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Lot Essay
'[T]he beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you the freedom to change things... I like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly that theres a sense of them not being complete to keep them alive and fresh' (R. Warren, quoted in J. Cape, Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, London 2009, p. 35).'
Striding across two square plinths, a pair of caricatured legs in platform heels, cropped dramatically and tantalizingly at the hips, Rebecca Warren's masterpiece Croccioni is a brilliantly satirical subversion of the male fetishisation of the female form. An early work by the artist executed in 2000, Croccioni was created at a time when Warren was gaining critical momentum before her Turner Prize nomination in 2006. Croccioni's title itself is a wittily crafted amalgamation paying homage to her references: the dynamic movement of Umberto Boccioni's futuristic and macho sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and the voluptuous, louche females of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. Warren would later make explicit her debt to Crumb in the playful title of another work Homage to R. Crumb my father (2003).
It is through her referencing of a pantheon of iconic male figurative artists that Warren so powerfully subverts the sculptural clichs attached to the age old genre of the female body. She revisits Fontana'searly fragmented figures, Crumb's buxom ladies, the eroticised postures of Rodin, as well as Helmut Newton's overtly sexualized women, ingenuously eschewing idealisation and fantasy for deliberate, provocative distortion. In doing so she creates her own uniquely strident forms, depicted in Croccioni with its bulbous thighs, portly calves, and the omission of the rest of the body. Warren has described her relationship to the artists whose work she references as 'one of influence and allowing yourself to be influenced. Of course there is a real hardcore drive of iconoclasm in there too and general oedipal revolt. It's also about finding a way to be expressive. Expression is perceived as a problem. One way of negotiating that is to re-use existing idioms that are accepted as being expressive' (R. Warren quoted in B. Ruff, (ed.), Dark Passage, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zurich, Zürich 2005, p. 21).
Warren exploits the pliability of the clay media to flesh out the legs in Croccioni, teasing and kneading at the clay, imbuing it with its own particular vernacular of form. As Warren has said, 'the beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you the freedom to change thingsI like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly that there's a sense of them not being complete to keep them alive and fresh.' (R. Warren quoted in J. Cape, Shape of Things to come: New Sculpture, exh. cat.,Saatchi Gallery, London 2009, p. 35). Croccioni's fresh contours combined with its unfired, inchoate earthiness creates a work of surprising visceral beauty and dynamism.
Striding across two square plinths, a pair of caricatured legs in platform heels, cropped dramatically and tantalizingly at the hips, Rebecca Warren's masterpiece Croccioni is a brilliantly satirical subversion of the male fetishisation of the female form. An early work by the artist executed in 2000, Croccioni was created at a time when Warren was gaining critical momentum before her Turner Prize nomination in 2006. Croccioni's title itself is a wittily crafted amalgamation paying homage to her references: the dynamic movement of Umberto Boccioni's futuristic and macho sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and the voluptuous, louche females of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. Warren would later make explicit her debt to Crumb in the playful title of another work Homage to R. Crumb my father (2003).
It is through her referencing of a pantheon of iconic male figurative artists that Warren so powerfully subverts the sculptural clichs attached to the age old genre of the female body. She revisits Fontana'searly fragmented figures, Crumb's buxom ladies, the eroticised postures of Rodin, as well as Helmut Newton's overtly sexualized women, ingenuously eschewing idealisation and fantasy for deliberate, provocative distortion. In doing so she creates her own uniquely strident forms, depicted in Croccioni with its bulbous thighs, portly calves, and the omission of the rest of the body. Warren has described her relationship to the artists whose work she references as 'one of influence and allowing yourself to be influenced. Of course there is a real hardcore drive of iconoclasm in there too and general oedipal revolt. It's also about finding a way to be expressive. Expression is perceived as a problem. One way of negotiating that is to re-use existing idioms that are accepted as being expressive' (R. Warren quoted in B. Ruff, (ed.), Dark Passage, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zurich, Zürich 2005, p. 21).
Warren exploits the pliability of the clay media to flesh out the legs in Croccioni, teasing and kneading at the clay, imbuing it with its own particular vernacular of form. As Warren has said, 'the beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you the freedom to change thingsI like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly that there's a sense of them not being complete to keep them alive and fresh.' (R. Warren quoted in J. Cape, Shape of Things to come: New Sculpture, exh. cat.,Saatchi Gallery, London 2009, p. 35). Croccioni's fresh contours combined with its unfired, inchoate earthiness creates a work of surprising visceral beauty and dynamism.