Artist-Direct Art Auction November 13, 2009 Viewing

Artist-Direct Art Auction
November 13, 2009
Viewing: 7–9PM
Live Auction: 9PM
Ryan McGinness Studios
215 Centre St., NYC
Party 19 of 50 Parties
50parties.com
The artist is the seller,
and there is no auction
house that will be taking
a cut of the sale.
The Auctioneer
Sara Friedlander is a specialist
in the Post-War and Contemporary
art department at Christie’s.
She graduated from Brandeis
University with a BA in Art History,
and minored in Creative Writing and
Women’s Studies. She went on
to complete her Master’s degree in
Fine and Decorative Arts at the
Sotheby’s Institute in London where
she wrote her dissertation on late
19th and early 20th century American
and British periodical illustration.
She has worked at the Lucas
Schoormans Gallery in Chelsea and
at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham,
Massachusetts.
Yorgo Alexopoulos
Mt. Diablo/No Feeling Is Final, 2009
aluminum C-print, plexiglass, wood frame
54 x 35 in.
Edition: Unique
Estimate: $3,000 – $3,500
Best known for his innovative use of new
media and technology, Yorgo Alexopoulos
has made a name for himself both in the
television/film industry and in the contemporary art world. While exhibiting his art
throughout the United States, including in
New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, he has also manned the motion
graphics controls behind many highly
acclaimed films, including Nova’s “The
Elegant Universe” and “Planet B-Boy.” His
work on “The Kid Stays in the Picture” about
legendary Hollywood producer Bob Evans
landed Yorgo at the Sundance Film Festival.
His work has taken him to that important
festival twice since. He says his art work
“proposes and constantly reinvents a visual
vocabulary influenced by astrophysics,
religious iconography, and mythological
symbolism and explores human transcendental experience.” Both the artist’s and
the viewer's individual and collective
interaction with nature and things greater
than the self are central themes in Alexopoulos’s paintings, video installations, and
digital photographs. He is a graduate of
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
and he lives and works in New York City’s
garment district.
LOT 1
Sebastiaan Bremer
Corridors – Mantle and Cabinet, 2009
inks on lamda print, framed
9.25 x 6.5 in.
Estimate: $2,000 – $3,000
Sebastiaan Bremer was born in the Netherlands in 1970 and moved to New York in
1992. An autodidact, he enrolled in the Free
Academy in The Hague in 1989–1991.
In 1998 he went to Skowhegan in Maine and
in 2001 to Art Omi in Columbia County, New
York. Bremer turns photographs—found or
personal—into trippy, dusty memories that
simultaneously reveal the subconscious and
the real world in a single blink of the eye.
He invented a poetic braille made up of text,
personal symbols, and ghostly shapes that
integrate with their complex grounds almost
to the point of disappearing, becoming
buried in a sea of suspended dots. By labo-
riously painting on top of snapshots, he
attempts to slow down time to render
a hauntingly beautiful interior landscape.
He was a visiting professor at Virginia
Commonwealth University in 2006 and
was resident artist at the Lower East Side
Printshop in 2006/2007. He has also
curated several projects since 1992.
His work has a home in many prestigious
collections around the world, including the
MoMA, LACMA, and the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
LOT 2
Cheryl Dunn
Fans 2 – Rutherford, NJ, 2007
photograph, framed
41 x 28 in.
Edition: 1 of 5
Estimate: $1,500 – $2,000
Cheryl Dunn lives and works in New York
City. She is a documentary photographer
and filmmaker whose works have appeared
in international museums and galleries as
well as in magazines and books. Dunn
recently completed a short film appearing
on New York Times.com. Her second book,
entitled Some Kind of Vocation, was published by PictureBox and distributed by DAP.
Her film Bicycle Gangs of NY premiered at
the Tribeca Film Festival and was accompanied by a book of the same title. The same
year, her film Come Mute played at the Los
Angeles film festival after premiering in the
touring museum show Beautiful Losers.
Dunn is currently in production on a featurelength documentary that centers around the
Creative Growth Art Center, a school in Oakland California for artists with disabilities.
LOT 3
David Ellis
What’s He Building in There?, 2006
album covers, wood, resin
12.5 × 41 × 12.5 in.
