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Our top 25 picks from Christie’s Contemporary Art November New-York Sales


 

Today, We Share With You Our Auction Selection From The Contemporary Art Sales At Christie’s New-York (Nov. 9&12, 2021)


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CHRISTOPHER WOOL (B. 1955)

UNTITLED, 1990

ENAMEL ON ALUMINUM

108 X 72 IN. (274.3 X 182.9 CM.)


“I always considered myself involved with painting. I can’t imagine someone seeing one of those and not realizing it’s a painting. I think the way I used text was not didactic. I was not speaking about art, I was just making paintings. The text was more subject than anything else.”

Christopher Wool


Christopher Wool is a contemporary American painter. In his paintings, Wool contrasts bold stenciled text or abstract brushwork with white backgrounds. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 6,500,000 – USD 8,500,000


 


CLAIRE TABOURET (B. 1981)

THE STAINS (GARNET), 2017

ACRYLIC ON PANEL

24 X 18 IN. (61 X 45.7 CM.)


Claire Tabouret studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Motivated by a sensitivity to the passing of time and the floodgates of vulnerability opened by human relationships, Tabouret’s painting practice is paced between periods of productive urgency and quiet reflection, and animated by layers, fabrics, and full, loose brushstrokes. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 50,000 - USD 70,0000


 

DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE (B. 1932)

COPAL #3, 1975

COLORED PENCIL AND COPAL ON PAPER COLLAGE MOUNTED ON PAPERBOARD

COLLAGE: 19 5/8 X 15 IN. (49.8 X 38.1 CM.)

OVERALL: 39 1/8 X 29 IN. (99.4 X 73.7 CM.)


Dorothea Rockburne is an American artist whose works merge aspects of geometry, nature, and Egyptology. Employing a range of media, Rockburne arranges her materials using a logic based in both mathematics and symbology. “Even though it has an intellectual basis and mathematical structure, my work comes from a deep emotional source within me,” she explained. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 8,000 - USD 10,000


 


ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)

MARIA SHRIVER, 1986

ACRYLIC AND SILKSCREEN INK ON CANVAS

40 X 40 IN. (101.6 X 101.6 CM.)


"Went right downtown because Maria Shriver was coming at 11:00 (cab 5$). And she's really pretty and she took good pictures." – Andy Warhol


Andy Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. Like his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, Warhol responded to mass-media culture of the 1960s. His silkscreens of cultural and consumer icons—including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Campbell’s Soup Cans, and Brillo Boxes—would make him one of the most famous artists of his generation. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 400,000 - USD 600,000


 


DAVID HAMMONS (B. 1943)

UNTITLED, 2004

WALL-MOUNTED SCULPTURE COMPRISED OF 13 AFRICAN MASKS, WOOD, METAL, WIRE, ROPE, STRAW, AND MIRROR

39 X 11 X 55 IN. (99.1 X 27.9 X 139.7 CM.)


David Hammons’s totemic sculpture is a powerful talisman that projects the spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic embodiment of the artist’s career. Under Hammons’s astute eye, an apparently rudimentary assemblage of discarded ephemera becomes imbued with a new and powerful narrative. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 3,000,000 - USD 5,000,000


 

RICHARD PETTIBONE (B. 1938)

« ANDY WARHOL, '25 FLOWERS #1', 1963 », 1971

ACRYLIC AND SILKSCREEN INK ON CANVAS, IN ARTIST'S FRAME

7 7/8 X 7 ¾ IN. (20 X 19.7 CM.)


Richard Pettibone is one of the pioneering artists to use appropriation techniques. Pettibone was born in Los Angeles, and first worked with shadow boxes and assemblages, illustrating his interest in craft, construction, and working in miniature scales. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 120,000 - USD 180,000


 



WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)

SEATED WOMAN, 1969-1980

BRONZE

26 ¾ X 39 X 21 IN. (68 X 99.1 X 53.3 CM.)

