{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61726,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"150","artist":"Annie Cabigting (b. 1971)","title":"Hastened Glimpses of Dead Metaphors in Vanished Splendor","starting_price":4600000,"signed_dated":"signed, dated and inscribed \"annie 2013 5.6\" (on the overlap)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"36\" x 36\" (91 cm x 91 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Christie's, Asian Contemporary Art, Hong Kong, 29 May 2016, Lot 165","exhibited":"Beirut International Exhibition & Leisure Center (BIEL), Beirut Art Fair 2013, Beirut, Lebanon, 19 - 22 September 2013","literature":null,"write_up":"Annie Cabigting has always been fascinated by what happens in those quiet, unscripted moments that unfold in front of a work of art. Rather than viewing art history as a collection of untouchable monuments locked away in museum vaults, the acclaimed Filipino artist treats it as an ongoing, living conversation. In her 2013 canvas, Hastened Glimpses of Dead Metaphors in Vanished Splendor, Cabigting enters into a thoughtful dialogue with Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic modernists. Where Balthus created shadowy, interior worlds heavy with psychological tension and still silence, Cabigting takes a step back into the gallery space itself. By doing so, she bridges the gap between mid-century European modernism and our contemporary world, exploring how a historic painting continues to breathe, provoke, and resonate across generations. <br><br> At the heart of the canvas hangs a faithful rendering of Balthus’s 1938 portrait of his young neighbor, Thérèse Blanchard. Slumped casually in a tall wooden armchair wearing a deep crimson jacket and dark skirt, Thérèse's sprawling posture and unflinching gaze carry an unmistakable air of youthful introspection. Cabigting reproduces Balthus's soft, earthy palette and dry, fresco like paint application with extraordinary tenderness and technical skill. But the true emotional anchor of Cabigting's scene lies in the foreground, where a gallery visitor stands just inches from the frame. Seen from behind in a slouchy dark hoodie, her hair gathered into an effortless bun, she feels instantly familiar. <br><br> It is through both her poetic title and her deliberate staging that Cabigting unfolds a multi-layered critique on the nature of the Gaze. Balthus’s legacy has long been a lightning rod in art history, frequently analyzed through what cultural theorist Laura Mulvey famously coined as the \"male gaze\"—a visual hierarchy in which female figures are constructed primarily as passive objects of sight. In his landmark 1972 treatise Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger succinctly captured this historical dynamic, writing that \"men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at.\" In Cabigting’s title, Balthus’s young subject becomes one of art history’s \"dead metaphors,\" frozen in the \"vanished splendor\" of modernist allegories that reduced female interiority to passive beauty. Cabigting radically quietly upends this formula. By inserting a contemporary woman front and center—who pauses for a \"hastened glimpse\" of her own—the act of looking is reclaimed as an exercise in personal agency. The modern spectator is no longer watching herself being looked at; she is actively doing the looking, interrogating the masterwork on her own terms. Standing behind Cabigting's visitor, we become the final link in an intricate web of sightlines, reminded that a masterpiece is never static, but continually rewritten by every new pair of eyes that stops to confront it. (Jed Daya)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":6500000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":6500000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":25588,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":7810400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":68620,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/150.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":68995,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/150c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":68730,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/150a.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":68729,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/150b.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":149,"next":151,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}