11 Contemporary Highlights from the Fraiberger Collection

César, Le Centaure, 1983.
Estimate €300,000–500,000

A major piece in César’s career that many consider to be one of the masterpieces of sculpture, Le Centaure (Hommage à Picasso) is the perfect synthesis between classicism and modernism. Composed of clear cut contours and broken angles, the work breaks with abstraction and employs the most contemporary of materials and techniques. Le Centaure (Hommage à Picasso) is a complex work of many meanings which embodies the singularity of César’s artistic approach. Its eloquence is intensified by the large size that pulls the spectator into an encounter or even a confrontation.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Hans Hartung, T1956-13, 1956.
Estimate €500,000–700,000.

German-French painter Hans Hartung was known for his gestural abstract style. He achieved recognition for his work in the late 1950s and was awarded the International Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1960. Talking about his work, he said: “Scribbling, scratching, working on the canvas, painting it finally, seem to me to be human activities that are as immediate, spontaneous and simple as can be singing, dancing or the play of an animal that runs, stamps or snorts.”

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Head and Scapula, 1983.
Estimate €5,000,000–7,000,000.

Painted in 1983 at the age of only 23, Head and Scapula is doubtless one of the most emblematic and captivating paintings Basquiat ever made. Marked by the spontaneity which characterized his work at the end of the 1970s, the pictorial composition vibrates with the intensity and energy so often associated with the work of one of the greatest geniuses in the history of painting.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Gibert & George, The Penis, 1978.
Estimate €700,000–1,000,000.

The Penis combines photography, a medium that the artists always favoured as they consider it the most intelligible and easily assimilated, with a black and white drawing which contrasts with the explosive red of the central panels. Another striking dissonance is the opposition between the particularly crude subject of the drawing and the pose taken by Gilbert & George, the passive and unperturbable witnesses of a scene susceptible of upsetting an unadvised public. These dissonances are increased by the work’s composition, a minimalist and rigorous grid of medieval stained glass windows.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Daniel Buren,Peinture acrylique blanche sur tissu rayé blanc et bleu, 1970.
Estimate Upon Request.

It was 50 years ago that the French Concepualist Daniel Buren discovered the two-colored striped linen awning fabric at a Paris market. Since then, the 8.7-centimetre wide stripe has been his central motif – the artist calls it a “visual tool.”

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Jean Dubuffet, Les riches fruits de l ’erreur, 1963.
Estimate €3,500,000–5,000,000.

With Les riches fruits de l’erreur , painted on 12 March 1963, Dubuffet suddenly found what was to become the very spirit of the L’Hourloupe series. With no longer any notion of place or individualized figures, the painting seems to be fragments within a continuum without beginning or end.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Georges Mathieu, Vivent les cornificiens !, 1951.
Estimate €300,000–500,000.

Vivent les Cornificiens ! is spectacular not only for its exceptional size but also for the historical story that it evokes; a story captured in the drips and splashes of thickly applied paint. At the time Mathieu painted the canvas in 1951, he had long ago broken with figuration, concentrating instead on an informal art. Indeed, he was one of the first in France to react violently against the constraints of classical art in favour of the liberated style of Lyrical Abstraction, replacing the paintbrush with the paint tube pressed against the very surface of the canvas. Only forms and colours now testify to the artist’s expressivity, and sensibility presides over reason.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Wildredo Lam, A Trois centimètres de la Terre, 1962.
Estimate €2,500,000-3,500,000.

A Trois centimètres de la Terre (1962), an important painting by Wilfredo Lam, belongs to a series of major works from the beginning of the 1960s. Lam had moved to Paris after several years of training in Spain and, at the end of the war, rediscovered Cuba where he was born in 1902. By this time, he had entirely incorporated the teaching of the masters of Cubism, Picasso and Matisse, and had built up a language which was his own whilst fitting into the great lines of modernity.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Jean-Michel Atlan, Aboda Zara, 1958.
Estimate €150,000-200,000.

Atlan is unclassifiable. His work is abstract and figurative, expressionist and automatic, surrealist and primitivistic. His art escapes all dogmas. He upsets the traditional relationship between form and figure and breaks with perspective. Under the movements of his brush, the motif opens across the space of the canvas, creating strange contrasts and abandoning matter to itself.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Latifa Echakhch, Tambour 148’, 2012.
Estimate €100,000–150,000.

True to the minimalist procedures she is so fond of, Latifa Echakhch made her Tambours (Drums) with limited means. Suspending a drip full of black ink above a round canvas in the shape of a target, she allows chance to take over whilst still controlling it, skilfully choosing when to stop the flow. With their deep black centres, saturated with matter, the Tambours establish a dialogue between being and nothingness, turning the spectator into a witness of the evanescence of matter.

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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Sterling Ruby, SP30, 2008.
Estimate €400,000-600,000.

SP 30 ’s surface is washed in fluorescent colours - colours that may be foreign to a painter’s palette but more readily seen in the spray paint aisle. Its lemon-lime greens, bright pinks, tangerines, and teals are cut through by amorphous intrusions of black. As Gea Politi noted in a 2014 article for Flash Art, “[Ruby’s] work is as complex as the American empire. It addresses numerous topics, including aberrant psychologies (particularly schizophrenia and paranoia), urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption.”

Collection Alain & Candice Fraiberger
6 December | Paris

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