Acrylic on canvas

40 × 60 cm. 15 3/4 x 23 3/4 in.

Signed in English and dated on the reverse
PROVENANCE
Half Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Important Private Collection, Asia

Orchid in an Empty Valley
New International Art Star —— Genieve Figgis

“The poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods.”
——Oscar Wilde

It has often been said that viewing the works of Genieve Figgis is like reading the poetry of Oscar Wilde – beautiful and satirical, wherein one can feel the warmth of reality through the sharp ridicule. In contrast to most “remade classics,” Figgis uses brightly colored acrylic pigments to highlight the material quality of painting. Moreover, she uses constant “repainting” and the flowing nature of the media to present a silky and distorted texture at the edge of objects, with outlines that are uncertain and vacillating, to create an image space of bright color and constant change. In addition, the artist's free flowing brushwork is ultimately a powerful narrative tool that places images from art history against a background of her own Irish culture. For example, Figgis highlights the sumptuous life of Edwardian nobility together with its violence, hypocrisy, distorted and complex social forms. She also offers a “melted” expression of past artistic masterpieces, undermining the luxuriousness of classicism and dreams of Rococo style, while using subversive forms to create image contexts replete with black humor. In this way, her paintings are real world critiques of interest and privilege that eliminate the resplendent pretence of the upper class.

Famed Rebel, Taking the Path Less Traveled

As with her subversive creative style, Genieve Figgis also demonstrated a maverick eccentricity when growing up in Dublin. Despite being deeply passionate about art, she was rejected by art colleges at 19 because of her lack of professional training. However, Figgis refused to be dissuaded and despite starting a family at 21, she continued her passion for painting in her spare time when not working in a jewelry store. At the age of 30 she went back to school, graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin with a Masters of Fine Arts at 40 (1912) and has since made her living as a professional painter.

Although inspired across a broad swathe of space and time, Figgis is particularly enchanted by the aesthetics of eighteenth century nobility. She uses her uncommon personal vocabulary to infuse traditional painting with an appealing contemporary spirit and from this evolved her humorous subversion of traditional painting motifs. In 2014, Figgis' unique painting expression and grafting of classical and modern painting on social media platform Twitter attracted the attention of renowned US contemporary artist Richard Prince, who not only procured her work but also introduced her to the New York art scene. A few years later, Figgis' art career reached new professional heights, becoming a celebrity artist on Twitter and holding a first solo exhibition at the Half Gallery in New York which was an unprecedented success and made her the most sought after modern art star. Underneath their sumptuous and beautiful surfaces, her paintings are imbued with a sense of uneasiness and fragility, magnificence and decline, and in that context the interplay of past and present provide the artist with many opportunities for cross discipline cooperation. For example, in 2016 Figgis was invited by New York Metropolitan Opera House to hold an exhibition based on Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, which soon became the talk of the New York art world. On top of that, her works have also been collected by such celebrities as former Louis Vuitton creative director and fashion guru Marc Jacobs and Asian superstar Jay Chou. On this occasion, three classic works by Genieve Figgis are being auctioned, which collectively showcase her unique style and artistic vocabulary, making them perfect additions to any collection.

Adrift in Dreams, Classical 'Mirror-image' World

Figgis is particularly adept at depicting romantic and leisurely life scenes, her free flowing brushwork breathing new life into refined indoor spaces and exquisite attire. For example, Lady with a Cat (2015) (Lot 41) showcases the daily life of a noble lady: In the painting a woman stands in the center of a large luxurious room dressed in a pin tunic skirt, her “flowing” garments almost one with the white windows behind her, appearing abstract. For the artist, animals are important mediums to express color and its rhythms, and in this painting a tabby cat sits on the right window sill with its head raised and alert eyes looking directly at the viewer, like a “servant” presented as a foil to a central object. In terms of space, Figgis deliberately removes the interior furnishings, leaving only the symmetrical layout of the room, the horizontally-extending green walls and a huge red carpet. These elements intensify the visual sensation of emptiness and loneliness and the lack of concrete images forces viewers to reflect on those things that are “truly their own” and the fact that if prosperity and material life are merely fleeting, then only true companionship lasts forever.

