Dominic Chambers Golden Hour
Dominic Chambers
b. 1993
Golden Hour
Executed in 2022.
Oil on linen
40 by 35 in. (102 by 89 cm.)
Please note that while this auction is hosted on Sothebys.com, it is being administered by the Aspen Art Museum, and all post-sale matters (inclusive of invoicing and property pickup/shipment) will be handled by the Aspen Art Museum. As such, Sotheby’s will share the contact details for the winning bidders with the Aspen Art Museum so that they may be in touch directly post-sale.
Condition Report:
Please contact bid@aspenartmuseum.org for condition report.
Catalogue Note:
Dominic Chambers (b. 1993 St. Louis, MO; lives and works in New Haven, CT) creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. Interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding, re-contextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, the artist sees painting as a critical and intellectual endeavor, as much as an aesthetic one.
Chambers’ recent paintings, such as "Golden Hour," feature his friends and acquaintances engaged in acts of leisure and contemplation. Locating his figures in shifting, monochromatic dreamscapes, Chambers suggests the mutability of our environment, and his scenes evoke the sensation of losing oneself in a good book or moment of quiet reflection. The artist sees color as a protagonist in his paintings―as important to unlocking their meaning as his subjects. Chambers’ deft manipulation of the tension and interplay between contrasting colors gives his work a subtle electric charge, while his eye for balance imbues each piece with a particular poetic harmony.
Dominic Chambers
Written by Sara Harrison for Aspen Art Museum Summer Issue 2022
Dominic Chambers wants to normalize the experience of doing nothing. In a filmed walk-through of his 2020 exhibi-tion "Like the Shapes of Clouds on Water," at Pittsburgh's August Wilson African American Cultural Center, he discusses his paintings of people relax-ing, reading, daydreaming. These works depict real people-friends, family-in imaginary landscapes; psychological and figurative, they explore the rela-tionship between reality and fantasy.
Chambers paints with strong, often primary colors, sometimes allowing red, yellow or blue to dominate the work. Color-field painting provides an important touchstone, while the influ-ence of art history is at its most explicit in the series "After Albers" (2020), in which tonal, concentric squares are laid atop the painted scene or the canvas is split horizontally by a sharp division of color.
Literature is another key influence for Chambers, who also writes short stories. Discussing the Pittsburgh show, he cites W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 The Souls of Black Folk as an important source. In this text, Du Bois describes how,
in the US, Black people live "behind the veil" of racial difference, separating them from the white society in which they must move and limiting their full self-expression. In Chambers's paint-ings, this experience is translated as a pattern of raindrops or a wash of color, partially obscuring the image of those behind.
A recent series is informed by Chambers's interest in the idea of shadow work, developed by psychoana-lyst Carl Jung, which encourages engagement with the unconscious and whole self. Speaking to Jasmine Wahi for artnet earlier this year, Chambers comments: "One's validation is often held in the power of other people. O en white people, for example, and the institutions. So, anything you produce is often measured by their sense of validity, and that robs you of your power. [ ... ] That reclaiming of power, that reclaiming of wholeness, is also a part of the shadow working. Then you don't need that validation. Your images stand on your own."
Provenance:
Kindly donated by the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London
View it on
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
Dominic Chambers
b. 1993
Golden Hour
Executed in 2022.
Oil on linen
40 by 35 in. (102 by 89 cm.)
Please note that while this auction is hosted on Sothebys.com, it is being administered by the Aspen Art Museum, and all post-sale matters (inclusive of invoicing and property pickup/shipment) will be handled by the Aspen Art Museum. As such, Sotheby’s will share the contact details for the winning bidders with the Aspen Art Museum so that they may be in touch directly post-sale.
Condition Report:
Please contact bid@aspenartmuseum.org for condition report.
Catalogue Note:
Dominic Chambers (b. 1993 St. Louis, MO; lives and works in New Haven, CT) creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. Interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding, re-contextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, the artist sees painting as a critical and intellectual endeavor, as much as an aesthetic one.
Chambers’ recent paintings, such as "Golden Hour," feature his friends and acquaintances engaged in acts of leisure and contemplation. Locating his figures in shifting, monochromatic dreamscapes, Chambers suggests the mutability of our environment, and his scenes evoke the sensation of losing oneself in a good book or moment of quiet reflection. The artist sees color as a protagonist in his paintings―as important to unlocking their meaning as his subjects. Chambers’ deft manipulation of the tension and interplay between contrasting colors gives his work a subtle electric charge, while his eye for balance imbues each piece with a particular poetic harmony.
Dominic Chambers
Written by Sara Harrison for Aspen Art Museum Summer Issue 2022
Dominic Chambers wants to normalize the experience of doing nothing. In a filmed walk-through of his 2020 exhibi-tion "Like the Shapes of Clouds on Water," at Pittsburgh's August Wilson African American Cultural Center, he discusses his paintings of people relax-ing, reading, daydreaming. These works depict real people-friends, family-in imaginary landscapes; psychological and figurative, they explore the rela-tionship between reality and fantasy.
Chambers paints with strong, often primary colors, sometimes allowing red, yellow or blue to dominate the work. Color-field painting provides an important touchstone, while the influ-ence of art history is at its most explicit in the series "After Albers" (2020), in which tonal, concentric squares are laid atop the painted scene or the canvas is split horizontally by a sharp division of color.
Literature is another key influence for Chambers, who also writes short stories. Discussing the Pittsburgh show, he cites W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 The Souls of Black Folk as an important source. In this text, Du Bois describes how,
in the US, Black people live "behind the veil" of racial difference, separating them from the white society in which they must move and limiting their full self-expression. In Chambers's paint-ings, this experience is translated as a pattern of raindrops or a wash of color, partially obscuring the image of those behind.
A recent series is informed by Chambers's interest in the idea of shadow work, developed by psychoana-lyst Carl Jung, which encourages engagement with the unconscious and whole self. Speaking to Jasmine Wahi for artnet earlier this year, Chambers comments: "One's validation is often held in the power of other people. O en white people, for example, and the institutions. So, anything you produce is often measured by their sense of validity, and that robs you of your power. [ ... ] That reclaiming of power, that reclaiming of wholeness, is also a part of the shadow working. Then you don't need that validation. Your images stand on your own."
Provenance:
Kindly donated by the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
