Rebecca Warren

Lot Description Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) Bunny clay on painted MDF plinth overall: 28 7/8 x 15 x 13 5/8 in. (73.5 x 38 x 34.5 cm.) Executed in 2002. (2) Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DONALD YOUNG View Lot Notes > Bunny, a pubescent youth, posture erect and poised, is an object to be fetishized and immediately calls to mind Degas' Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, although Warren manages to both invoke and skew the famous sculpture by Degas, forming a complex visual language of her own. Manipulating the clay with physicality--clumping, lumping, and twisting--she deletes all signs of perfection; instead she emphasizes the visual signs of squeezed flesh. Her strong sense of formal awareness brings sensitivity to the weight and the proportions to each area of the female nude, inflating and emphasizing individual sections of the body to fetishize thick caves, voluptuous hips, and bulging breasts. At first glance the sculptural surface displays aggression but there is a hand-made quality that reads both unfinished and tender. Warren blurs the boundaries between loveable and unlovable, sensual and grotesque, redefining what sculpture should and should not be. "The beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you that freedom to change thingsI like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly, that there's a sense of them perhaps not being complete, to keep them alive and dynamic and fresh" (R. Warren).

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) The Lady with the Little Dog reinforced clay on MDF on wheels 70 1/8 x 39 3/8 x 34 5/8in. (178 x 100 x 88cm.) Executed in 2003 Maureen Paley, London. Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003. J. Cape, The Shape of things to Come: New Sculpture, London 2009 (illustrated in colour, p. 30). London, The Saatchi Gallery, The Boiler Room, 2003. Ipswich, Ipswich Art School, The Saatchi Gallery at Ipswich Art School, 2010-2011. The Lady With The Little Dog by Turner Prize nominee Rebecca Warren is a large-scale sculpture that challenges sculptural conventions while also engaging with the history of figurative sculpture. Executed in 2003, Warren's work presents the female body as something that has been aggressively manipulated into being. With its earthy, unfired and unfinished look, The Lady With The Little Dog unveils a tension between thought and process, while creating a unique, new sculptural mode that is at once formal and explicit. Known chiefly for her exuberant, roughly-worked clay sculptures, bronzes and vitrines, Warren belongs to the same generation as the YBA artists from the 1990s. In her work, Warren wryly addresses her fascination with artists who have overtly fetishised the female form: modernist sculpture, highlighting a shared interest in sexualising women's shape by discarding heads or any personal attributes, and filtering symbols of objectification. Warren's shape-shifting sculpture reveals her sensitivity to the issues of flesh, fat and femininity. Her subject is one of the most traditional in art history, but here she subverts the inherited clichés associated with the genre. Moreover, the malleability of clay employed in The Lady With The Little Dog allows her to explore unconscious free association, thus creating a bold new figure for the female nude and redefining what sculpture should be or should look like.

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) Croccioni reinforced clay on MDF plinths 31¼ x 31 1/8 x 15¾in. (79.5 x 79 x 40cm.) Executed in 2000 Maureen Paley, London. Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000. J. Cape, Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, London 2009 (illustrated in colour, p. 35). London, Maureen Paley, The Agony and the Ecstasy, 2000. London, Royal Academy of Arts, The Galleries Book, 2002, no. 30/2 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). London, Saatchi Gallery, The Boiler Room, 2003. London, Saatchi Gallery, New Labour, 2003 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). Zurich, Kunsthalle Zürich, Rebecca Warren, Dark Passage, 2004 (illustrated in colour, p. 34) Ipswich, Ipswich Art School, Saatchi Gallery Exhibition at Ipswich Art School Gallery, 2010-2011. London, Saatchi Gallery, The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, 2011 (illustrated in colour, p. 109). '[T]he beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you the freedom to change things... I like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly that theres a sense of them not being complete to keep them alive and fresh' (R. Warren, quoted in J. Cape, Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, London 2009, p. 35).' Striding across two square plinths, a pair of caricatured legs in platform heels, cropped dramatically and tantalizingly at the hips, Rebecca Warren's masterpiece Croccioni is a brilliantly satirical subversion of the male fetishisation of the female form. An early work by the artist executed in 2000, Croccioni was created at a time when Warren was gaining critical momentum before her Turner Prize nomination in 2006. Croccioni's title itself is a wittily crafted amalgamation paying homage to her references: the dynamic movement of Umberto Boccioni's futuristic and macho sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and the voluptuous, louche females of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. Warren would later make explicit her debt to Crumb in the playful title of another work Homage to R. Crumb my father (2003). It is through her referencing of a pantheon of iconic male figurative artists that Warren so powerfully subverts the sculptural clichs attached to the age old genre of the female body. She revisits Fontana's early fragmented figures, Crumb's buxom ladies, the eroticised postures of Rodin, as well as Helmut Newton's overtly sexualized women, ingenuously eschewing idealisation and fantasy for deliberate, provocative distortion. In doing so she creates her own uniquely strident forms, depicted in Croccioni with its bulbous thighs, portly calves, and the omission of the rest of the body. Warren has described her relationship to the artists whose work she references as 'one of influence and allowing yourself to be influenced. Of course there is a real hardcore drive of iconoclasm in there too and general oedipal revolt. It's also about finding a way to be expressive. Expression is perceived as a problem. One way of negotiating that is to re-use existing idioms that are accepted as being expressive' (R. Warren quoted in B. Ruff, (ed.), Dark Passage, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zurich, Zürich 2005, p. 21). Warren exploits the pliability of the clay media to flesh out the legs in Croccioni, teasing and kneading at the clay, imbuing it with its own particular vernacular of form. As Warren has said, 'the beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you the freedom to change thingsI like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly that there's a sense of them not being complete to keep them alive and fresh.' (R. Warren quoted in J. Cape, Shape of Things to come: New Sculpture, exh. cat.,Saatchi Gallery, London 2009, p. 35). Croccioni's fresh contours combined with its unfired, inchoate earthiness creates a work of surprising visceral beauty and dynamism.

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) Totem (g.) hand-painted bronze on painted MDF plinth bronze: 24½ x 10¾ x 7 7/8in. (62.2 x 27.3 x 30cm.) plinth: 45¼ x 11¾ x 11¾in. (115 x 30 x 30cm.) Executed in 2003-2012, this work is number one from an edition of five plus two artist's proofs Donated by the aritst. "In all of Rebecca Warrens works the feasibility of the representation of the body as well as of the creative act per se becomes manifest as a monstrosity." B. Ruf quoted in Rebecca Warren, Dark Passage, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich 2004, p. 12.

Lot Description Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) Bitch Magic: The Musical Plexiglas, wood, neon, pom-pom, painted plaster and clay 55 x 19¼ x 13½ in. (139.7 x 48.9 x 34.3 cm.) Executed in 2001-2003. Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DONALD YOUNG