ROB PRUITT | Baby, 2011 | acrylic, enamel paint and flocking on canvas

Sold for £97,250 at the Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 10 October 2012, achieving an auction record for the artist.

“In the end, art is really just about developing a sensitivity to your environment and making comments about the world you’re living in in a beautiful way.” ROB PRUITT

Like Rob Pruitt’s glittering paintings of panda bears and sculptural formations of blue jeans, the present lot Baby from 2011 is characterized by a subtle humour and an exuberant visual flair. The transition from baby blue to baby pink is disrupted by four quick strokes that denote a happy baby’s face.

Since the early 1990s, the work of New York-based artist Rob Pruitt has combined post-modern Pop aesthetics with political satire. Pruitt’s artistic mission is to critique the structures of the art world by playfully staging conceptual projects during his exhibitions. For his latest show at Kunstverein Freiburg in Germany, Pruitt put gigantic fibreglass dinosaurs in front of large-scale oil paintings that show apartments of people who suffer from Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome. During the time of the exhibition, a working flea market was installed in the gallery space, selling used goods to the visitors.