Estimate: $8,000 – $10,000
David Ellis is an artist born into a family immersed in music. His paintings are often
recorded in a form of digital time-lapse animation he calls motion painting. Like jazz,
these works provide Ellis with an opportunity
to combine ideas with collaborators and
work solo within a form that promotes improvisation and spontaneity.
with kinetic installations that produce analogue sequences in rhythm. His latest work,
often in collaboration with composer
Roberto Lange, deconstructs the inner
workings of player pianos to create sprawling sculptures that automatically play percussive rhythms with recycled typewriters,
buckets, bottles, and cans.
Ellis often stages events when exhibiting his
motion paintings, inviting musicians, performers, and sound artists to interpret the
work live. His motion painting Paint on
Trucks in a World in Need of Love was exhibited at MoMA. Ellis further explores sound
Recent projects have been exhibited at The
Huntington Museum of Art, ICA Philadelphia,
Rice University Gallery, and PS1/MoMA.
LOT 4
Todd James
The New Deal, 2009
screen print on paper
21.7 x 29.5 in.
Edition: 36 of 150
Estimate: $250 – $350
Todd James is an internationally known
artist and designer who spent the bulk of
his childhood and adolescence watching
cartoons, eating cereal, and writing graffiti.
Through his work on New York City’s
subway trains as REAS, he mastered the
practical challenges of good design at an
early age. James’s commercial works
include logos for clients such as the Beastie
Boys, The Source, Eminem, Mobb Deep,
and Redman, and these remain some of rap
music’s most enduring icons. As Puppet
Designer and a Production Designer on
Comedy Central’s hit show Crank Yankers,
James’s singular aesthetic sensibility was
introduced to a television audience with
great success. On the fine art side, work by
James has been shown at the 2000 Venice
Biennale, the Institute of Contemporary
Art in Philadelphia, the Tate Museum in Liverpool, and at Deitch Projects in New York
City, as well as in the Beautiful Losers
museum tour. Todd shows with V1 Gallery
in Copenhagen, Colette in Paris, and
Lazarides in London. Currently, James is
preparing for a new show at Deitch Projects
reuniting with Barry McGee and Steve
Powers, for early 2010. James currently
resides in New York.
LOT 5
Robert Lazzarini
Untitled, 2006
graphite on paper, framed
12 x 12 in.
Estimate: $2,800 – $3,200
Robert Lazzarini, born in 1965 in New Jersey, received his BFA from the School of
Visual Arts. He is primarily known for his
sculptures and installations that alter perception and explore the relationship between
image and object. His work has been
exhibited both nationally and internationally
in venues such as the Whitney Museum of
American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine
Arts, the Wadsworth Atheneum, The Taipei
Museum of Contemporary Art, The Deste
Foundation, and the Kunsthalle Bern. Some
permanent collections include the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwau-
kee, WI; the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte,
NC; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; the
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and
Davidson College, Davidson, NC. Robert is
currently a Visual Arts Fellow at the Neiman
Center for Print Studies, Columbia University. He lives in New York and works in
Brooklyn and is represented by Deitch Projects, New York.
LOT 6
Ryan McGinness
Untitled, 2008
acrylic on wood panel
24 in. dia.
Estimate: $12,000 – $14,000
Ryan McGinness is an international artist,
living and working in Manhattan. He grew
up in the surf and skate culture of Virginia
Beach, Virginia, and then studied at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, as an Andrew Carnegie
Scholar. During college, he interned at the
Andy Warhol Museum. Known for his
original extensive vocabulary of graphic
drawings, which use the visual language
of public signage, corporate logos, and
contemporary iconography, McGinness
creates paintings, sculptures, and environments. He has shown at museums and
galleries worldwide, and his work is in the
permanent public collections of the Museum
of Modern Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego,
Cincinnati Art Museum, MUSAC in Spain,
and the Misumi Collection in Japan.
LOT 7
Van Neistat
Kubrick, 2009
wood and steel
7.25 x 24 in.
Estimate: $1,500 – $2,000
Van Neistat (pronounced NICE-tat)
b. 1975, Maine, USA
Van Neistat is an artist living in New York
City. His work has appeared in the São
Paolo Biennial; National Museum of Fine
Arts, Buenos Aires; Perth Institute of
Contemporary Art; Palais de Tokyo, Paris;
Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and
on the Panasonic Astrovision in Times
Square. Most recently, he made an
8-episode TV series with his brother Casey.
The show, titled THE NEISTAT BROTHERS,
was sold to HBO and is awaiting scheduling.
