?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
JOAN FONTCUBERTA (1955 - )
Le Chant des Oiseaux. Selenium-toned silver photogram on painted vinyl wallpaper, the image measuring 482.6x387.4 mm; 19x15 1/4 inches, the mount 558.8x457.2 mm; 22x18 inches, with Foncuberta's signature and date, in pencil, on mount recto. 1989.
From a series exhibited at Zabriskie Gallery, New York titled "Joan Fontcuberta: Paper Gardens," April 10-May 22, 1991. Fontcuberta was exhibited by Galerie Zabriskie, Paris as early as 1983.
A disrupter, an activist, and a provocateur, Fontcuberta is perhaps best understood as a conceptual artist. His diverse body of work uses photography--the artistic medium most frequently associated with a neutral truth--and creates believable fictions, elaborate hoaxes, and beautiful alternate realities. At its core, each of his multi-layered series question authority and our relationship with subjective truth, in imagery that is at times pesudo-documentary, at times Surrealist, and at times lyrically beautiful. Born in Barcelona, Spain, Fontcuberta is the recipient of the Hasselblad Award. His best known series are titled Fauna, 1987 (which purports to discover a zoologist's work and catalogues unusual animals) and Sputnik, 1997 (which investigates a Russian cosmonaut's disappearance).
