Provenance:

Daniel Reich Gallery, New York.

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2009.

Lot Note:

Paul P. has emerged over the past two decades as one of the most distinctive figurative painters of his generation, carving out a body of work that reclaims a nineteenth-century portrait tradition—Whistler, Sargent—for subject matter that tradition would never have countenanced. Since his earliest exhibitions in the early 2000s, drawing on appropriated photographs from the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and pre-AIDS-era gay pornography, he has built a practice around the act of historical recuperation: taking images pushed to the margins and returning them to a lineage of painted portraiture with total sincerity, no irony intended. That project has earned him a place in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, LACMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as a spot in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

This work, from 2009, comes from the period in which that reputation was consolidating—the same year P. appeared in a group show at The Museum of Modern Art, shortly before institutional recognition abroad followed at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern and, later, the Freud Museum in London. What distinguishes P. within contemporary figurative painting is less a signature style than a sustained argument: that desire, memory, and art history are inseparable, and that a painter working today can still make that case through the languid, atmospheric means of an earlier century. As he has put it, his subjects are "anonymous and interchangeable" figures through which he searches for "the touching of hands between the past and the present"—a line that could stand as a statement of purpose for his practice as a whole.

Unframed.

Minor accretions at lower left and lower center. No apparent issues under UV. Additional images available upon request.

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