This is a Forgery (JW)

I managed to gather a ton of works from my desktop image collection in thinking about artworks that could inspire me to commit forgery, and narrowed it down to three. My initial fogery candidates included paintings by Picasso, Philip Guston, Georg Baslitz, and Gerhard Richter but when I widdled it down further I ended up selecting works that satisfied three motivations for commiting forgery and included works that were not identified by the artists hand. The first would satisfy the thrill of making the thing, the second I would make to keep —— something that I’d love to look at regularly. The third motivation being to sell, not so much for profit, but to see if I could do it. Something that I suspect is often the motivation for anyone willing to create a forgery.















MAKE
Sigmar Polke/2009 Stained glass windows
The Grossmünster (“great minster”)
Romanesque/Protestant church Zurich, Switzerland
Sliced agetes

The forgery I would keep would be Joe Bradly’s “Grin” I love the simplicity of this painting, the raw linework, happy color and dumb subjectmatter. I never get sick of it, it’s the perfect blend of graffitti, minimalism, expressionism, and restraint.


























Keep
Joe Bradly
Grin, 2009
Painting - oil crayon, pencil, soot, and paint on canvas in artists frame
210 x 190 cm (82.5 x 75 inches)

I would make Hans Haacke’s Condenstion Cube to sell. First of all it seems perfectly doable, but it’s also completely magical and pure, depending on the simple science of temperature to conjure it’s effect. Because the cube doesn’t rely on any type of linework or identifable materials like the agates in Polkes stained glass pieces, one could possibly get away with making multipules that might be difficult to trace or identify.






















Sell
Cube / Hans Haacke : Condensation Cube (1963)
A hermetically sealed clear plexiglass cube containing 900ml of water which at room temperature creates a closed system of evaporating and condensing water.