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From John Currin to Chris Ofili, Exceptional Contemporary Prints from the Collection of David Teiger

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Over more than six decades, David Teiger redefined the meaning of connoisseurship and great collecting. With clarity of vision he sought truly exceptional works, assembling a superlative collection in its diversity and its depth. Leading Sotheby’s December Prints & Multiples Online auction are twenty-seven lots from The History of Now: The Collection of David Teiger, sold to benefit Teiger Foundation for the support of contemporary art, including Peter Doig’s Canoe-Island and John Currin’s Milestones portfolio. Click ahead to see a selection of our favorites, open for bidding to 10 December.

Past Auction
Prints & Multiples Online
30 November–10 December 2018 | 2:00 PM EST | New York

From John Currin to Chris Ofili, Exceptional Contemporary Prints from the Collection of David Teiger

  • A surrealist image of a room with a cellar door, a woods and the tops of a pair of shoes hovering at the top if the composition.
    Robert Gober, Untitled. Starting bid $2,800.
    Known for his installation and sculptural works, Robert Gober draws on memories from his childhood as well as his personal life and reinterprets everyday objects such as drains, doors, chairs and body parts to distort perception. This lithograph plays with these interesting juxtapositions, depicting a pair of shoes standing on autumn leaves in front of a mayonnaise packet. Gober then switches angles, illustrating trees, a prison window and cellar door en face to create this slightly eerie composite scene.

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  • A small model of a gallery door with the words " The Wrong Gallery."
    Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, The 1:6 Scale Wrong Gallery. Starting bid $2,400.
    This multiple is a 1:6 scale reproduction of New York’s smallest exhibition space, The Wrong Gallery. The original space consisted of a glass door and two-and-a-half square feet of floor space. The gallery exhibited the work of over 40 artists in its existence between 2002 and 2005. Cattelan, Gioni and Subotnick have joked that the gallery was the back door to the locked world of contemporary art. According to Cattelan, the multiple accompanied by scale models of some of the artworks shown there, means that “anyone can play at being dealer at home.”

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  • Mark Wallinger, Ghost. Starting bid $1,400.
    Wallinger began the Ghost project with the intention of making an oil painting of a unicorn and started with a scanned reproduction of George Stubbs’ monumental oil on canvas, Whistlejacket of circa 1762. But the appearance of the scanned image led Wallinger in a new direction for the work, as he explains, “The results looked like an X-ray, rather than a negative. And that, of course, brings up the notions of X-raying paintings, the secret life of paintings beyond the surface. So, in that instantaneous way, I had something that was a lot more interesting than anything I could labour away at.”
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  • Two squares, one orange and one burnt red, with polka dots around the edges forming an exterior square.
    Richard Anuszkiewicz, For David (Two Holiday Cards). Starting bid $300.
    Following the success of his 1963 MoMA Holiday Card, Richard Anuszkiewicz continued to produce small, annual editions to gift to family and friends around the holiday season. These two screenprints are vibrant examples of his holiday cards from 2003 and 2004 and typify the artist’s exploration of color and geometry and their effect on perception. Both inscribed ‘For David’, the prints are indicative of David Teiger’s immersion into the contemporary art world and the close, personal relationships that he developed with the artists themselves.

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  • Nicholas Party, Dinner for 24 Elephants. Starting bid $400.
    On Friday 2 September 2004, Nicholas Party hosted a dinner party at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Sitting on stools of the artist’s design, the guests ate a seven course meal that included caviar, a single oyster, asparagus and a poached pear, all served on plates that Party painted. Issued in an edition of 20, this set of seven plates from the dinner recalls the playfulness and simple joy of the evening.

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  • A white paper with the words "I learned helplessness from rats."
    Bruce Nauman, I Learned Helplessness from Rats. Starting bid $1,900.
    This etching and drypoint is emblematic of Bruce Nauman’s clever use of text mixing humor and irony to provoke and unsettle the viewer. Riffing off of his titles for a video installation and a subsequent etching titled Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) and Learned Helplessness in Rats, which, in turn, was taken from a Scientific American article, Nauman once again plays with the phrase and twists it one step further to I Learned and blackly commenting on the nature of existence.

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  • A red canvas with a small figure and a white splatter.
    Takashi Murakami, DOB Jump. Starting bid $1,500.
    This screenprint from 1999 illustrates Mr. DOB, one of Murakami’s earliest cartoon creations inspired by anime and manga. It is believed that Mr. DOB represents Murakami’s alter ego and is one of the most represented characters in the artist’s oeuvre. The name roughly translates to "Why? Why?" and the ubiquitous presence of the character in a variety of forms suggests that Mr. DOB, and Murakami himself, is questioning the nature of the world around him.

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  • A man with long hair in a canoe in the water with a yellow and orange sky.
    Peter Doig, Canoe-Island. Starting bid $1,400.
    This screenprint from 2000 illustrates a lone canoeist, a motif familiar in Doig’s work. With this collage-like composition, Doig presents an interesting interplay of illusion, texture and color. The bright atmospheric sky contrasts starkly with the glimmering, black surface of the water; a lone island sits atop the horizon in the distance, the canoe fills the frame horizontally and the hazy figure looks out directly to the viewer. The result is a dreamlike and existential image - what, if any, is the man’s connection with the island? With the viewer?

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  • Two naked women in a Northern Renaissance style with tree stumps behind them.
    John Currin, Milestones. Starting bid $7,000.
    John Currin’s Milestones portfolio displays the artist’s technical mastery as well as influences that range from the High Renaissance to pop culture images of the 1950s. His skillful rendering of the female figure in the seven scenes of the portfolio produces imagery that spans the whimsical to the inscrutable, if at times even unsettling.

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  • Six black-and-white images of women.
    Alex Katz, Six Female Portraits. Starting bid $400.
    This portfolio of six heliogravures encapsulates not only Alex Katz’s distinctive style of flat, planar portraiture but also the strong relationships David Teiger built with the artists whose work he collected. Gifted to Mr. Teiger by the artist in 2004, the title page is inscribed “For David Best Wishes Alex 4/12/04.”

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  • "Here and now" written in red and underlined in blue with a compass of (north, south, east and west) on each side.
    Ed Ruscha, Here and Now. Starting bid $2,400.
    Here and Now encapsulates Ruscha’s playful preoccupation with words. Depicted in large, capitalized red letters, the phrase ‘Here and Now’ immediately captures the viewer’s attention. By placing the phrase in a box and in the center of the four cardinal directions of north, south, east and west, Ruscha perhaps references the axis mundi, where the four compass directions meet, revealing the center of the universe, where ‘here and now’ truly is.

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  • Chris Ofili, Afro Lunar Lovers; and Afro Lunar Lovers II. Starting bid $900.
    Afro Lunar Lovers and Afro Lunar Lovers II are emblematic of Chris Ofili’s work from this period, showcasing his representations of romance and exoticism as well as his celebration of black culture through a deeply symbolic visual language. Both works illustrate a couple in embrace under a golden moon set in a beautiful tropical setting and are executed in the restricted palette of red, black and green – the colors of the Pan-African flag. Significantly, in Afro Lunars II, Ofili has included two serpents entwined with the nude couple, making explicit reference to seduction and Adam and Even in the garden of Eden.

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