?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
JIMMY DESANA (1949-1990)
A suite of 5 photographs from DeSana's Suburban series The titles include: Marker Cones (No Head), 1982 * Sweatshirt #2, 1980 * Four Legs with Shoes, 1979 * Sweatshirt (Outdoors), 1980 * Figure with Light Trails in Bed, 1980. Cibachrome prints, the images measuring approximately 375x483 mm; 14 3/4x19 inches, the sheets slightly larger, each with a blind stamp "JIMMY DESANA" on recto, and an edition number 9/28 or 2/28 (the first image) in pencil on verso. 1979-82; printed 1982.
Like Enema, DeSana's "Suburban" series examines S&M culture alongside traditional suburban culture, equating everyday life with bondage in witty and humorous ways. Here the figures are lit with tungsten lights and bright, nearly garish, gels, and are depicted further stripped of identity (while the figures in "Submission" were often masked, here the figures' heads are often completely obscured or submerged). The increasing ambiguity of bodies in DeSana's images can be found not only in terms of identification but also in sexuality. DeSana said, "I think of the body almost as an object...I attempted to use the body but without the eroticism that some photographers use frequently...The body was treated almost as a prop and used with objects." Made at a time when color photography was only just beginning to be considered within fine art spaces, DeSana's use of bright color printed as glossy Cibachrome prints explicitly ties the work to consumerism and advertisements, in a visual language unambiguously and purposefully new and distinctive. Complex and suggestive, the imagery is both seductive and strange in his overt dramatization and submersion of sexuality and gender. (Jimmy DeSana, Submission,, Brooklyn Museum, 2022)
