A jigsaw puzzle held in a tin can made by W. Anastasi for the MoMa musuem gift shop.  This is a fantastically impossible, and very humourous piece of art, in its own right.  It is essentially an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle.  The background of which is a simple light grey, with no picture to make up to help guide, as per normal puzzles.  On top of that, the actual 'picture' on the jigsaw is infact an image of another jigsaw.  So, the outlines further confuse as the attemp to connect shapes is unertaken.  Quite brilliantly confusing!

William Anastasi is an American visual artist working in a wide range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, photographic works, and text. He has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1960s and is known as "one of the most underrated conceptual artists of his generation".  His first solo exhibition took place in 1964 at the Betty Parsons gallery following a chance meeting with Philip Guston who recommended his work to Parsons. Following this he had a number of exhibition at the Dwan Gallery from 1965 to 1970. In his early career, Anastasi was largely influenced by Marcel Duchamp, whose work he first saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art during his teens.  His work is predominantly abstract and conceptual. Early works such as Relief (1961) and Issue (1966) incorporate the use of industrial and construction materials. His works are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2010 Anastasi was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award, an unrestricted grant awarded biennially. Currently exhibited works include "Nine Polaroid Photographs of a Mirror", currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2007, he took part in the artistic performance "Blind Date" at the White Box Gallery in New York. In the performance, he and fellow artist Lucio Pozzi both drew dozens of artistic pieces blindfolded in an 8 hour long artistic duel.  Anastasi was a close friend of composer John Cage who he first met in 1965 when Cage heard that Anastasi was preparing an exhibition titled 'Sound Objects' and was interested in learning more. In 1977 Cage and Anastasi began playing chess daily Anastasi wrote the memoir The Cage Dialogues about their friendship.

Throughout Anastasi’s career as a seminal figure in the field of Conceptual Art, semantics and tautology have long played significant roles. The subject of pairing in particular has been a recurring theme since as early as 1967, when Anastasi’s Six Sites exhibition at the Virginia Dwan Gallery featured the gallery’s walls photographically rendered on canvas, then hung on the same walls. Repetition has also been embraced in Anastasi’s well-known subway drawings, a continuing series of unsighted works on paper the artist creates while drawing blind on the train, letting the motion of the car dictate the chance markings on paper as pure gesture. Circular reasoning informs Anastasi’s puzzle works. The puzzle as metaphor first appeared in 1975, when the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Anastasi to design a jigsaw puzzle for their store. The result was iconic, as his design was to create a puzzle-themed puzzle, similar in concept to his wall-on-a-wall works. It was popular enough to re-issue in a second color version.

Upon seeing the first enlarged piece in Anastasi’s studio, John Cage inquired how many pieces were in the puzzle’s box. When Anastasi replied with the number, Cage’s response was ‘Well then you’ve made 513 masterpieces!’ Puzzle also poetically references Anastasi and Cage’s many hours spent over a chessboard, silently engaged in a game of a different sort.

This is a fabulous piece of art from an intriguing figure, now eighty nine years of age.  A piece that is clearly going to be highly sought after in the future.  The set is complete, and in excellent condition.  There is one slight scuff to the paper surround to the tin, otherwise condition is excellent.