C.O. Paeffgen - Untitled - image-1

Lot 713 D

C.O. Paeffgen - Untitled

Auction 1135 - overview Cologne
01.06.2019, 14:00 - Contemporary Art
Estimate: 10.000 € - 15.000 €
Result: 24.800 € (incl. premium)

C.O. Paeffgen

Untitled
1974

Acrylic on photo canvas. 110 x 160 cm. Framed. Monogrammed and dated 'C.O.P. 74'. - Traces of studio and minor traces of age.

The classic! C.O Paeffgen discovers the illustration of a fun bathing party in the daily newspaper Vuesnik of 17 July 1974, cuts the find out, copies the details of the source and turns the description into an occasion, outlining the performers with contours, colouring bikinis, bathing shorts and hats. The rose-pink horizon intensifies the relaxed summer mood and the picture's status. The former black and white image is photographed and worked and lastly stretched over the canvas frame. One of the usually boring reports on the annual repeated opening of the bathing season undergoes a very cheerful, perhaps personal view of the event: does C.O. Paeffgen happen to be at the Croatian Mediterranean on 17 July between the Kvarner Bay and Dalmatia, not bothering to take his own photographs because the professional journalists provide him so easily with the motif? Or is he parodying the artist Max Liebermann's bathing scenes of the Dutch beach at Noordwijk which appear nearly every year? Neither is true: the newspaper can be bought at the kiosk in Cologne! The fictional excursion is also not of significance for the picture, but illuminates the artist's working method with the sometimes more and sometimes less manipulative intervention of a photographic template by outlining the contours. The authenticity of the original - as here - does not necessarily get lost, but the cheerful and relaxed enjoyment of bathing is lovingly brought into focus by the overdrawing of a conventional photographic document from a daily newspaper.

MvL

Provenance

Private collection, North Germany