On the occasion of the sale dedicated to modern and contemporary art on Thursday, July 9, 2020, PIASA auction house is offering for sale a work by Chilean-born artist Iván Navarro.
Born in 1972 in Santiago, Iván Navarro spent the first years of his life in Chile under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. This traumatic experience will be an important source of inspiration. Through his digital installations, the artist explores the themes of authoritarian power, mass control and confinement.
He uses light as a base material, while diverting objects into electric sculptures and transforming space through optical games. Iván Navarro was precisely marked by his discovery of optical art and in particular the work of the German artist and theorist Josef Albers. The latter, a professor at the Bauhaus, found refuge in the United States to escape from Nazism.
He gave particularly well-attended courses at Black Mountain College. Iván Navarro's luminous window paintings, echoes of Albers' Homage to the Square, subject the infinitely multiplied squares to programmatic flickering. Words stand out on each of the compositions. Language is a luminous appearance of consciousness, which refers to the double meanings, to the painful memory of the discrepancies between the multiplicity of appearances and the supposed uniqueness of truth.
Ivan Navarro (born 1972)
Dark hole way
Door, mirror, lightbulbs, three keys, and plug-in system
Set of 3 + 1 AP
218 x 101,5 x 30 cm
Provenance :
- New York sale, Phillips de Pury, May 11 2012, lot 252
- Purchased from the latter by the current owner
- European private collection
The work offered to collectors at the sale on Thursday, July 9, 2020, Dark hole way is estimated at between 40,000 and 60,000 euros. It consists of a mirror inside which hundreds of small light bulbs are embedded. The handle on the left side reveals the symbolic significance of the work. Iván Navarro represented Chile at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. His work has already been exhibited all over the world, notably at the Whitney Museum in New York (2006), at the MOCA in Miami (2007) and in Paris for the Neons exhibition at the Maison Rouge.