LOT 8
Erik Parker
Cosmic, 2009
pigment print on German etching paper
Image: 18 x 24 in., Paper: 21 x 27.5 in., Published by Art City Editions
Printed at Laumont Studio, New York
Edition: 25 + 7 APs;; signed, dated, and numbered in pencil
Estimate: $800 – $1,000
New York-based artist Erik Parker (b. 1968)
paints meticulously curated worlds of chaos
within his brightly colored, highly saturated
canvases. The artist obsessively paints layer
upon layer of amorphous shapes, globules,
and drops, pushing each composition to the
optical extreme.
Parker’s biomorphic subjects not only reference the hallucinogenic psychedelia of
American culture in the 1960s but also
historical and contemporary socio-political
issues. Informed by a variety of sub cultural
themes, including music, graffiti and illustration, Parker offers a profound visual experi-
ence beyond his intensely layered forms of
text and imagery.
Erik Parker was born in Stuttgart, Germany,
and studied at the University of Austin,
Texas, then at SUNY Purchase. Parker’s
work has been widely published and has
earned him several awards. He has exhibited
in solo shows in Tokyo, Milan, Manchester,
Cologne, New York, and Los Angeles as well
as in group shows around the world.
LOT 9
José Parlá
Name & Note, 2009
acrylic, oil paint, and powdered pigments on printmaking paper
27 x 44 in.
Estimate: $10,000 – $12,000
José Parlá was born in Miami in 1973. Parlá
studied at the Savannah College of Art and
Design in Georgia as well as at The New
World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida.
His paintings reflect the way in which cities
function as palimpsests. By drawing inspiration from the urban landscape—the energy
and memories—which inform him, Parlá
creates a visual narrative of his experiences
in different cities. Through the multilayered,
psycho-geographical, calligraphic nature
of his work, he embeds these stories in his
paintings and invites the viewer to discover
his vision of the environment. Parlá is therefore not just a painter but a new kind of
novelist; a modern storyteller who uses
gestures, the writing on the wall, and found
advertisings to reconstruct complex stories
and anatomies.
LOT 10
Eve Sussman
A Day in Angie’s Kitchen, 2009
box of 8 archival inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle paper made
from original Polaroids
Edition: 10 + 2 APs
Each photo: 3 x 3.8 in., Mat: 8 x 10 in.
Estimate: $1,500 – $2,000
Eve Sussman is an artist whose primary
medium is motion pictures. She has also
been know to build things—most recently,
Yuri’s Office, an exact replica of Yuri
Gargarin’s office (the first man in space) for
an exhibition at the Winkleman Gallery.
Together with Rufus Corporation, the ad hoc
think tank that she founded in 2003, Sussman produced 89 seconds at Alcazar
and The Rape of the Sabine Women. Rufus
Corporation’s recent project White on White
is an experimental thriller, shot primarily in
post-soviet Central Asia, being produced as
an episodic mini-TV series, a feature film,
and a randomized movie in which the narra-
tive is determined via computer code. Sussman is currently in development on Smarter
than God, a 5-screen video work based on
the Lehman bankruptcy and the AIG bailout.
Her work has been supported in part by
Creative Capital, New York Foundation for
the Arts, New York State Council on the
Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative
Time, CeC Arts Link, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
LOT 11
Andrew Sutherland
Rain Drop, 2009
paper, glue
6.5 x 10.5 in. (unframed), 12 x 15 in. (framed)
Estimate: $1,000 – $1,200
Andrew Sutherland is a mixed-media artist
whose work explores and draws upon
natural and industrial processes, bricolage,
DIY, natural and supernatural forces, and
everyday life. Sutherland has shown his
work throughout the United States and
Japan. He recently had a two person show
with his brother at ATM Gallery in New York
and is currently in the group show Main
Street: An Exhibition of New Video Art and
Animation at Space 15 Twenty in Los
Angeles. Sutherland lives and works in
Brooklyn, NY.
LOT 12
Peter Sutherland
My Gramma’s Bent Pointer, 2007
photograph
20 x 16 in.
Estimate: $600 – $800
Peter Sutherland is based in New York.
His work employs some of the techniques
of traditional documentary photography to
capture the hidden beauty of ordinary
objects and everyday situations. He’s released several publications and films, most
recently Buck Shots (powerHouse books)
and Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project
(Zeitgeist Films).
exhibitions have been on view at Someday
Gallery, Melbourne; MU, Eindhoven; and
Gallery White Room, Tokyo.
