PIASA is organizing a Modern and Contemporary Art auction on Wednesday, December 8th. Comprising 47 lots, this sale is based on a fine selection of works produced between the end of the 1950s and today by international artists. It includes notably a work by Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin.
"I really began to understand any society by snooping around its flea markets. I can see there, through what we throw away, how great ideas end up." Edward Kienholz
The artistic career of Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) began as a loner. Self-taught, he moved to Los Angeles in 1953 where he ran avant-garde galleries before meeting his partner, Nancy Reddin Kienholz (1943-2019). Together they formed a creative and determined unit. For them, commitment is achieved through visual shock and a pronounced denunciation, but always subtle and elusive. If certain works testify to a deaf rage, others, less didactic, leave the spectator a great freedom of interpretation. Their work bears witness to a virulent denunciation of the failings of American society: consumerist excess, ordinary racism, sexism, institutional violence, and religious hypocrisy in particular.
No Name Dog is an assemblage of everyday objects in which the work of the duo Edward and Nancy Kienholz goes beyond the boundaries of sculpture and draws a disturbing universe between fascination and repulsion. Their strange scenes mix animal sculptures, like here a decapitated dog and a naturalized frog, and manufactured objects in an ambiguous and mysterious realism. The objective is a virulent denunciation of the failings of American society.
Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz
No name dog, 1983-84
Estimate: 25 000 / 35 000 €
As the art critic Germano Celant explained, "Kienholz did not seek to sublimate the harshness and tragedy of life, its loneliness and its banality, but used them instead as a way of shining a light on this low and popular universe, in which the rubbish and the dirty, the depravity and the filth represent a new and surprising beauty: a feeling or perception that stupefies and excites, impresses and disgusts, but never leaves one indifferent."
The couple's works are present in major institutions, including the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Fondazione Prada in Milan or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), and have been shown at major events, such as Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972.
