John Chamberlain Mayonnaise Voice

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
Mayonnaise Voice, 2007
Painted and chromed steel. 23 1/4 x 21 x 29 in. (59 x 53.3 x 73.7 cm).
ESTIMATE $250,000-350,000

We love the intense color combination of Mayonnaise Voice which John Chamberlain created in 2007. Mayonnaise Voice by John Chamberlain will be sale at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York with an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000.

John Chamberlain is best known as an icon of 20th century American sculpture who redefined the notions of modeling, casting and volume. He brought to life a combination of organic notions of composition, a focus on the incorporation of large scale painterly shapes and aggressive manipulations of raw materials that resulted in visually stunning three dimensional artworks directly descendant from the visual idioms embraced by Abstract Expressionist artists Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Chamberlain’s talent lies in creating formally challenging sculptures from the long discarded detritus of American consumerism, automobiles, into raggedly amorphous artworks that viscerally incorporate the act of destruction as a pre-requisite to the act of creation.

The present lot is comprised of an amalgamation of delicately crushed of car parts and scrap metal which have been doused in hard, shiny Pop-like colors and fused together to create a voluminous tension that is seamless in energy but not in surface. The composition is formed by chance, a randomly compatible fit of individually created components. These casual junctions allow for multiple viewpoints that give way to various interpretations of the work’s formal definition. The colors are automatically integrated into the work to give clear visual evidence of each part’s interaction with the others. This work perfectly exemplifies the artist’s masterful success at “altering Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the ready-made, and using the car as both medium and tool. In them, Chamberlain incorporated euphoric spontaneity, destruction, and chance and gave body to modernism’s developing belief that the subject of art be its own making. These very strategies were then made to breathe new life into the volume modernism had deflated, and to revive the techniques of modeling and casting modernism had declared obsolete.” (Kertess, K. “Color in the Round and Then Some: John Chamberlain’s work, 1954-1985” in John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Sculpture 1954-1985, p. 29)

Phillips de Pury & Company; New York
Contemporary Art, Part I
May 14, 2009

http://www.phillipsdepury.com