Tag Archives: circus

One of the star pieces of the upcoming auction is a Menina by Manolo Valdés , a collage in which a variety of techniques converge and which was part of an exhibition at the Sen Gallery in Madrid (see “Composition”, 1982, lot 35215018) . In this exhibition, Valdés paid tribute to different artists dedicating a personalized menina to each of them, according to their style or movement to which they belonged. In this type of interpersonal and postmodern winks, Valdés managed to express himself with great ingenuity.

From Barceló, we put out to tender the impressive canvas “Crâne à l’Âne” , 2006 (lot 35266281), a material composition of great expressive force , where the autobiographical element is interwoven under subtle symbolic references.

An artist who never ceases to amaze us, demiurge of magical worlds and metamorphic and unclassifiable creatures, Cuban Roberto Fabelo, delights us on this occasion with sculptures, paintings and drawings such as “The Garden of Night” (lot 35216977).

As you can see, once again variety meets quality in our next contemporary and contemporary art auction.

Between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, a new aesthetic and ideological movement emerged in Italy that would permeate the artistic and literary production of the peninsula and the entire continent.

The Baroque conquered the European courts with its approach so far removed from earlier Mannerism: a triumph of invention over imitation, a celebration of emphasis and strangeness, a clear intention to surprise and impress, in stark contrast to Classicism.

The spectacularity sought by this movement is expressed to a large extent with impressive and sumptuous ceilings decorated with frescoes. – The goal is to amaze the viewer and fool their eyes, using illusionistic painting to recreate three-dimensional effects. The architectural barrier thus becomes a springboard to represent a scene halfway between reality and fiction, creating unreal spaces that mix earth and sky (like the ceiling of the church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome painted by Andrea Pozzo ).

In the Renaissance, Andrea Mantegna highlighted this technique in the Bridal Chamber of the Doge’s Palace in Mantua, using false architectural structures leading to an open sky, suggesting an illusion of depth.

However, during the Baroque, the paint on the ceilings, already widely used, is transformed into an artistic “stage” to express a triumph of figures, lasting stucco, illusionistic paintings. In addition to the technical complexity of the surface to be decorated, the optical distortion caused by a scale representation on the ceiling had to be taken into account.

To get around this problem, the most common stratagem – already known to Michelangelo of the Last Judgment – was to resort to anamorphosis, a curved or oblique image that could only be deciphered if it was observed from a certain point of view.

During this period, the Church of the Counter-Reformation was the main client: it wanted to dazzle and awaken strong emotions in the faithful, taking advantage of the Christian iconographic repertoire.

Thanks to the cinema and television, some shoe models have become authentic references in the history of fashion, becoming a collector’s item.

An icon among icons, Manolo Blahnik’s designs are considered an international benchmark. This was confirmed by Carrie Bradshaw when she showed her great love (even obsession) for the Blahnik in the series “ Sex & The City “Since then, who has not dreamed of having a” Manolo “?

Not only Carrie Bradshaw fell in love with these shoes: Victoria Beckham, Madonna, Beyoncé, Anna Wintour, Michelle Obama or Rihanna, among many others, blindly trust the canary, wearing their designs on red carpets and international events.

Manolo Blahnik went to London during the 1970s to try his luck in the world of fashion. His atypical and particular shoe designs, added to his talent and his good circle of friends, launched the canary to stardom. Since then, Blahnik has become a classic on the catwalks, designing footwear for renowned brands such as Calvin Klein, John Galiano, Calorina Herrera and Christian Dior.

The European colonial expansion in North Africa during the 19th century was decisive in the desire of many artists to travel and explore an unknown world. From the representation of their landscapes, customs and conflicts arose the so-called orientalist painting, a genre with its own personality within nineteenth-century art, passionately cultivated by great masters such as Eugene Delacroix, Dominique Ingres or Mariano FortunyAlong with this conquest, the success of travel literature, the desire to find novel pictorial themes and the adventurous spirit that characterized them, led many artists on a journey to the dreamed paradise that they assimilated in their works with the recreation of an Orient. Exotic and captivating. Proof of this is the selection of works that on July 15th we offer in our oriental art auction.

