Wright Auction

Studio Job, a ground-breaking art and design studio based in the Netherlands, is an international leader in contemporary art and sculpture. Led by artist Job Smeets (b.1969) a pioneer of modern conceptual and sculptural art and design, he founded Studio Job in 1998 in the renaissance spirit combining traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. Smeets leads a team of over 25 highly talented craftspeople to produce art pieces, sculptures and works in the atelier in the Netherlands. The studio works across art, interiors and design with a vast range of high-profile clients, galleries, and collaborators.

The present lot, from Studio Job's 2009 Industry Series features laser-cut and hand-constructed marquetry of Indian rosewood and maple. The intricate and symmetrical façade resembles seventeenth century Dutch decorative designs, while the morbid subject matter alludes to vanitas still-life paintings and the proliferation of memento mori imagery during the Dutch Golden Age. In Studio Job's modern re-imagination of these historical motifs, animal skeletons, butterflies, mice and lizards mingle with fearsome icons that have become commonplace in contemporary life—gas masks, electrical towers, automatic weapons and pluming smoke stacks.

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch came to be the richest, most powerful and most technologically advanced peoples in the world. While much art of the Dutch Golden Age celebrated this abundance with opulent still-lifes and dignified portraits of civic life, vanitas paintings were reminders that no other thing was certain other than death and that earthly possessions, inherently transient, were often pursued out of vanity. These paintings existed as both a moral flogging as well as a genuine appeal to viewers to meditate upon and appreciate the richness of the world at hand, even in its chaos. The same could be said about Studio Job's Industry Series, which urges those living with these works to fear not the threats of the modern world, but to fear not living fully and freely alongside them.