The piece Carriage (Lot 40) was completed in the same year as a salute to the classic painting The Black Countess by post-impressionist master Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In the work, the artist uses her flowing brushwork to eliminate all allusions to the environment and playfully subverts the traditional aristocratic scene. As a result, the standard focus of the genre, nobility riding in a horse-drawn carriage, is replaced with a focus on the “working class” carriage driver, as Figgis alludes to the class contradictions inherent in the social structure. In the background, the whirlwind-like brush strokes depict an orange-red sky, as if melted flames are about to drip on the ice blue ground. In addition, the coach and sunburned face of the coach driver at the center of the picture are completely distorted, as they have been through a turbulent storm. The outline of the figure is surrounded by an earth-yellow pigment, almost as if blended with the orange-red flames behind, and this imbues the painting with a flamboyant resplendent style. It is could be warning of an impending revolution and the tense depiction instantly grabs the viewer's attention.

Erudite and Informed, Self-Reflection Connecting History and Reality

“I was deeply attracted by the drama in their work. I felt as if I was an unofficial royal court painter and in that position I was able to do whatever I wanted when creating, without a second thought for anything else.”
——Genieve Figgis

Figgis' creative inspiration often comes from “some of my favorite artists,” such as Goya, Velasquez, Fragonard and Thomas Gainsborough. In that context, it is clear that the 2016 work Blue Room (Lot 42) represents a “reinterpretation” of Gainsborough's renowned later work Diana and Actaeon. In 1770, renowned British portrait painter Gainsborough learned that one of his contemporaries Sir Joshua Reynolds while teaching a class at college admonished students that blue, a cold color, should be generally avoided as a keynote hue. It was as an expression of his contempt for this “law” that Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy. Unexpectedly, the work created a successful brand new aesthetic that served as a testament to the pioneering spirit of the British bourgeoisie as they explored the world in the 18th Century and as society transformed from feudal to capitalist. In his later years, Gainsborough sought to reproduce Titian's Diana and Actaeon in a different style. This is a world renowned work from Titian's Poesies series, described by J.M.W. Turner as “the most beautiful painting in the world” which also paved the way for “naked beauties bathing” motif that later became popular in Western painting. Gainsborough's version of the piece represents the perfect union of figures and scenery, placing the figures he depicted in a flowing landscape as a eulogy to humanity's free pursuit of self spirit. If we compare this to Figgis' Blue Room, she places the naked women indoors, making this a private scene from the mid 16th Century that cannot be displayed in public. However, Figgis is ingenious in her use of color, using blue to depict human forms and the spatial environment, thereby infusing the work with a modern feel generally associated with monochrome abstract paintings. To the left there are multiple layers of color, with the ink blue contrasted against the white floor. In this we can see an echo of Gainsborough's use of color in The Blue Boy, which also alludes to the artist's personal “rejection of tradition.” Moreover, the collision of narrative environment displacement and innovative use of color creates a rich and dramatic tension. The painting hanging on the wall on the right of the scene seems to speak to the brushwork of Titian, while the relaxed tone further juxtaposes the time and space of tradition and modernity. It also offers a deeper and more spiritual cross-examination of the real world definition of “subversion” and “striving to improve” than seen in earlier works.

Blue Room showcases a diametrically opposite atmosphere to the elegant and extravagant palace-type scene in Lady with a Cat. The blue figures are like ghosts wandering in the silent indoors and ingeniously correspond to work from the Anthropometries of the Blue period series by New Realism pioneer Yves Klein, which used the blue physical female form to showcase his rebellion against the era, gender and standards. However, in this work the blue human forms are no longer two dimensional graphic images, but rather ghost-like apparitions that slowly rise from the white background, with the artist's distorted image methodology echoing the surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. This creates a magical atmosphere, one that speaks to the appearance of decay and carnal desire at night, as well as a life of sentimentality and indulgence. On the left of the painting the artist uses large brushstrokes to create a blue dividing wall, which offers a powerful visual conflict to the highly realistic neo-classicist building on the right. Indeed, it is almost like discovering a virtual “gap” in the middle of the painting that transports viewers into a monstrous and multicolored vortex of time and space. In this sense, the approximation of the “bodies” in the painting to classicist “souls” enables the work to achieve a balance between abstraction and representation, unease and humor.

If Oscar Wilde viewed art as existing on a higher plane than life, then Genieve Figgis sees it as a mirror reflecting reality. As an artist, she uses her clarity of thought to rebel against common practice through her paintings. In this sense, Figgis takes the poetry of impressionism, the exaggeration of abstraction and the humor of post-modernism and blends them together with impetuous colors. As with the “orchid in an empty valley” of Buddhist cosmology, her works are avant-garde and independent of the world, but such attention to detail is also therapeutic to the human soul.

Price estimate:
HKD: 320,000 – 420,000
USD: 41,300 – 54,200

Auction Result:
HKD: 802,400