N9 (EDITION OF NINE PLUS TWO ARTIST'S PROOFS)


Willem de Kooning was a renowned American-Dutch painter that helped form the Abstract Expressionist movement. His gestural works—which were loosely based on figures, landscapes, and still lifes—helped establish a distinctly American style of painting. Perhaps De Kooning’s most famous series were his Woman paintings, inspired in part by Pablo Picasso’s work, they featured a wholly original approach to deconstructing the figure. “I don't paint with ideas of art in mind. I see something that excites me. It becomes my content,” the artist once explained. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 500,000 - USD 700,000



 

JAMES ROSENQUIST (1933-2017)

UNTITLED, 1988

OIL ON CANVAS MOUNTED ON PANEL

44 X 60 IN. (111.8 X 152.4 CM.)


The essence is to take very disparate imagery and put it together and the result becomes an idea, not so much a picture. It’s like listening to the radio and getting your own idea from all these images that are often antidotes—acid—to each other. They make sparks or they don’t.

– James Rosenquist


James Rosenquist was an American Pop artist known for his monumental paintings and prints. Often appropriating commercial imagery, his montage-like works combined popular culture, Surrealism, and historical painting methods. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 300,000 - USD 500,000


 


RICHARD DIEBENKORN (1922-1993)

UNTITLED, 1980

ACRYLIC, WAX CRAYON AND GRAPHITE ON PAPER

31 ¾ X 23 ¾ IN. (80.7 X 60.3 CM.)


Richard Diebenkorn was an influential 20th-century American painter whose work was comprised of distinct aesthetic periods. Considered a quintessentially Californian artist, he is best remembered as a founding member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, along with David Park and Elmer Bischoff. “All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression,” he once explained. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 250,000 - USD 350,000


 


THEASTER GATES (B. 1973)

RESOLUTION 3: GET TO KNOW THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL, 2013

DECOMMISSIONED FIRE HOSE AND WOOD, IN ARTIST'S FRAME

59 X 94 IN. (149.9 X 238.8 CM.)


Fire hoses are something you don’t really think of until they’re necessary…but they’re filled with a real potency: the potential of this tremendous amount of water and water pressure.

– Theaster Gates


Theaster Gates is a contemporary American conceptual artist working in a diverse practice of installation art to address topics of social justice, gentrification, and urban renewal. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 350,000 - USD 450,000


 


JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)

RÉNE RICARD, 1984

OILSTICK, WAX CRAYON, COLORED PENCIL AND CHARCOAL ON PAPER

30 X 22 ½ IN. (76.2 X 57.2 CM.)


“We are that little baby, the radiant child, and our name, what we are to become, is outside us and we must become “Judy Rifka” or “Jean-Michel” the way I became “Rene Richard.”

(R. Ricard, “The Radiant Child”, Artforum, December 1981, p. 43)


Ahighly unique work of intimate delicacy, René Ricard offers an extraordinary view into Jean-Michel Basquiat’s psyche and serves as a crucial documentation of the artist’s life. Brimming with intense color and a vivacious coarseness, this work epitomizes Basquiat’s idiosyncratic style and brilliantly encapsulates the artist’s critical sensibilities. Basquiat created this work in 1984, a year in which the precocious 21-year-old would reach newfound heights of expressive power and ingenuity. – Christie's Lot Essay


ESTIMATE: USD 800,000 - USD 1,200,000


 


ISSY WOOD (B. 1993)

OVER ARMOUR, 2018

OIL ON VELVET

71 X 55 ¼ IN. (180.2 X 140.5 CM.)


Towering at nearly six feet tall, Issy Wood’s Over Armour is a formidable union of dichotomies: surreal and real, material and immaterial, object and artwork, it is a larger-than-life trompe l’oeil. In this work Wood presents a quilted leather jacket in full, pressed against the four edges of the picture plane, painted on a cloak of black velvet. Softly smudged, fluttering brushstrokes coax the form into reality. Each quilted panel of the jacket is meticulously toned with shadows and finished with bright white strokes, glinting and gleaming like body armor. – Christie's Lot Essay


ESTIMATE: USD 150,000 - USD 200,000


 


DAVID SALLE (B. 1952)

QUARTET, 2007

OIL ON FOUR JOINED CANVASES

20 ¼ X 60 ¼ IN. (51.4 X 153 CM.)


