CONTEMPORARY CURATED With Co-Curators Agnes Gund & Oprah Winfrey

Bi-Annual New York Auction to Follow BY WOMEN, FOR TOMORROW’S WOMEN An All-Women Artist Charity Auction Benefitting Miss Porter’s School

270+ Lots Led by: Kerry James Marshall’s Powerful Figurative Work from 2008 UNTITLED (PAINTER) Estimate $1.8/2.5 Million

PUBLIC EXHIBITION OPENS TOMORROW IN SOTHEBY’S YORK AVENUE GALLERIES

Auctions 1 March 2019

NEW YORK, 21 February 2019 – Sotheby’s is pleased to open our 2019 auctions of Contemporary Art with Contemporary Curated on 1 March in New York. Reflecting a diverse ensemble of works from the Post-War and Contemporary periods, with many exceptional highlights appearing at auction for the first time, this season’s offering is accented by an outstanding group of works by African American and women artists, with examples by Olga de Amaral, Louise Bourgeois, Sam Gilliam, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Kerry James Marshall and Faith Ringgold, among others.

Highlights from the sale include George Condo’s Smiling Girl with Black Hair (estimate $1/1.5 million) – a highly refined example of his ability to manipulate the traditional notions of portraiture – Sean Scully’s monumental Wall of Light Pink Grey Sky from the artist’s celebrated Wall of Light series (estimate $800,000/1.2 million); Ad Reinhardt resplendent No. 12 from 1950 (estimate $600/800,000); and Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Obsession from 2005 – a remarkably complex example of the artist’s most personal and renowned body of work (estimate $450/650,000).

Estimated to achieve more than $22.5 million, the auction this March marks the highest-ever pre-sale estimate in the sales series’ nearly 6-year history.

Preceding the bi-annual auction is By Women, For Tomorrow’s Women – the first-ever all-women artist benefit auction at a major auction house. Over the course of several months, 40 pieces by 38 pioneering women artists have been donated to create this distinct offering of modern and contemporary works, with full proceeds to support financial aid that enables emerging female leaders to attend Miss Porter’s School, the nation’s leading, all-girls private boarding school. Separate release available

The Contemporary Curated pre-sale exhibition opens to the public this Friday, 22 February, alongside works from By Women, For Tomorrow’s Women, and our Contemporary Art Online auctions, open for bidding from 22 February – 8 March.

Charlotte Van Dercook, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auctions in New York, said: “On the heels of our highest-ever sale total this past September, we are thrilled to present the Contemporary Curated auction this March. Included in the sale are several paradigm shifting and groundbreaking, fresh-to-market works by artists who have played pivotal roles in the Contemporary art historical cannon. Some of these examples include the intimate circa 1945 Alice Neel portrait Connie, a formative painting by Eva Hesse from the late 1950s, a 1970 intricately collaged, vibrant Romare Bearden entitled The Unforgotten and the groundbreaking 1974 Slab painting Special Checking by Jack Whitten, the first from this series to appear at auction by the artist. In addition to these exceptional works, we are thrilled to offer a selection works by the artists active today, led by the exquisitely painted 2008 Untitled (Painter) by Kerry James Marshall, which addresses the tenets of race and representation as well as the act of painting and the history of cultural production. Many of the exceptional works in the Curated sale are by artists historically underrepresented in the secondary market, which is a wonderful complement to the charity component of our sale series this season as we are honored to partner with Miss Porter’s School on the By Women, For Tomorrow’s Women auction, co-chaired by Agnes Gund and Oprah Winfrey. We are honored to be collaborating on the sale which will raise money for financial aid at the school and know that the auction will celebrate and promote the vital contributions that female artists have made, and will continue to make, to art-making and to our culture at large.”

CONTEMPORARY CURATED HIGHLIGHTS

Untitled (Painter) leads a trio of works by Kerry James Marshall (estimate $1.8/2.5 million). Marking a pivotal shift in the canon of contemporary art, Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Painter) from 2008 embodies his commitment to rewriting the tenets of race and representation. In the present work, Marshall challenges the hegemonic archetype of the artist, forging a commentary on the privileges and assumptions inherent to artmaking, by inserting a black female subjectivity into this rarified space. Uniting abstraction with an unapologetically raced and gendered presence, the work is an exploration of the foundations of culture, in the view of the artist, to reimagine the “mythic image of the painter,” and reflect on the nature of art itself.

This exceptional work comes to auction following Sotheby’s previous record-breaking sales of works by the artist: in September 2018, Marshall’s Study for Past Times established a new auction record for a work on paper by the artist when it sold for $1.8 million (estimate $900,000/1.2 million) in the Contemporary Curated sale. Just four months prior, the artist’s monumental painting, Past Times, shattered Marshall’s previous auction record when it sold for $21.2 million, cementing a new top auction price for any work of art by a living African American artist.

