Sale: 548 / Contemporary Art Day Sale, Dec. 08. 2023 in Munich Lot 141

 

141
Victor Vasarely
LLA, 1968/1973.
Acrylic on canvas
Estimate:
€ 50,000 / $ 55,000
Sold:
€ 63,500 / $ 69,850

(incl. surcharge)
LLA. 1968/1973.
Acrylic on canvas.
Signed in lower right. Verso of the canvas twice signed (once in printed characters), dated "1968-73" and titled as well as inscribed "2612" and with minimally differing dimensions. 124.5 x 69.5 cm (49 x 27.3 in).
The date refers to both the year the work was conceived and the year it was realized.
• Victor Vasarely was one of the founding members of Op-Art and one of its most prominent representatives.
• His psychedelic colorful pictures vex the observer with their perceptual illusion.
• In terms of color, format and form the work reflects the famous "Olympic Poster" of the 1972 Munic Olympics
.

Accompanied by a photo expertise from Pierre Vasarely, president of the Fondation Vasarely, universal legatee and holder of Victor Vasarely's moral rights, issued in May 2021. The artwork will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint de Victor Vasarely, which is currently compiled by the Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Heseler, München.
Private collection Southern Germany (acquired from aforementoned in the 1990s).

Hypnotic motifs, vibrant forms and flickering patterns: The master of optical illusion puts our vision to the test."
From a text for the exhibition "Vasarely. Im Labyrinth der Moderne", Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, September 26, 2018 - January 13, 2019.

Victor Vasarely's aesthetic approach is based on, among others, the traditions of Constructivism and geometric abstraction. However, in his innovative work, he lends completely new, multi-faceted dimensions to the basic principles. With the help of a pictorial language reduced to as few and simple basic forms as possible, a slight distortion of geometric elements according to the rules of perspective, and a sophisticated arrangement of the forms, the artist succeeds in evoking spatiality on the flat surface of the canvas, thus creating impressive optical illusions. The results are complex structures that challenge the viewer's perception and imagination. In the work offered here, the viewer's gaze is also manipulated in such a way that the flat, two-dimensional image area is transformed into a complicated, geometric architecture of stacked and juxtaposed cubes and thus into a three-dimensional composition. After a largely monochrome creative period in the 1950s and early 1960s, Vasarely found completely new, extraordinary and complex color variations of great luminosity and intensity in the following period, which we also find in the present work. With this very characteristic, colorful cold-warm contrast, but also the use of the simplest basic geometric forms - circle, square and triangle -, the blurring of surface and plasticity, as well as the resulting bewilderment of the viewer's senses, the work is a prime example from the extremely successful period around 1960. [CH]



141
Victor Vasarely
LLA, 1968/1973.
Acrylic on canvas
Estimate:
€ 50,000 / $ 55,000
Sold:
€ 63,500 / $ 69,850

(incl. surcharge)