?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
RICHARD STANKIEWICZ Double Booger for a Little John.
Steel sculpture, 1961. 770x525x230 mm; 30 1/2x20 3/4x9 1/4 inches (including base). With the artist's initials and dated "1961-10" on the upper side of the base.
Ex-collection private collection, Chicago.
Published Donadio, "Miracle in the Scrap Heap: The Sculpture of Richard Stankiewicz," Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 2003, page 39 (illustrated).
According to Donadio, describing Stankiewicz's work from the beginning of the 1960s, "He made heads that took the Urchin form, a section of cylindrical pipe, which he treated like a tunnel and filled with assorted discards of hardware. But at the same time he made two-faced Janus heads, sculptures with two primary surfaces and exaggerated facial expressions. With their grotesque and scary facial features, these stelae often bore names like Double Booger for a Little John, or The Suicide. The first of these was later described as a "spirit trap" for a person the artist detested. The latter may have been a meditation on the death of Ernest Hemingway, whose suicide was front-page news in the summer of 1961. The contrast between his untitled and his named works was becoming extreme."
