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Contemporary Art

10 Works to Start your Contemporary Art Collection

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As the Contemporary Art Online|New York and Contemporary Art Online|Paris sales open for bidding, we look at ten works by leading American and European contemporary artists such as Frank Stella, Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol, David Smith or George Mathieu to start your art collection. Click the image above to view the slideshow.

Past Auction
Contemporary Art Online ǀ Paris
2–16 December 2019 | 3:00 PM CET | Paris
Past Auction
Contemporary Art Online | New York
25 November–6 December 2019 | 12:00 PM EST | New York

10 Works to Start your Contemporary Art Collection

  • Lee Ufan, East Winds
    Estimate $80,000–100,000
    "Painting, above all, obeys the principles of ecology. One must find the therapeutic points in the undefined expanse of the canvas. And one must put one’s brush on such spots so as to fill the canvas with force and lively interactions." — Lee Ufan
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  • Frank Stella, Green Solitaire
    Estimate $50,000–70,000
    "The templates start with an image value and an aesthetic existence of their own, whether or not you recognize them – as I do – as tools, I wanted to transform that, to raise the level of it from design into art, and to make it physical; in effect, to give the templates a real presence, a pictorial presence… Abstraction has to be made ‘real’ in Picasso’s pictorial sense of the word... abstraction has, in some curious sense, not to be abstract.” — Frank Stella
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  • David Smith, Untitled-Nude
    Estimate $40,000–60,000
    “It was the soar of the human figure that held him, the uncompromising thrust it makes, the fight it carries on with the force of gravity... If this is geometry here, it is geometry that writhes and squirms.”
    Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. IV, Chicago 1993, pp. 227-98, as quoted in Alex Potts, “Personnages: Imperfect and Persistent”, David Smith: Personage, p.7
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  • Andy Warhol, Shoe with Diamond Dust
    Estimate $120,000–180,000
    The shoe is one of the most recognizable and long-standing motifs in Warhol’s oeuvre, which he began depicting in the 1950s while working as a commercial illustrator for I. Miller and Glamour magazine. It is no surprise that this iconography stuck with him, as within post-war consumer culture the shoe grew to symbolize materialism and frivolity, something that Warhol would intentionally exacerbate through his signature graphic and repetitive style. Sometimes carrying titles with the names of known figures, such as Julie Andrews or Elvis Presley, the shoe epitomized luxury and fetishism in a new mass-consumer culture that coveted voyeurism and attention through excess.
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  • Richard Hambleton, Jumping Shadow
    Estimate $100,000–150,000
    An American-Canadian graffiti artist, Richard Hambleton initially attracted public attention by painting faux crime-scene outlines of bodies on pavements. In the early 1980s, Hambleton painted buildings in the Lower East Side of New York City alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, during which time the artist also began to portray iterations of his highly recognized Shadowman figures onto found objects and canvases. According to the artist: “they could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a nuclear holocaust or even my own shadow”.
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  • Yayoi Kusama, Nets
    Estimate €10,000–15,000
    “In front of paint brushes and canvas, my hands react to them and make my work before I think of anything. Then, when the piece is completed, I look at it, and am surprised by the result — always.” – Yayoi Kusama
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  • Tom Wesselmann, Untitled (bedroom face)
    Estimate €12,000–18,000
    “I don’t depict nudes from any sociological, cultural or emotional intention. The nude, I feel, is a good way to be aggressive, figuratively. I want to stir up intensive, explosive reactions in the viewers.” — Tom Wesselmann
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  • Georges Mathieu, Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part
    Estimate €5,000–7,000
    “The paint originates directly, like a scream, from a nearly hypnotic state… […] although the first brushstroke may be completely arbitrary, the second is irrevocably determined by the first, the third by the first two and so on until the end” — Georges Mathieu
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  • Zao Wou Ki, Untitled
    Estimate €12,000–18,000
    “I think I can say that painting with marks is a Chinese invention, but Chinese painters have never taken it seriously, and for a long time I was mistrustful of the facility that came to me from my long apprenticeship in calligraphy. It had remained an exercise in style, a kind of virtuoso demonstration that I mistrusted. But, despite this feeling to which I became increasingly indifferent, I went on. I saw spaces come into being, made or unmade according to my whim, in an invasive impression of lightness: lightness of brush and colour, the lightness of the moment, of time passing. And as I arranged those marks, the living of life became lighter and the pleasure of those gestures prevailed over the traces in my memory". — Zao Wou Ki
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  • Niki de Saint Phalle, Oiseau amoureux
    Estimate €6,000–8,000
    “To me, my sculptures represent an amplified version women’s worlds, women’s delusions of grandeur, women in today’s world and women in positions of power” — Niki de Saint Phalle
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