Provenance:

Gaga, Mexico City.

Private Collection.

Lot Note:

Since the early 2000s, Cosima von Bonin has developed a body of textile wall works—sewn rather than painted, and typically fabricated by master seamstresses to her design—that recast the language of geometric abstraction in soft, pieced fabric. Von Bonin refers to these works as "Lappen" (rags, or cloths), a term whose modesty is itself part of the gesture, deflating painting's traditional claims to authorship and craft even as the works occupy its wall-based, framed format. The recurring "Bubbles" motif, seen across related Lappen, such as 36 Bubbles Loop (2010), reduces the field to a pattern of stitched, circular forms: a deadpan nod to hard-edge abstraction and Pop repetition, rendered through sewing and patchwork rather than paint. Halfway Bubbles 1, 2, and 3 extends this inquiry across three panels, its title's "halfway" suggesting an interrupted or partial version of the pattern, in keeping with von Bonin's ongoing interest in exhaustion, incompletion, and irony as both formal and conceptual strategies.

Exhibited within the same year as major surveys of her work at the Arnolfini, MAMCO Geneva, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the triptych reflects a period in which von Bonin's Lappen stood alongside her sculptural practice as a central, and increasingly recognized, strand of her work. Von Bonin's work holds a place in major international collections, including Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Museum für Neue Kunst im ZKM, Karlsruhe.

Unframed.

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