Major sculptural works by the world’s leading contemporary artists will be shown by Christie’s Private Sales from 26 May to 28 October 2012, in a curated exhibition inspired by Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards, 1735, in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, the home of the Rothschild Collection and one of the most visited of the National Trust properties.
Richard Serra House of Cards © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2012
Works by Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Dan Flavin, Joana Vasconcelos, Tony Cragg and Anish Kapoor have been chosen by Christie’s as a contemporary response to The Rothschild Collection’s own special exhibition of Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards, re-united at Waddesdon for the first time with Chardin’s three other paintings of the same subject lent by the Musée du Louvre, Paris, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the National Gallery, London.
The House of Cards exhibition is envisaged as a sculptural counterpoint to the paintings, with their beautiful articulation of finely-balanced cards and underlying messages of the inexorable passage of time and the fragility of youth. The emphasis on structure and form combined with an understanding of the materials at work is something shared between Chardin’s card player and the great artist. For both, the controlled marshalling of gravity to a point of perfect equilibrium is the essential ambition. It is this intersection between the boy in the painting and the sculptor’s skillfull manipulation of material and form that Christie’s explores in this exhibition at Waddesdon Manor.
