Lot 3: American Tristar, 2004

American Tristar, 2004
Fluorescent lights.  150 x 150 in. (381 x 381 cm).   This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

 Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York

Exemplary of Mark Handforth’s sense of playful wit, the present lot is a striking installation of fluorescent lights that animates its surrounding space. Handforth has developed his noteworthy oeuvre on an ethic of challenging the conventions of sculpture. The present lot references the aesthetic of Dan Flavin, while addressing the innate romance of glowing light and the expansive symbolism of a radiating star.
 
"Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday objects, making subtle alternations and juxtapositions to reference modernist design, Minimalist sculpture, street subcultures, and roadside Americana…The result is an art that, as Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer writes, is 'equal parts suburban alienation and modernist transcendence.'"
(B. Sholis, “Mark Handforth,” Terminal Five, 2004)