Aleksandra Mir (B. 1967)
Aleksandra Mir (B. 1967)

(i) Stock Market: '87 Crash Wall St. Bloodbath (19th October 1987)(ii) Stock Market: '87 Crash Stox Ride The Seesaw (20th October 1987)(iii) Stock Market: '87 Crash Wall St. On A Roll (21th October 1987)(iv) Stock Market: '87 Crash Fed $$$ Fail To Nip Dip (22nd October 1987)(v) Stock Market: '87 Crash TGIF! (23rd October 1987)

Details
Aleksandra Mir (B. 1967)
(i) Stock Market: '87 Crash Wall St. Bloodbath (19th October 1987)
(ii) Stock Market: '87 Crash Stox Ride The Seesaw (20th October 1987)
(iii) Stock Market: '87 Crash Wall St. On A Roll (21th October 1987)
(iv) Stock Market: '87 Crash Fed $$$ Fail To Nip Dip (22nd October 1987)
(v) Stock Market: '87 Crash TGIF! (23rd October 1987)
marker pen on paper
each: 74 x 58in. (188 x 147.3cm.)
Executed in 2007
Provenance
Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above in 2007.
Exhibited
New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Newsroom 1986-2000, 2007 (illustrated in colour, pp. 171-172, 174-175).
Berlin, Martin Gropius Bau, ArtandPress, 2012. This exhibition later travelled to Karlsruhe, ZKM Center for Art and Media.
Ipswich, Ipswich Art School Gallery, Revisitations: Saatchi Gallery returns to Ipswich Art School, 2012.
London, Saatchi Gallery, Champagne Life, 2016.
Further Details
These works are part of a larger series of two-hundred-and-thirty-six, of which one-hundred-and-nineteen were destroyed during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Lot Essay

These five large drawings, vibrantly produced in marker pen by Aleksandra Mir and a team of assistants, are part of a larger series of 200: each depicts the front page of an edition of the New York Post or the New York Daily News between the years 1986 and 2000, with these five telling the story of the 1987 Wall Street crash. At the show’s first exhibition, Mir and her team carried out the drawing in the gallery itself, writing the ‘headlines’ to be hung the next day while visitors milled around them taking in the previous day’s work. As Mir said about the show, ‘we produced art at a schedule more akin to a news agency than to that of an artist’s studio.’ The lively, almost cartoonish calligraphy of the drawings reflects the energetic sensationalism of the original tabloid newspapers, but they also draw on Mir’s background writing and distributing fanzines around New York. Using these DIY techniques to painstakingly recreate these stories, each one familiar to the New Yorkers of Mir’s generation, the artist draws our attention not only to the shared cultural memory cultivated by the media, but at the same time reminds us of the vitality of the processes of human collaboration that lie behind these memories.

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