Oct 04, 2018 - Sale 2487

Sale 2487 - Lot 166

Price Realized: $ 5,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
WILLIE COLE (1955 - )
I sacrifice my Selix.

Mixed media assemblage with iron scorched canvas and a Proctor Silex iron, 1991. 1245x940x89 mm; 49x37x3 1/2 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.

Provenance: Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago; the Dr. Robert H. Derden Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1991).

Exhibited: A Black Collector's Odyssey in Contemporary Art, Community Gallery of Art, College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL, January 12 - February 25, 1990; The Object Redux: Re-used, Renewed and Reinvented, Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Art, Racine, Wisconsin, September 18 - November 6, 1994.

This early and significant example of Willie Cole's incorporates both his signature use of a hot iron to scorch the canvas and an attached Proctor Silex steam iron. Cole first began making his iron scorch paintings during his Studio Museum in Harlem residency of 1990. The Protor Silex iron, according to Patterson Sims in Anxious Objects: Willie Cole's Favorite Brands, was prized by the artist "for its overall design and the pattern of its perforations." Sims pp. 41 and 103.