David Salle is a contemporary American painter, printmaker, and photographer. A prominent Neo-Expressionist artist, his collage-like paintings feature overlapping imagery from a variety of sources, such as magazines, interior décor, and art history. His colorful compositions are rendered in a straightforward, uncomplicated style, layering different figures and patterns. “Ever since I started painting,” the artist has explained, “I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.” – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 60,000 - USD 80,000


 


ADOLPH GOTTLIEB (1903-1974)

POLYCHROMED MAZE, 1956-1958

OIL ON CANVAS

42 X 54 IN. (106.7 X 137.2 CM.)


Adolph Gottlieb was a prominent American painter and member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Characterized by an idiosyncratic use of abstraction that utilized pictographs and mythological symbols, his works achieved an emotional intensity through both color and line. “Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality,” he once reflected. “To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.” – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 300,000 - USD 500,000


 


NICOLAS PARTY (B. 1980)

LANDSCAPE, 2021

PASTEL ON LINEN

43 X 36 IN (109.2 X 91.4 CM.)


Nicolas Party is a contemporary painter and sculptor. He uses bright, playful colors that connect his work to Expressionism and Fauvism, and he creates immersive environments for his exhibitions that tap into both the new and the familiar. Party often creates wall murals as part of his installations, and his work also tows the line between figuration and abstraction. Pastel is Party’s signature medium, and it allows him to explore dreamy and surrealist qualities in his work. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, he lives and works in Brussels and New York. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 300,000 – USD 500,000


 

RICHARD SERRA (B. 1938)

CANADIAN PACIFIC, 1982

PAINTSTICK ON PAPER

38 X 50 IN. (96.5 X 127 CM.)


Richard Serra is a contemporary Minimalist artist known for his monumental steel sculptures. Often daunting in scale, Serra’s swooping architectural curves often provoke dizziness and disorientation as viewers walk through their winding passages. Though he also makes paintings and prints, it is Serra’s exploration of the properties of unconventional materials—such as Splash (1968–1970), a series using molten lead, and Belts (1966–1967), sculptures of vulcanized rubber—gradually increased the scale of his work. – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 150,000 - USD 200,000


 


JOHN CHAMBERLAIN (1927-2011)

MAGNESIUM REVOLT, 1977

PAINTED AND CHROMIUM-PLATED STEEL

71 X 43 X 42 IN. (180.3 X 109.2 X 106.7 CM.)


“I’m basically a collagist. I put one thing together with another thing. I sort of invented my own art supplies.” John Chamberlain


Standing under six feet tall with its uniquely human scale, John Chamberlain’s Magnesium Revolt, 1977 exemplifies the seamless, almost organic way that Chamberlain fits the rough and uneven individual pieces of automobile scrap metal together to construct a harmonious work out of what had previously been an unrelated collection of raw materials. – Christie's Lot Essay


ESTIMATE: USD 800,000 - USD 1,200,000


 

MARK BRADFORD (B. 1961)

THE NEXT HOT LINE, 2015

MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS

84 ¼ X 108 ¼ IN. (214 X 275 CM.)


Operating at the confluence of cultural anthropology and socially nuanced abstraction, Mark Bradford has created a prominent place for himself in today’s rapidly expanding art world. Working in a singularly inventive mode that mines the depths of the urban environment and the history of painting in equal measure, his monumental canvases ask questions about the place of Black artists in the art-historical timeline. – Christie's Lot Essay


ESTIMATE: USD 4,000,000 - USD 6,000,000


 

GEORGE CONDO (B. 1957)

LINEAR CONNECTION, 2010

ACRYLIC, CHARCOAL AND PASTEL ON LINEN

50 X 60 IN. (127 X 152.4 CM.)


At the confluence of contemporary figurative painting and art history, George Condo’s colorful tableaux are populated by a range of idiosyncratic characters created out of the artist’s wonderfully transgressive graphic line. In Linear Connection, this line traces out a cast of characters that populate many of Condo’s painting from this period. Curvaceous nudes, Picasso-like faces, disjointed limbs, and of course Rodrigo — Condo’s ‘disapproving butler,’ a figure who observes everything, but says nothing. – Christie's Lot Essay


