Live Auction: 6 April 2022 • 5:00 PM CEST • Paris
Y ves Klein claimed that in order to understand and appreciate art, you must soak it up like a sponge. Loïc Malle took this approach to heart when assembling his collection, which reads like an anthology of contemporary art: an incredible array of works reflective of his many artistic encounters over the years with dealers, critics and curators. But the works in the Malle collection are not just reflections of a particular taste or time. They all follow a common theme: that of experience in all its forms. The experiences expressed through the collection are as diverse as the artists that it encompasses: non-retinal for Duchamp; conceptual for Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris; immaterial for Klein; and monumental for Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer and Charles Ross, whose Earthworks cannot be fettered by the shackles of a museum or gallery.
Only Time Will Tell reflects that it takes time to distinguish and appreciate artists like Yves Klein who are so far ahead of their time.
Collection Loïc Malle | Only Time Will Tell
Auction Highlights
Philip Guston, The World
Executed in 1974, The World occupies a unique place in the work of Philip Guston. The work is part of the artist's final phase of creation, marked by a return to figuration and now celebrated as one of the most influential and innovative works of the 20th century. It was executed as Guston left the hustle and bustle of New York to retire to his new studio in Woodstock, where he frequented writers and poets such as Anne Waldman, who called on him to illustrate an issue of her poetry magazine, "The World", published between 1967 and 2002.
View Lot
View Lot
All these artists were exhibited, defended and often financed by the woman Loïc Malle considers to be the most admirable gallery owner of all, Virginia Dwan. The Dwan Gallery was the first transcontinental gallery between Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s. Its walls hosted exhibitions by all the European and American avant-gardes of the time and allowed the emergence of many of its protagonists. It also financed the creation of the most historic ‘Earthworks’ of Land Art, of which Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the symbol. 25 years before the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the LACMA in Los Angeles, Loïc Malle paid homage to it in Paris through two memorable exhibitions in 1990 and 1991.
