Ai Weiwei

Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/Lucerne
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Illumination, 2008, p. 9, illustration of another example in colour
Philip Tinari, et al., Ai Weiwei, Works: 2004–2007, Beijing 2007, pp. 36, 37 and 38, illustration of another example in colour 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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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."

Untitled, from 2006, is one of Ai Weiwei's best known sculptures in which he looks back to the work of another great polymath, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The sculpture, meticulously crafted from Huanghali wood using nail-free furniture joinery techniques perfected in the Ming dynasty and handed down for generations, is inspired by the proportions founded in the golden ratio. The golden ratio is a mathematical ratio that has fascinated thinkers since Euclid and Pythagoras because it finds frequent expression in nature and because the proportions, when applied to the arts, are considered to be aesthetically pleasing. It became the focus of much interest during the Renaissance and was frequently employed by artists and architects in their work.

 

Leonardo da Vinci produced one of the first representations of the polyhedron Ai Weiwei has fashioned, a truncated icosahedron with twelve pentagonal faces and twenty hexagonal faces, like a football. Leonardo's drawing was published as an engraving in De Divina Proportione, 1509, written by his close friend the mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (1445-1514). Ai Weiwei's Untitled is not modelled after Leonardo's illustration: rather, it is modelled after a toy that the artist bought for his cat, a small lattice-work ball with a bell in the centre. When Ai Weiwei later chanced upon a book in which Leonardo's illustration was reproduced, he made the connection between the sublime and the ridiculous.

 

The artist was fascinated to find an illustration that exactly depicts what he had designed five hundred years later. Moreover, he was astonished to find joinery techniques similar to those of the Ming dynasty. Indeed Leonardo's drawing was based on a wooden model, made either by Leonardo or his friend Pacioli, which implies that these techniques were employed at a contemporaneous time five thousand miles away in Europe. Separated by half a millennium, Untitled implies a chance meeting of minds between two men whose interdisciplinary interests probe multiple aspects of the world around them. Arguably the most important artist working in China today, Ai Weiwei's practice extends beyond fine art to include architecture, design and social and cultural commentary.