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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings & Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  11 Apr 2017 ~ 6.30pm (NZ time)
• Lot #:
  24
• Lot Description:
  Michael Parekowhai
  The Moment of Cubism
  unique hand-finished bronze, 2009
  1190mm x 410mm x 520mm
• Provenance:
  Purchased Michael Lett, Auckland.
• Exhibited:
  Michael Parekowhai: The Moment of Cubism , Michael Lett, Auckland 28 Nov 2009 - 23 Jan 2010.
• Notes:
  Michael Parekowhai's (b. Porirua, 1968, Ngā Ariki Kaiputahi, Ngāti Whakarongo) work combines a ready and playful wit with immaculate production and thoughtful (if sometimes oblique) references to art history and New Zealand identity. He has received many accolades. In 2001, he received the New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate and, in 2011, he represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. That year, he was also awarded the Premier of Queensland Sculpture Commission in Brisbane and Nga Toa Whahaihuwaka, Māori of the Year for Arts, and, in 2013, his work in Phoenix, Arizona, was recognised as a 'Top 50 Public Art Project' by Americans for the Arts, Public Art Network and he was awarded the Barfoot & Thompson 90th Anniversary Gift to Auckland City, resulting in The Lighthouse on the city's waterfront. The Moment of Cubism first exhibited in a solo show of the same name at Auckland's Michael Lett gallery in the summer of 2009/10: one of seven individually unique bronze-cast lemon saplings, bagged up as if just purchased from the garden centre. It's always dangerous to try and read too much into Parekowhai's work because meaning is slippery and multivalent with him, but the title suggests the emergence of cubist art from the colonisation of indigenous African art by Western classicism: packaged up, commodified, taken away and repurposed. The title itself, however, comes from an eponymous, seminal 1969 essay by the late John Berger in which the paradox of cubism is defined as an objective spirit and subjective execution - much like the paradox of Parekowhai himself. On a more immediately accessible level, though, the idea of something as fragile and ubiquitous as a lemon tree rendered in durable, monumental bronze is immediately intriguing and seductive. Paradox on paradox.
• Estimate:
  NZ$25,000 - 35,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.