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s so many of us are now remote working and social distancing, it’s natural that we are paying greater attention to our home environment. Art can transform our immediate surroundings into a haven for contemplation and inspiration, which would be a welcome lift during these unprecedented times. Whether our modern home might be a spacious house or a smaller city apartment, there is always room for more beauty, wit, and color. From Sotheby’s Contemporary Art sale, which is now open for bidding until 16 April, Specialist Florence Ho highlights eleven lots to spruce up the modern home, including works by Jonas Wood, INVADER, Ian Williams, Nobuo Sekine, Mr. Doodle, and Madsaki. A stellar selection of contemporary works by Jeff Koons, KAWS, Yayoi Kusama, Yoshitomo Nara, and Haroshi, among many others, rounds out this sale.
- INVADER
- Jonas Wood
- Mr Doodle
- Ian Williams
- Nobuo Sekine
- Haroshi x Karimoku
- Jeff Koons
- KAWS
- Madsaki
- Yayoi Kusama
- Yoshitomo Nara
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Aladdin Sane (Yellow Edition)"Finding the right spots to display my work is the key part of the invasion process," Invader says. The French street artist began his first "invasion" in Paris in 1998, and today his signature pixelated alien motif has become a global phenomenon. The artist describes his work as "urban acupuncture" and injects artistic spirit into urban social spaces. You can open your home to the “invasion process” with Aladdin Sane , titled after rock legend David Bowie’s alter ego and 1973 album. The work is a nostalgic mashup of pop-culture icons, featuring Bowie’s red-and-blue lightning bolt over a yellow Pacman ghost – a fun way to brighten up a living room, entryway, or a child’s bedroom. -
VoteSports is a prominent theme in Jonas Wood’s oeuvre, as the artist is an avid basketball fan and would even depict NBA Hall-of-Famers in his paintings. Wood is well known for his depictions of household objects and domestic interiors, possessed of the uncanny ability to infuse ordinary environments with visual intrigue, using array of formal techniques, flattened colors and spatial distortion to create viewpoints that are at odds with viewer expectations. Vote is a collectible smaller-scale work by this celebrated artist and would make a wonderful wall collage of bold color contrasts for fellow sports aficionados. -
Pink BirdIn the world of Sam Cox, also known as Mr. Doodle, odd little characters noodle across the surface, and life is quirky and light. Such is the artist’s vision of the world in which art brings delight and much needed levity, especially at times when things appear far too serious. Reminiscent of Keith Haring’s energetic graffiti style, DoodleLand is a whole new visual phenomenon. In 2019, Sotheby’s Gallery exhibited works of this eccentric 21st century artist, which proved immensely popular with art lovers of all ages. Bursting with spontaneous imagination, Pink Bird and a similar work Orange Fish would surely delight the young at heart, and together would offer endless hours of fascination in a child’s bedroom. -
ImmortalsIan Williams explores the lines between virtual and real. His painterly world view is informed by digital landscapes, scrutinizing and transforming found objects from video games to arrive at an understanding of whether virtual objects are “real” ontologically; while they are not tactile things, they do possess interactive and properties that mimic objects in our physical world. Williams explores these concepts with the still-life painting, a tradition that quite fittingly contemplates life, death, and existence through a meditation of inanimate objects. Immortals is a cerebral contemporary still-life work that would go well in the study, by a flat computer screen or anywhere you might question the nature of your reality. -
Sacred ObjectNobuo Sekine’s pioneering practice catalyzed the movement of Mono-ha in the 1960s, which arrives at Zen tranquility through the exploration of topological geometry. Sacred Object is from Phase Conception, a series created in the late 1980s and one that features works of smaller size than Sekine’s other “Phase” series. The painterly technique in this series uses gold and silver leaf to cover punctured surfaces, recalling pre-Renaissance religious paintings. Sacred Object’s mix of black, silver and gold foil is highly unusual in Sekine's work at auction. The surface is very smooth with a subtle shimmer. The tranquil nature of the work lends itself to contemplation, ideal for the study or a wall collage. -
Be@rbrick Karimoku Haroshi 400％A skateboarder and self-taught artist, Haroshi is best known for repurposing discarded skateboards and transforming them into sculptures of vivid chromatic splendor. Composed of layers of wood grain, then carved and polished, these works are not only pleasing to the eye, but also thought-provoking in their environmentally conscious concept. Each sculpture contains a fragment of skateboard which imparts a soul upon the work. Haroshi teamed up with Karimoku, maker of stylish wood collectibles, for Be@rbrick 400％ . This three-dimensional alternative can incorporate a sculptural element to the living space. -
Balloon DogJeff Koons has repeatedly asserted that his work should be taken at face value with no interpretive content; this, in conjunction with his use of both kitsch and banal materials, has greatly contributed to the polarizing nature of his career. He is also known to tread between sectors of art and fashion, having collaborated with brands such as Louis Vuitton, Stella McCartney and H&M. Koons’s most distinguishable design is that of a balloon dog, which he has recreated in several iterations. These balloon dogs are often massive in scale, made of metal, and given a mirror-like finish. The magenta and yellow balloon dogs in the current sale are made of metallised porcelain and can easily fit into any modern home. -
JaLOUSe PosterExecuted in 2007, JaLOUSe Poster is a poster of the cover artwork that KAWS created for JaLOUSe Magazine September issue of the same year. It is larger than life-size, and recalls the early career of KAWS, when he was a street artist tagging posters in New York, painting over Calvin Klein ads of Kate Moss or Christy Turlington with phantom-like creatures bearing his signature crossed-eyes and white gloves. For a modern home with ample wall space, this poster would add a cosmopolitan finish. -
Mona Lisa 3P (Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci)Enjoy a masterpiece at home without queuing in a crowd for hours. “There are plenty of artists who can copy masterworks much more beautifully than I can,” Madsaki says. “I’m not interested in painting beautifully or nicely. To me, ugly is beautiful.” Mona Lisa 3P is the Japanese artist's rendition of Leonardo's enigmatic painting. With Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) II and Brillo Soap Pads Box II-P , he takes aim at celebrated works by David Hockney and Andy Warhol, respectively. Madsaki’s modus operandi of adapting masterpieces with graffiti, using spray paint within fine art, and treating icons with irreverence, are all part of the artist’s eccentric humor and critique of the rarefied world of art. -
FlowersThe flower looms large as a motif in Yayoi Kusama’s art. As a child, Kusama experienced hallucinations in which an overwhelming multitude of flowers would bloom, fill the space around her, and communicate with her. According to her autobiography, “Every violet had its own individual, human-like facial expression, and to my astonishment they were talking to me.” Kusama created large-scale flower sculptures that are uncannily anthropomorphic and exuberantly bizarre. In Flowers , a limited-edition ceramic plate, Kusama returns to this singular hallucinogenic vision, confronting the viewer with an idiosyncratic Surreal-Pop aura that is at once whimsical and sinister. -
Doggy RadioYoshitomo Nara’s sleeping puppy is one of the most beloved from the artist’s cast of characters. The whimsical creature recurs in Nara’s works, rendered in life-size sculpture as well as figuring as the hero in Nara’s first illustrated book for children. The Lonesome Puppy tells the sweet tale of a young pup that was so large no one could see him – that is, until a determined girl climbed up high enough to befriend him. Nara’s Doggy Radio , at a more manageable size, enables art lovers and audiophiles not only to see the sleeping puppy but also to hear him, as the limited-edition art piece is also a functional radio with Yamaha speaker system.