Another key highlight of the sale is Jack Whitten’s 1974 painting Special Checking (estimate $300/500,000). Starting in the early 1970s in New York, Whitten engineered new extrapolations on Abstract Expressionism. The elusiveness of paint drove Whitten to create the instrument he called the “developer,” a proprietary floor-based tool, he used to quickly spread a layer of acrylic paint onto a canvas in a single gesture.

This tool led to the creation of his signature Slab paintings. For this series, Whitten utilized an unconventional process for which he would lay the canvas on the floor, drag a squeegee across to mix his color, and then let the paint dry. Paint was piled on as much as a quarter-inch thick in many of them, and all of the tones Whitten chose were left visible. With their warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries, they resemble long-exposure photographs of things in motion. Slab works were featured at the artist’s 1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Special Checking was featured as the cover of the exhibition catalogue. Indisputably the strongest example to ever appear at auction by the artist, the work is entirely fresh to market and the very first Slab painting to appear at auction after the artist’s death. Following his death in 2018, there has been a widespread outpouring of zeal for the artist, including important commemorative surveys such as a major show, Odyssey, at the Met Breuer in the fall of 2018 and Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Paintings, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Executed shortly after the artist lost the support of the Works Progress Administration for her involvement with the Communist Party, Connie from 1945 is an early work that reveals Alice Neel at a point of flux and transition, referencing myriad art historical sources and crafting a composition that, despite its multiple references, is unique (estimate $300/500,000).

The dynamics of the relationship between Neel and her sitter are made more ambiguous by the artist’s use of art historical allusion, placing her subject in a lineage of female portraiture and more general depictions of the female form. Connie's elegant and attenuated hand is a visual quotation of the similarly elongated features of Bronzino's sitters and the aristocratic portraiture of Van Dyck, while her body is positioned to mimic Titian's Venus of Urbino. The sitter’s loud and vibrant dress recalls Matisse's Woman in a Purple Coat, a masterwork executed just a decade prior that helped bring bold pattern and color into the vernacular of European Modernism. While both paintings share many similarities, the present work differs in that Connie dominates its environment rather than being subsumed by it, becoming unplaceable. Using this lack of contextual information to focus attention on the sitter, the present work becomes timeless, taking contemporary and historical references and mixing them to infuse the grandeur and staidness of art historical lineage with the sensation of lived experience. Acquired directly from the artist the same year that it was created, Connie exemplifies Neel’s ability to visually depict the sensation of interpersonal intimacy.

Another highlight of the sale is Jacob Lawrence’s Menagerie from 1964 — an energetic work on paper emblematic of the artist’s unique stylistic combinations, functioning as both a reflection and commentary on the artist’s world (estimate $180/250,000). One of the preeminent social chroniclers of the 20th Century, Lawrence painted the present work in the year he and his wife traveled to Nigeria, reveling in the cultural sights and street life there.  In Menagerie, the artist depicts a brutal event: two figures preside over a fowl slaughter, grimacing as caged animals look on from afar. Appearing at auction for the first time in nearly two decades, the present work comes to market on the heels of Sotheby’s strong result for another work by the artist: in November 2018, Lawrence’s The Businessmen shattered its $2 million high estimate to achieve $6.2 million, establishing a new auction benchmark for the artist.

CONTEMPORARY ART ONLINE & THE FORM OF IDEASOpen for Bidding from 22 February – 8 March

Sotheby’s auctions of Contemporary Art continue this week with Contemporary Art Online (22 February – 7 March) and a dedicated online-only sale, The Form of Ideas (22 February – 8 March).

Featuring 250+ lots, this season’s Contemporary Art Online sale is distinguished by the 17 works on offer to benefit Miss Porter’s School, as well as an impressive ensemble of pieces from the collections of celebrated patrons Judith Neisser and David Teiger, among others. The auction also includes works by renowned artists such as Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Lee Krasner, Alex Katz, John Wesley, Sam Gilliam, Marlene Dumas, Laura Owens and Richard Hambleton, and offers both new and established collectors with the opportunity to acquire works at accessible price points below $100,000.

Presented alongside Contemporary Art Online, The Form of Ideas is a unique offering of 30 lots from the distinguished collection of Arnold and Marie Fordes – California-based collectors who focused on a range of important and intellectually rigorous artists from the Post-War period onward. Working closely with the curator Paul Schimmel, the Fordes created a bold collection focusing on generations of international artists working in Minimal and Conceptual frameworks, such as Niele Toroni, Fred Sandback, John Miller, Vito Acconci, Tony Cragg and Jenny Holzer, among others.  In addition to the grouping of lots from the collection that is offered in the Contemporary Curated sale on 1 March, this sale offers the opportunity to acquire important works at price points below $50,000.