ESTIMATE: USD 2,500,000 - USD 3,500,000


 

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011)

UNTITLED, 1976

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS

6 X 8 IN. (15.2 X 20.3 CM.)


Helen Frankenthaler was an American painter and printmaker known for her unique method of staining canvas with thin veils of color. Her practice can be seen as a bridge between the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and the Color Field painters of the 1960s. The techniques employed in works such as Mountains and Sea (1952)—a pastel blend of oil paint and charcoal on unprimed canvas—were influential to both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. “One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it,” she once said of her practice. “It looks as if it were born in a minute.” – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 20,000 - USD 30,000


 


KENNETH NOLAND (1924-2010)

WEST, 1964

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS

20 X 20 IN. (50.8 X 50.8 CM.)


Kenneth Noland was a leading American Color Field painter. His interest in working with flat colors developed into a fixation with simple shapes like chevrons, stripes, and bullseyes. Noland’s hallmark technique of staining unprimed canvas arose from his interactions with Morris Louis, Clement Greenberg, and Helen Frankenthaler. The late critic Hilton Kramer once wrote of Noland, “An art of this sort places a very heavy burden on the artist’s sensibility for color, of course—on his ability to come up, again and again, with fresh and striking combinations that both capture and sustain our attention, and provide the requisite pleasures.” – Artnet


ESTIMATE: USD 150,000 - USD 200,000


 


DANIELLE ORCHARD (B. 1985)

TWO BATHERS, 2021

OIL ON LINEN

40 X 30 IN. (101.6 X 76.2 CM.)


Nodding to the great painters of the modern era including Picasso and Matisse, Orchard’s paintings often reference their styles and subject by portraying female nudes in a more abstract manner; the figures are portrayed in multi-perspectival Analytic Cubist style or abbreviated otherwise into solid contours and saturated colors. As she tackles depiction plane by plane, or each abstract part that she sculpts with thick impasto, Orchard is exploring the female corporeal representation.


While the concept of female nude finds itself deeply ingrained in art history as a muse and more recently being established as a subject of study, Orchard adds depth by infusing her own experiences as a female artist, having trained, posed, and even taught in life drawing classes. – Perrotin.com


ESTIMATE: USD 5,000 - USD 8,000


 


AARON GARBER-MAIKOVSKA (B. 1978)

UNTITLED, 2018

OIL AND INK ON FLUTED POLYBOARD, IN ARTIST'S FRAME

91 ½ X 80 7/8 IN. (232.4 X 205.4 CM.)


Aaron Garber-Maikovska is perhaps best known for his bold abstract paintings, which feature expressive mark-making and cryptic compositions, though his practice also spans drawing, sculpture, and video. The Los Angeles–based artist uses ink, oil stick, pastel, and acrylics to create his cacophonies of electric linework and geometric forms, which can evoke the styles of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, and Willem de Kooning. – Artsy.com


ESTIMATE: USD 20,000 - USD 30,000


 


TOM WESSELMANN (1931-2004)

STUDY FOR SEASCAPE #16, 1966

LIQUITEX, OIL AND GRAPHITE ON BRISTOL BOARD

IMAGE: 12 5/8 X 12 1/8 IN. (32.1 X 30.8 CM.)

SHEET: 14 ½ X 16 IN. (36.83 X 40.6 CM.)


"When I made the decision in 1959 that I was not going to be an abstract painter, that I was going to be a representational painter, I had absolutely no enthusiasm about any particular subject or direction or anything. I was starting from absolute zero. And in choosing representational painting, I decided to do, as my subject matter, the history of art: I would do nudes, still lives, landscapes, interiors, portraits, etc. It didn’t take long before I began to follow my most active interests: nudes and still lives." – Tom Wesselmann


ESTIMATE: USD 50,000 - USD 70,000


 
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