Learn about our Modern and Contemporary Fine Art specialists’ favorite works from our upcoming Fall Prints and Multiples Online Auction, taking place online on September 26, 2017.
Taylor Curry
Consignment Director, Modern & Contemporary Art
Daniel Arsham’s Polaroid Camera is part of his Future Relics series, in which he takes obsolete technology and reimagines them as petrified anthropological relics that have been excavated by scientists in a distant and dystopian future. Each object in the series is limited to just 500 pieces and sells out within hours of release. Other objects in Arsham’s series include a Sony Walkman, a cassette player and a clock. With the growing pace of technological advancement, who knows what we will see included in this series in the not so distant future.
News that the Olympics is coming to Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles in 2028 has us excited for Jim Dine’s Olympic Robe from 1988. This work features one of Dine’s signature motifs, the bathrobe, which he has appropriated from an advertisement. Considered to be an indirect self-portrait, Dine uses limited forms to explore personal and cultural connotations of everyday objects. This work is part of a portfolio published by the Olympic Committee for the 1988 Games in Seoul.
Frank Hettig
Consignment Director, Modern & Contemporary Art
This work, from Robert Motherwell’s ‘Basque Suite’ series, represents his very early interest in screen printing and depicts his signature style of bold brush strokes and splattered paint.
Pierre Soulages is known for his gestural abstract paintings and interest in the interaction between light, reflections and black paint. The striking blue in Composition, 1988 makes this work a unique and interesting work to add to your collection.
Naomi Thune
Consignment Director, Prints & Multiples
If you were to stroll London’s East End, you would stumble onto ‘Alphabet City’, a colorful array of spray painted murals. English artist Eine is an internationally recognized street artist and a pioneer in the exploration of graffiti letterforms. His charming works can be found in permanent museum collections and galleries worldwide.
Rainbow bread can elevate even the gloomiest of moods. Tim Davis, New York based photographer, has taken something mundane and made it humorous.
Holly Sherratt
Director, Modern & Contemporary Art, San Francisco
I’m pleased to offer this portrait of Gertrude Stein by Robert Indiana. The American Pop Artist is best-known for his famed Love image that has been rendered in prints and several large-scale sculptures around the world. Indiana rendered Gertrude Stein with the same bold colors and graphic style. Stein is an ideal subject: the famed art collector, playwright and novelist supported the careers of several leading artists such as Picasso, Cezanne and Matisse. Indiana is one of many artists since the 1900s to represent her portrait in his own unique style.
As a Southern California native, I love this graphic surfing collaboration between artist Shepard Fairey and photographer Craig Stecyk. Stecyk is an artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer and all-round great guy who is best known for his documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. He’s been referred to as a “historian on everything that is cool about California” especially surf and skate culture. Fairey is a well-known graphic artist and muralist. His most famous images include Andrea the Giant, the Obey trademark, and Hope poster of Barak Obama. The cool duo are good friends and have collaborated on several projects. In fact, Fairey designed the soundtrack package for Stecyk’s film. This image is based on Stecyk’s 1970’s photograph of the Pacific Ocean Park pier that divides Santa Monica and LA. The decaying pier became a famous surfing and skating hangout of the Z-Boys of Dogtown. As Fairey stated, the surfers would “shoot the waves through its ragged pilings in poetic demonstrations of humankind and nature in harmony rather than conflict.”
Leon Benrimon
Director, Modern & Contemporary Art, New York
John Baeder, the American photorealist painter, is well known for his images of American Roadside diners. His images have always resonated with me. I enjoy seeing this, often forever lost, snapshots of true Americana. I find that some contemporary artists greatest contribution is to document and critique their respective cultures. Baeders photorealist compositions serve as important documentation of what is sadly, becoming a disappearing part of American culture.
We have sold the Cattelan sculptures made in collaboration with Seletti individually quite a lot since they were first produced in 2014-2015. Surprisingly its only now has a collector came to us with the full set of these three together. Seeing them as a set and is much more interesting as the viewer further understands how Cattelan took one idea, and translated it into three uniquely familiar works, combined a lewd subject matter with familiar childhood toys, only Cattelan can do.
Over the past few years I have developed a fascination and growing interest in toys both as objects and as a viable, somewhat new, medium for artists to create multiples. This example for Takashi Murakami, is particularly exciting as it explores one of his most celebrated characters DOB. Murakami created this for the inaugural Complex Con in 2016 in a limited edition of 750. While many artists have decided to make toys either open editions or for edition sizes in the thousands, Murakami’s decision to limit production for these speaks to his interest in giving these longevity by making them more collectible.
