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Lot Essay
Annie Cabigting has won widespread recognition for her beautifully rendered, photorealist canvases. Her works often employ meta-references within art history, interrogating how art is perceived and what happens when the viewer becomes the viewed. Cabigting's eye is drawn to the uncommon: the minute details, the overlooked or dismissed aspects to a work of art - such as the reverse of the Mona Lisa or the visual result of a destroyed Francis Bacon.
Cabigting researches her artworks extensively and possesses a deep awareness of art historical practices. Combined with her immaculate painterly technique, she has developed a keen ability to intelligently subvert or interrogate the existing works of other artists. However she does not engage these works in their known or realized forms, but explores their intrinsic potential: what they could have been or could possibly be through the progressive gaze of one like Cabigting. She stages what can be considered an artistic intervention in order to breathe new life and new perspectives into iconic artworks, reinventing the canon of art history for her viewers.
It was during one such academic investigation that Cabigting discovered Francis Bacon's propensity for destroying and discarding works which did not meet his exacting standards. Other critics and viewers may have overlooked these as immaterial efforts by this master painter, however Cabigting perceived beauty and vast potential within the uncovered trove of images. She resurrected the destroyed paintings within a series of sensitively executed canvases, of which this current artwork is a powerful and elegant example. It portrays the monochromatic, spatially void backdrop characteristic of Bacon's artwork, while in the foreground is the torso of a human figure in plum-colored robes, executed in mimesis of Bacon's gestural brushstrokes. However where the head should be is a gaping square hole, as the canvas has been cut out to reveal the stretcher bar behind. This reduction of Bacon's most iconic motif, the screaming or anguished facial expression, invalidates our hitherto established perception of Bacon's art practice and forces the viewer to contemplate the artwork beyond its reality, for its underlying possibilities. At the same time, we also acknowledge Bacon's destroyed painting for its material substance of canvas and wood, upon which a fragment of genius lingers.
Cabigting researches her artworks extensively and possesses a deep awareness of art historical practices. Combined with her immaculate painterly technique, she has developed a keen ability to intelligently subvert or interrogate the existing works of other artists. However she does not engage these works in their known or realized forms, but explores their intrinsic potential: what they could have been or could possibly be through the progressive gaze of one like Cabigting. She stages what can be considered an artistic intervention in order to breathe new life and new perspectives into iconic artworks, reinventing the canon of art history for her viewers.
It was during one such academic investigation that Cabigting discovered Francis Bacon's propensity for destroying and discarding works which did not meet his exacting standards. Other critics and viewers may have overlooked these as immaterial efforts by this master painter, however Cabigting perceived beauty and vast potential within the uncovered trove of images. She resurrected the destroyed paintings within a series of sensitively executed canvases, of which this current artwork is a powerful and elegant example. It portrays the monochromatic, spatially void backdrop characteristic of Bacon's artwork, while in the foreground is the torso of a human figure in plum-colored robes, executed in mimesis of Bacon's gestural brushstrokes. However where the head should be is a gaping square hole, as the canvas has been cut out to reveal the stretcher bar behind. This reduction of Bacon's most iconic motif, the screaming or anguished facial expression, invalidates our hitherto established perception of Bacon's art practice and forces the viewer to contemplate the artwork beyond its reality, for its underlying possibilities. At the same time, we also acknowledge Bacon's destroyed painting for its material substance of canvas and wood, upon which a fragment of genius lingers.