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Lot description
PROPERTY FROM THE ALBERT E. AVELLANA COLLECTION Porcelain Wedding Inscribed Top: “Art Performance and Participation”, Below “Porcelain Wedding” Dated 1989, London (lower right) oil on canvas 13 1/2" x 10 1/2" (34 cm x 27 cm) "Porcelain Wedding” is perhaps one of two of David Medalla’s most important performance works. (The other being “Stitch in Time”.) First performed in 1974, “Porcelain Wedding” delved into the themes of marriage and burial. Reputedly drawing in the audience to undress and allow themselves to be smeared in mud and to be painted on, it was notoriously difficult to re-stage but nevertheless quickly passed into legend. Medalla’s belief that all beauty should be ephemeral deliberately made no record of it. It was also part of a larger discourse Medalla had during what he called his “Marxist period” where he was looking at “historical conditions more and more, horrified by the gap between poverty and wealth” that he had seen in India. Medalla would theorize that while societies create technologies and these in turn give birth to societies, “artists did not think in those terms — but in terms of form and beauty and composition.” The original “Part-Art” piece was, according to Medalla, was “based on things like the beginning of industrialization or the beginning of poetry.” This oil is doubtly rare as a visual totem of that event. Medalla, born in Singalong, Manila, epitomized the avantgarde artist of the 60s and 70s. He traveled the world, impressing even the most elite artists. “I was pleasantly surprised that people like Tinguely, Takis and Yves Klein, who were superstars in Paris in the sixties, actually took me seriously,” he said in one interview. Medalla’s works are in the Tate collection in London. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)