Ingmars Lindbergs
Director
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Lot 65P
An Allan Houser bronze, 1992
1 May 2020, 10:00 PDT
Los AngelesSold for US$2,040 inc. premium
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Kim Jarand
Specialist, Head of Sale
Allan Houser
Chiricahua Apache, (1914-1994), untitled abstract family, 1992, bronze with iridescent patina, edition 3/20, stamped signature and foundry mark.
excluding stone base: height 11 3/4in, width 7 1/4in
excluding stone base: height 11 3/4in, width 7 1/4in
Footnotes
Throughout his career, Allan Houser was prolific, experimenting with a range of themes, subjects and representative styles. As Houser's technique evolved over time, his modernist semi-abstract works began to take on a more streamlined elegance, and by the early 1980s, Houser began to delve ever deeper into abstraction.
"Reductive yet expansive, the abstract works are more open-ended, and yet they are every bit as poetic and emotive as his representational works of art" (W.J. Rushing, Allan Houser: An American Master, Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 2004, p. 151.
Houser often explored familial bonds in his work (most notably the theme of mother and child), but the present example mixes a quasi-representational family unit with one of Houser's most prolific themes in his later sculptures: that of faceless cloaked figures evocative of historical photographs of blanket-wrapped Pueblo figures. "Linking the sentinels to historic photographs situates them within the field of visual culture, but we also understand them as non-specific, if provocative, standing totemic forms..." (Ibid.).