Keith Edmier

Metro Pictures Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Metro Pictures Gallery, Keith Edmier, 1998
London, Tate Gallery, Abracadabra: International Contemporary Art, 1999, p. 42, illustrated in colour, and pp. 43 and 45, illustrated in colour in detail
New York, Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies, Keith Edmier 1991-2007, 2007-08, pp. 76-77, illustrated in colour, and p. 80, illustrated in colour in detail

Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick, Eds., Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Cologne 1999, pp. 140-41, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although it fails to convey the monumental three-dimensionality of the sculpture. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a small number of very minor traces of adhesive residue at intervals to some of the joins between the various elements and, as to be expected with the artist's choice of media and working process, some small and minor rub marks and fissures in a few places to the silicone rubber surfaces throughout.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"I was looking for a way to connect the personal with the natural world.  I was interested in working with actual plants, and began casting living botanical forms in an effort to freeze time – to provide permanence to the impermanent and ephemeral. They became a way of storytelling for me: using their life cycles, behaviour, histories, and mythologies to comment on my own experience" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue: New York, Center for Curatorial Studies, Keith Edmier 1991-2007, 2008, p. 82).

Keith Edmier's extraordinary Victoria Regia (Second Night Bloom) towers monumentally over the viewer affording a fantastical subterranean spectacle of the ephemeral and magnificent nocturnal blooms indigenous to the eponymous Amazonian underwater plant. As a dominant focal point of Edmier's comprehensive mid-career retrospective held at the Center for Curatorial Studies in New York in 2008, the present work embodies a consummate conflation of the major themes of time, nostalgia, decay and the natural world underpinning the entirety of the artist's sculptural practice. Executed in 1998, a year of particular creative achievement, Victoria Regia is inextricably linked to two adjacent major works from the very same year, Beverley Edmier 1967 and A Dozen Roses, now held in the collection of the Tate. Announcing the full realisation of Edmier's artistic maturity, the theatrical scale and bravura technical sophistication situate this immense sculpture as truly iconic within the artist's oeuvre. As outlined by David A. Greene in Frieze magazine: "the lilies are a tour de force of fabrication, their dhurrie-sized pads effortlessly suspended in the air above our heads; in effect, we become big fish and frogs, nosing around the hollow receptacles of one and the pollen-smeared stamens of another" (David A. Greene, 'Keith Edmier: Metro Pictures' in Frieze, Issue 40, May 1998). Indeed, whimsically propelling the viewer into a mysterious and dream-like encounter, the hyperrealistic plant-sculpture delicately cast in pink resin directly from the enormous species of exotic water lily, represents a triumph of skilled artistry:  intricate spines, petals and translucent veins highlight formal splendour and meticulous execution. As such, Victoria Regia unequivocally stands as the most important work by Keith Edmier ever to be offered for public sale.

A faithful and life-size sculptural transmutation of the monumental species of South American pond-lily, Edmier's Victoria Regia comprises one half of an almost identical partite pairing. As a single sculptural entity both works together constitute a thematization of the hermaphroditic development particular to the regia genus. During the cyclical course of anthesis the nocturnal underwater flower appears as a pure white female blossom the first night, which over the course of the next day morphoses to incorporate the male sexual organs, thereafter flowering with pink tips the following night.  The present work embodies the Second Night Bloom of anthesis, the moment whereby the chance transferal of pollen by the Cyclocephaia scarab beetle affords the Victoria's only means of fertilization. Painstakingly preserving this specific moment in time, Edmier's expert translation is at once a suspension of natural life and fleeting beauty, whilst simultaneously embodying a death-mask captured in the medium of pink resin.  Lurid pink shadows cast by the gigantic umbrella-like lily pads imbue Edmier's translation with the constancy of nostalgia; the perpetual trademark use of pink acrylic and polyurethane harks back to the dental acrylic and model making techniques rooted in the artist's formative training and experience as an orthodontic lab assistant and Hollywood special-effects artist. Conflated with the metaphoric eroticism of transformative, interchangeable and self-sufficient plant gender, Edmier's enormous artifice is at once a potent psychological allegory for notions of fragility and virility, punctuated with the autobiographical; as explained by Christian Scheidemann, "the artist sees autobiographical parrallel's in the portrayal of male and female gender roles, reflecting his own childhood in his parental home" (Christian Scheidemann, 'Keith Edmier: The Original and its Digestion', Parkett 8, 2007, p. 22).

Since 1991 Edmier has plundered the reminiscence of an adolescence spent in middle-America as a repository and creative well-spring of his particular artistic engagement.  Frequently re-creating and representing visages of important figures derived from childhood memories and forged in the typical pink dental acrylic, flowers often accompany or allude to such figures as allegorical surrogates and sexual referents to human love and desire. Edmier's instinctual proclivity for self-examination posits his practice as a form of fantastical reconfiguration of the past through memory, a kind of warped psychological archaeology; in this light Victoria Regia (Second Night Bloom) confers a reading that imbues these plants with a cultural and emotional weight, at once specific and universal as though viewed through a hallucinatory regressive dream.