Product Description
Tim Liddy Game of Boom or Bust (1951) Presidential Sweepstakes 2006 Oil and enamel on copper, plywood back
TIM LIDDY
“Game of Boom or Bust” (1951) Presidential Sweepstakes 2006
Oil and enamel on copper, plywood back
Signed in script: Tim Liddy “circa 1951” 2006, red circular ring
Provenance: William Shearburn Gallery (St. Louis, MO)
H: 15 1/8” x W: 15 1/8” x D: 2”
With his recent paintings, Liddy has both reasserted the construct of hyperrealist painting and developed a thoroughly unique advancement of that mode by extending the cultural reality of the indexed original. Based on the illustrated box lids of vintage board games, Liddy has recontextualized a subject, which evokes the underlying rules of life. Painted on copper or steel in the precise dimensions of the original, the metal is then manipulated to demonstrate the exact rips and tears from years of usage and includes trompe-l’oeil renditions of the scotch tape that might be holding the cardboard box together, the assorted stains, or the various graffiti of time. Liddy leaves no possibility of ambivalence, these works speak to a concurrent understanding of their original object identity and to themselves as works of art engaged in historical and psychological dialogue.
Tim Liddy Game of Boom or Bust (1951) Presidential Sweepstakes 2006 Oil and enamel on copper, plywood back
XANTI SCHAWINSKY (1904-1979) Switzerland/USA
Optical Structure 1943
Silver gelatin print
Signed: Xanti Schawinsky 1943 (script signature and date in ink on back of photo)
Photograph: H: 7 7/8” x W: 8”
Frame: H: 16 9/16” x W: 16 9/16”
Price: $24,000
Xanti Schawinsky is usually known either for the activities of his early career, as a young ‘enfant terrible’ of Bauhaus theatre, or for the work he produced at its close as a respected and mature abstract artist. However these two perspectives ignore his tremendous versatility, and the important role he had to play in bringing Modernist ideas to different parts of the inter-war world. Schawinsky was born in Switzerland, the son of a Polish Jew. His creative nature was obvious from an early age, and in his teens he studied art and music in Zurich, before travelling to Berlin and Cologne to learn about design and architecture. In 1924 he enrolled at the Bauhaus, and became involved in the school’s vibrant theatrical scene, also focusing on photography and painting. From the mid 1920s Schawinsky undertook wide range of professional commissions, working as a stage designer, a municipal studio director and a freelance designer. He also returned to the Bauhaus to teach. In 1933 Germany’s growing intolerance forced him to move to Milan, where he spent several years producing commercial graphic design, principally for the typewriter company Olivetti. An invitation to join the progressive Black Mountain College brought him to the USA in 1936. He spent two years at Black Mountain introducing Bauhaus ideas to his American students, before moving to New York to take up freelance design and pursue painting – an activity which absorbed almost all of his attention in his final years. As innovative in commercial art as he was in his unpaid pieces, Schawinsky’s work demonstrated the huge creative power of the inter-war meeting of art and industry.