Jack Tilton Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in December 1990

Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art (and travelling), Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, September 1994 - July 1995

Kay Larson, "David Hammons", Galeries Magazine, Feb/Mar 1991, p. 103, illustrated

This work is in very good condition. As to be expected with the found object nature of the media, there is some minor wear throughout, which predated the execution of the work. The edges of the cut handbag are frayed, with a number of loose threads, and there is minor oxidation to the metal surfaces with some dust and smear marks to the rubber tube. There is a minute speck of white paint to the center left reverse edge of the tube, which is possibly inherent to the media, and some minute cracks to the dried rubber at the bottom two corner tips and a small number of hairline cracks in the top right fold, which are inherent to the age and nature of the media.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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"Conceptual artist, environmental sculptor and social commentator, Mr. Hammons fashions from the artifacts of his urban surroundings a strange and rather wonderful kind of poetry."
Michael Kimmelman, "Giving Voice to the Ephemera of the Urban World," The New York Times, May 19, 1989

Throughout a five-decade career of eluding categorization and defying art world protocols, David Hammons consistently produces context-sensitive works that pose the question of identity – of his own, of the African American experience and of art. Conceived not frivolously but with a good deal of spontaneity and indelible wit, the arresting wall mounted sculpture Untitled from 1989-1990 is an exemplary instance of Hammons’ continuous reworking of the association between materials, objects  and t꧟heir connotations, all centered around two themes:  the commercialism and divisive nature of high art and societal struggle.

The present work, a portrait of a wide-eyed face, recalls the artist’s early Body Prints in which, with a nod to Yves Klein, Hammons pressed his own form onto the image. The corporeal image of Hammons, however, takes on a rather different significance than Klein’s Anthropométries, aside from the fact that Klein employed the bodies and visage of others: Hammons constantly wrestles with the inescapable redundancy o🅷f a black artist expressing “blackness.” This redundancy and the subsequent layering of meaning are conversely best expressed in the present work by Hammons’ extreme economy of means. By assembling and exalting a group of found objects, the artist perhaps is constructing a portrait of himself, one that is layered with self-consciousness, irony and the dignity of his itinerant artist-shamanism, or in other words, a kind of dignified “homelessness.” Throughout his oeuvre, Hammons’ self-fulfilling mystique – conjuring spirits with chicken parts, strands of human hair, bottles of cheap wine, decorated basketball hoops – is always accompanied by his reading of black cultural identity and its past heritage as he in turn deconstructs stereotypes and re-contextualizes materials.

Composed of a rubber inner tube, a dark-haired wooden brush, a pair of strip metal coils and a torn leather bag, Untitled is on the one hand deeply rooted in the art historical canons of assemblage, such as Pablo Picasso’s Bull's Head, (Seat and Handles of a Bicycle), 1942, as well as the Duchampian ‘ready-made’ that has influenced art since its inception. On the other hand, it is Hammons’ unique and joking take on the commercialism rampant in the contemporary world. The individual components of Hammons’ Untitled conjure up the romantic proletariat image of a mechanic, a shoe-shine man or a leather maker, only to be undercut by the pattern on the leather bag that is recognizably Louis Vuitton or the mark on the rubber tube that gives away its Italian origin. An alarmingly simple gesture of assemblage investigates the conversation and oppositional forces involved in today’s world – class, race, globalization, poverty, wealth – and where the black culture fits amid these forces. With eyes wide open in curiosity, disbelief or anger, the ambiguous face in Untitled demonstrates a consummate understanding of Hammons’ strategies of dissent and refusal. On the surface, the form of the present work resembles a sort of Jeff Koons’ Lobster or Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine, but in spirit, it’s a soulful meditation on contemporary culture disguised in romantic portraiture and modernist rebellion that occupies an artistic category on its own. “[Hammons’] translation of humble materials into poetic forms yields his art’s essential character as content-driven abstraction, spiritual food for the soul.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Zwirner & Wirth, David Hammons: Selected Works, 2006, n.p.)