拍品专文
Shard Straps is a beguiling mixed-media collage by the Hungarian-American artist Sari Dienes. Comprised of glass, wood, metal, plaster and doorknobs, it lays on a white canvas. Its protruding wooden frame grants it a box-like form that recalls the work of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. Despite the use of manmade objects, the overall composition’s rounded edges and neutral palette give the work an organic feel. The luminous glass elements resemble gems hidden in a labyrinthine spider’s web, and indeed there is a sense of mystery and withholding to Shard Straps’ complex arrangement, as though it is a magical charm, posed somewhere between the earthy and the ethereal.
Born in present day Hungary, educated in Paris and London and for much of her life a resident in New York, Dienes has woven a career that reads like a digest of 20th century history. A student of Fernand Léger and Henry Moore, a journey around America in the 1940s opened Dienes to the potential of using the natural landscape and everyday objects in her practice. “Bones,” she wrote, “lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art” (S. Dienes, quoted in P. Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, Lebanon, 1998, p. 214). In the 1950s she mentored Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Born in present day Hungary, educated in Paris and London and for much of her life a resident in New York, Dienes has woven a career that reads like a digest of 20th century history. A student of Fernand Léger and Henry Moore, a journey around America in the 1940s opened Dienes to the potential of using the natural landscape and everyday objects in her practice. “Bones,” she wrote, “lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art” (S. Dienes, quoted in P. Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, Lebanon, 1998, p. 214). In the 1950s she mentored Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.