?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
SIMONE LEIGH (1967 - ) Untitled.
Salt fired stoneware, 2006. Approximately 625 mm high; 25 inches high.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Philadelphia (2006).
Untitled is an excellent example of the Leigh's work in salt-fired stoneware in which she explores the imagery of the black female body, the romanticization of primitivism and fertility.
Leigh created another version of this vessel in black, entitled Pitch, pictured in the data base of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Leigh has often explored the experiences and social histories of black women through ceramics for over 25 years. Her work in ceramic makes multi-layered references to African traditions, feminism, ethnographic research, postcolonial theory and often times, racial politics.
Born to Jamaican parents in 1967, Simone Leigh grew up in Chicago and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA in Art and Philosophy from Earlham College in 1990 and taught ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her works span sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice projects that often focus on black female subjectivity. Through her investigations, her work overlaps cultures, time periods, and geographies, in what Leigh refers to a "collapsing of time," where she examines ideas of the female body, race, beauty and community.
Simone Leigh is a recipient of the Hugo Boss Prize (2018), the Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant (2018), Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2017), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2016) and Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2016). Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Leigh was the first artist to be commissioned for the Plinth, the first space on the High Line dedicated solely to monumental contemporary art commissions, where she will present her new sculpture Brick House in April of 2019.