The emergence of Orientalism as a fully recognized genre finds its origin during Romanticism , which in the same way as medieval historicism, then meant a flight from reality endowed with a certain mythification. Artists, attracted by the exotic and distant, represented the eastern world under a prism dominated by the fanciful and evocative character that characterized the multiple stories about the lands of Mediterranean Africa and the Middle East that, such as those of Francis Burton, Gustav Flaubert or Gerard de Nerval among others, proliferated in the literature. In fact, as a result of the Napoleonic campaigns, the western imaginary was nourished by the glories of these old empires, whose conquest was represented in multiple scenes symbolizing the power and superiority of the West over the East . In this way, the battle scenes, the subjugated slaves or the infinite deserts that they traveled during the colonization campaigns found a time of pictorial splendor.

However, in front of this vision, a more realistic aspect developed that, far from the bombastic tone and the negative connotations towards the Moorish that prevailed in the first orientalist works,it was recreated in the representation of customs, culture and scenes of daily life.Thus, during the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the painters traveled to the Middle East where they found a reality that discovered for them a different and new country, which stood out with its peculiarities above the clichés and prejudices of Europeans. The new orientalist school left wars, harems and slave markets behind to paint the world that opened before them in all its daily dimensions.

“Lana Turner”, portrayed through WArhol’s Polaroid in 1985. Up for auction at Setdart.

The king of pop art par excellence, Andy Warhol, anticipated several decades with his famous Polaroids to the explosion of social networks, which, like Instagram, have become a true symbol of our era. In the same way, Warhol turned his iconic portraits into a valuable account of the social environment that accompanied him throughout his career, immortalizing the brightest stars of the moment with his inseparable Polaroid camera. This is the case of photography (35175118) That next July 5 we present at our auction, where Warhol manages to capture the essence of the maturity of one of the great legends of the classic Hollywood screen, such as Lana Turner.

The relevance of Warhol’s facet as a photographer within the development of his artistic personality is completely unquestionable, as shown the more than 100,000 snapshots he took throughout his career . His love affair with photography begins around 1962 when the artist acquired his first Polaroid Big Shot camera . Fascinated by the advantages that photography instantly offered him, Warhol began to almost obsessively register everything around him, be it everyday objects, race riots, or the faces of the most famous people of the moment. Since then, he used his camera as if it were a preparatory work, being, as he himself stated, his particular pencil and paper with which he gave birth to a large part of his artistic corpus. In this way, his Polaroid became a fundamental tool in the process of making a later work that he often turned into screen printing. In fact, some of them, like Marilyn Monroe’s, have gone down in the history of contemporary art as true icons that are already part of our cultural imaginary

However, Warhol would soon cease to conceive of photography as a simple accessory means to turn it into an end in itself, a fully autonomous artistic expression through which he opened a fascinating window to the world of the star system and it brought us closer to the reality of its revered protagonists from a much more intimate and private vision than usual. For more than two decades, first with his Polaroid and later with a Minox camera, Warhol devoted himself to chronicling his daily life, in which his friends, many of them famous, became a real object of desire for the artist.

Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, John Lennon Salvador Dalí, Man Ray … all of them were the target of Warhol’s snapshots, immortalizing them in strict close-up to show the most mundane side of characters that, to the rest of the world, seemed unattainable . In this sense, we find a great paradox in Warhol’s work. While in his paintings or serigraphs everyday and consumer objects were elevated to the category of art, in his photographs he carried out an inverse process: to humanize the most inaccessible stars of his time. To do this, Warhol used to portray them in an improvised way and in simple outfits, focusing all attention on the expressiveness of their faces and gaze.