Sutherland has shown in group exhibitions
at Rivington Arms, NY; Guild and Greyshkul,
NY; Circleculture Gallery, Berlin; V1 Gallery,
Copenhagen, and the traveling Tiny Vices
show, curated by Tim Barber. His solo
LOT 13
Spencer Tunick
New York 5 (Montauk), 2009
C-print
8 x 10 in.
Edition: AP
Estimate: $1,000 – $1,200
Artist Spencer Tunick has been documenting the live nude figure in public, with
photography and video, since 1992. Since
1994, he has organized more than 95 temporary site-related installations that encompass dozens, hundreds, or thousands of
volunteers, and his photographs are records
of these events. The individuals en masse,
without their clothing, grouped together,
metamorphose into a new shape. The bodies extend into and upon the landscape
like a substance. These group masses,
which do not underscore sexuality, become
abstractions that challenge or reconfigure
one's views of nudity and privacy. The work
also refers to the complex issue of presenting art in permanent or temporary public
spaces.
His installations around the world have been
created in spectacular locations, including
Belgium, Australia, Canada, the United
States and Brazil, gathering thousands of
people at one time. His temporary site-specific installations have been commissioned
by the XXV São Paolo Biennial, Brazil (2002);
Institut Cultura, Barcelona (2003); The
Saatchi Gallery, London (2003); MOCA
Cleveland (2004); and the Vienna Kunsthalle
(2008) among others.
LOT 14
Dirk Westphal
bowery/broome SE version 1.0, 2009
30 x 40 in.
C-print laminated to aluminum with uv coating
Edition: 1 of 5
Estimate: $5,000 – $7,000
Dirk Westphal is a multi-media artist working
primarily with photography. His early work
consisted of posing and inventing fun scenarios around abandoned cars, organizing
and fighting in apocalyptically themed
gladiatorial events, and the hilarious Symphony of Horns, in which he conducted
gridlocked car drivers through a musical
score—their instruments being their horns.
The mid- to late ’90s consisted of in-depth
collections of pre-packaged desserts and
several series of things carved from these
desserts, such as bank logos, skulls, and
yin yangs. As a follow-up to his interest in
artificial flavors, Westphal started working
with the artificial colors in toothpastes,
cough syrups, and mouthwashes. His
interest in the notion of perceived beauty
or ‘what is attractive’ and society’s various
structures to harness and use these ideas
led to an exhaustive photo essay about
mutated goldfish. This series had a spin-off
project that consisted of making and laminating surfboards with his fish photos. That,
in turn, led to a selfish photography series.
This past summer, Westphal published his
first art book with Glenn Horowitz titled
Endless Bummer. He is currently working
on several other book projects.
Westphal’s work is held in numerous private
and public collections throughout the world.
He lives in New York City.
LOT 15
Romon Yang
Praefectus Astana, 2009
silkscreen on indian handmade paper
29 x 22 in.
Edition: 15 of 25
Estimate: $800 – $1,000
Romon Kimin Yang, aka Rostarr (b. 1971),
is an American artist living and working in
Brooklyn, New York. He was born in South
Korea and emigrated to the United States
in 1972, growing up in Falls Church, Virginia.
As a child, Yang was influenced by cartoon
animation, comic book art, skateboarding,
and early 80’s hip-hop culture from New
York. He studied at the School of Visual Arts
in New York City and has become known
for his original vocabulary of abstract iconographic paintings, totemic geometric characters and calligraphic drawings. Yang’s work
is defined by an expression he calls
“Graphysics,” meaning the fusion of visual
art and the physical laws governing the
movement of energy. He creates paintings,
sculptures, environments, and motion-painting films and has shown throughout the
United States and internationally at museums and galleries.
Yang’s work has been reviewed by Art
Forum, Modern Painters, Village Voice,
New York Times, Tokion, and Artnet.
LOT 16
Works by
Yorgo Alexopoulos
Sebastiaan Bremer
Cheryl Dunn
David Ellis
Todd James
Robert Lazzarini
Ryan McGinness
Van Neistat
Erik Parker
José Parlá
Eve Sussman
Andrew Sutherland
Peter Sutherland
Spencer Tunick
Dirk Westphal
Romon Yang
Special Thanks to
Cristin Tierney & Heather Dell