Françoise Gilot

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Françoise Gilot and it is registered in the artist's archives under no. 61878.

Provenance:
Sky Gallery, Florida.
Acquired directly from the above in 2011.
Private Collection.
Sotheby's, New York, sale of March 2, 2017, lot 103.
Acquired directly from the above sale by the present owner.

Lot Essay:
Throughout her long and multi-faceted career, Françoise Gilot stands as a remarkable French artist whose extensive oeuvre bridged the twentieth-century avant-garde with burgeoning contemporary aesthetics. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the artist explored the human figure through works on paper, many of which centered on the theme of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The present work, Titania and Oberon, 1969, depicts two main characters from the Bard’s eponymous play. Titania is the Queen of the Fairies, married to Oberon, the Fairy King. The pair are depicted as powerful natural spirits who together guarantee the fertility or health of the human and natural worlds. Yet their falling out over whether to keep a changeling boy has severely disrupted both worlds, as Titania explains at length in Act 1 Scene 2, ending "And this same progeny of evils comes /From our debate, from our dissension." As in all of her work, Titania and Oberon pulses with dynamic rhythm, overthrowing conventions to let Gilot’s impulses discover intense pictorial equivalences of storytelling.