.jpg?maxwidth=3840)
Lot 424
Annie Cabigting (B. 1971)
Office Baroque 1977 (After Gordon Matta-Clark)
Closed24 November 2013
Price Realised
HKD 325,000
More Information
Specialist note
Annie Cabigting is considered one of the few truly visionary female painters to emerge from Asia. Her beautifully rendered, photorealist canvases often employ meta-references within art history, interrogating how art is perceived and what happens when the viewer becomes the viewed. Cabigting's eye is drawn to the uncommon: the minute details, the overlooked or dismissed aspects to a work of art - such as the reverse of the Mona Lisa or the visual result of a destroyed Francis Bacon. Often her paintings portray paintings under scrutiny - an act of transference between the viewpoint of the immediate viewer of Cabigting's work, into that of the viewer within Cabigting's canvas.
Office Baroque 1977 (After Gordon Matta-Clark) (Lot 424) is one of Cabigting's most outstanding and progressive works to date. Taking the form of an inverse-teardrop shaped canvas, this radical composition explores and pays homage to conceptual artist and architect Gordon Matta-Clark who became famous for his works in abandoned buildings and warehouses. Office Baroque, an avant-garde site-specific project undertaken by Matta-Clark in 1977, involved physically cutting through a five-story Antwerp office building. This act was seen as that of artistic intervention in an unwanted, leftover urban space. Inspired by overlapping teacup rings left on a drawing, the carving was organized around two semi-circles that sliced through the floors, creating a rowboat shape at their intersection.
In this way, Cabigting's homage to Matta-Clark can be seen as an intervention of an intervention - overlapping their dual artistic practices, the way Matta-Clark intended with his overlapping teacup rings - by making permanent upon her canvas something which was intended to be temporal, abandoned, and specific to its location. By contrast, Cabigting's canvas as a movable object is not site specific. It takes the scene of Office Baroque from one unfixed location to another; inverting Matta-Clark's intent and suffusing it with the reflexive introspection of Cabigting's methodology.
Office Baroque 1977 (After Gordon Matta-Clark) (Lot 424) is one of Cabigting's most outstanding and progressive works to date. Taking the form of an inverse-teardrop shaped canvas, this radical composition explores and pays homage to conceptual artist and architect Gordon Matta-Clark who became famous for his works in abandoned buildings and warehouses. Office Baroque, an avant-garde site-specific project undertaken by Matta-Clark in 1977, involved physically cutting through a five-story Antwerp office building. This act was seen as that of artistic intervention in an unwanted, leftover urban space. Inspired by overlapping teacup rings left on a drawing, the carving was organized around two semi-circles that sliced through the floors, creating a rowboat shape at their intersection.
In this way, Cabigting's homage to Matta-Clark can be seen as an intervention of an intervention - overlapping their dual artistic practices, the way Matta-Clark intended with his overlapping teacup rings - by making permanent upon her canvas something which was intended to be temporal, abandoned, and specific to its location. By contrast, Cabigting's canvas as a movable object is not site specific. It takes the scene of Office Baroque from one unfixed location to another; inverting Matta-Clark's intent and suffusing it with the reflexive introspection of Cabigting's methodology.