl Andre, carefully thought through and representative of his style. For some commentators, however, it was simultaneously too little and too much.
Frances Kearney’s Five People Thinking the Same Thing – No. 2 (1998), a C-type print, was featured in NE Booth’s publication Young British Art: The Saatchi Decade. It has an estimate of £3000-5000.
Plenty of Contemporary art has a decorative draw; plenty more is meaningful and engaging, even if it lacks a traditionally aesthetic appeal.
Estimated at £5000-8000 and aptly named for recent times is the acrylic, oil and pencil work Virus by Joel Wyllie.
Sloan Street Auction’s Contemporary day sale on October 17 is packed with avant garde pieces from the past 30 years. Some are pictures, some are sculptural. Others, called things like (Routless) Placement (a pile of cardboard boxes on a trestle table) and Suitcase Bomb (the clue’s in the title), are unconventional and might take some getting used to. Not all are for the typical domestic environment.
George Sweet’s oil on canvas Nude IV is estimated at £5000-8000.
But all have their own unique appeal and there are some serious stamps of approval in the offerings.
Most are catalogued as coming from a “leading” British Contemporary collection, having been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and are offered with estimates in the thousands of pounds. Making them perhaps even more appealing for the intrigued bidder is the fact that these are all offered without reserve, so it might be possible to bag a real bargain.
Robert Dowling’s Untitled (2008) is not a pile of chain, but a wood and paint sculpture once exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and now offered with an estimate of £1500-2000.
There is a challenge baked into many of these works, but don’t let that put you off. Many also ask questions, offer playful jokes, and are visually stimulating. At the very least, most come with major names in the recent history of art.