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Jonas Wood, Yves Klein & More Contemporary Art Masters

A painting of a baseball card of Red Sox player Dennis Eckersley
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Our Contemporary Art Online: NYC sale offers a range of exciting works by masters of contemporary art from Yves Klein’s iconic Gold Leaf Table to Deborah Kass’ linguistically and visually playful OY/YO. Discover an early George Condo paintingthat provides insight into the artist's creative influences and a Jonas Wooddepiction of a baseball player that innovates the art of portraiture. To see these and more sale favorites, click ahead.

Contemporary Art Online: NYC
13–20 July

Jonas Wood, Yves Klein & More Contemporary Art Masters

  • A painting of a baseball card of Red Sox player Dennis Eckersley
    Jonas Wood, Eckersley. Estimate $40,000–60,000.
    Based in Los Angeles, Wood creates his works with an eye to the past, looking at artists such as Henri Matisse and David Hockney. The combination of portraiture, bold text and abstracted backgrounds made painting sports cards appealing for Wood. “The sports thing is funny. A lot of people think my work on the subject is based on being a super sports fan, because I’m from Boston or because I make these nostalgic pictures, but really the whole sports theme is just a vehicle for practicing portraiture.”*

    *Jonas Wood in Emily Leisz Carr, ‘Super Sports Fan: An Interview With Jonas Wood,’ Art in America, 9 October 2013.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Conrad Marca-Relli, Untitled. Estimate $25,000–35,000.
    Born in Boston to Italian immigrant parents, Conrad Marca-Relli spent his childhood travelling between America and Europe with his father, who was a journalist. During this time, Marca-Relli developed a lifelong appreciation for European culture and art, especially Italian Cubism. While largely self-taught, Marca-Relli was heavily influenced by modernist artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. His work uses deliberate interlocking shapes to represent abstract architectural concepts.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • A low, transparent rectangular table filled with gold leaf.
    Yves Klein, Gold Leaf Coffee Table. Estimate $20,000–30,000.
    Perhaps the most simultaneously influential and controversial French artist of the 1950s and early 1960s, Yves Klein is best known for his trademark ultramarine pigment, which he called International Klein Blue (IKB). The artist saw the color as a way of encompassing the expanse of the infinite as represented in nature (the sky and the ocean). Rose and gold were also deeply symbolic colors to the artist who believed experiencing color was to “bathe in cosmic sensibility."*

    *Yves Klein in Tess Thackara, ‘Yves Klein’s Legacy Is About Much More Than Blue,’ Artsy, 9 January 2017

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Reclining nude woman seen from a foreshortened view. The image itself is composed of a collage of smaller images.
    Vik Muniz, La Bacchante, after Gustave Courbet. Estimate $20,000–30,000.
    Brazilian photographer and multimedia artist Vik Muniz said in an interview with the New York Times that his goal was to “change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day.”* In his Appropriation Art series, Muniz recreates well-known works of arts with common materials, such as chocolate, garbage, and caviar. He then photographs his collages before destroying them, saving the once three-dimensional collages as two-dimensional photographs. Muniz's repetition of such highly established imagery using everyday materials tinkers with the illusion of grandeur and ultimately challenges how art is seen.

    *Vik Muniz in Carol Kino, ‘Where Art Meets Trash and Transforms Life,’ New York Times, 21 October 2010

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • A Surrealist-inspired landscape with a white marble statue of a person next to a abstract sculpture topped by an elliptical shape. What appears to be a boulder appears at the left foreground.
    George Condo, Untitled. Estimate $15,000–20,000.
    George Condo’s earliest, most foundational works have come under renewed focus recently. The artist’s Untitled , executed just as Condo articulated the notion of ‘artificial realism,’ exhibits the conceptual tenets which would come to define his practice. Untitled synthesizes disparate art historical subject matter, distorted through a Modernist lens, to forge a sense of pathos and psychological intensity that is uniquely contemporary.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Victor Vasarely, Homenaje a Malevich. Estimate $10,000–15,000.
    Strategically arranged geometric shapes and a dynamic use of color to portray depth are what make French-Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely’s “visual illusions” world-renowned. Varsarely is commonly known as the father of the Op Art Movement. His Homenaje a Malevich is a nod to Russian avant-garde artist and theorist Kazimir Malevich, who is best known for his work Black Square. The influence of Black Square is visible in Homenaje a Malevich through the use, destruction, and expansion of the traditional black square.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • A bright yellow sculpture of the letters "OY" on a metallic base.
    Deborah Kass, OY/YO. Estimate $10,000–15,000.
    OY/YO embodies many of the most important themes in Deborah Kass’ body of work, appropriating a male-dominated visual idiom to investigate the role of identity politics in representation. First conceived as a public installation in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the present work finds its basis in Ed Ruscha’s iconic OOF, now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Taking Ruscha’s foundational treatise in Pop Conceptualism and infusing it with her identity as a Jewish woman and New Yorker into the work, Kass’ sculpture can alternatively be read as the Yiddish exclamation “oy” or the oft-heard informal greeting “yo.”

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • An abstracted face made of swirling black, red and green marks, as well as many other colors.
    Enrico Baj, you are unrecognizable in this state. Estimate $7,000–9,000.
    Italian painter Enrico Baj began his education at the Brera Academy of Art and Milan University, where he studied law. Baj was highly aware and influenced by the political climate of the time, and in 1951, Baj co-founded the Movimento Nucleare (Nuclear Movement) with Sergio Dangelo. Movimento Nucleare was a collection of artists whose work both criticized and conversed with the Hiroshima and Nagaski bombings — a radical stance as abstract art was largely nonpartisan at the time.


    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Painting of four imaginary fox-like creatures on a black background. Two fanciful gray faces lean down from the top of the image, as though speaking to the animals,
    Gladys Nilsson, Terrarium. Estimate $3,000–5,000.
    Chicago-based artist Gladys Nilsson is known for her carefully layered collages and water based paintings filled with playful imagery. Her work often explores female sexuality and its natural contradictions in society. She is an original member of the Hairy Who group based in Chicago. In 1973, Nilsson became the first woman to have a solo-exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Julian Stanczak, Interrupted Lines. Estimate $18,000–25,000.
    Born in Poland in 1928, Stanczak traveled to London before immigrating to Cleveland in 1950. Heavily influenced by Joseph Albers and Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, Stanczak’s work explores how complementary colors and line bring forth the illusion of static movement and the effect of real and imagined light. One of the leading artists in the Op Art movement, he painted entirely with his left hand. His dominant right hand was permanently damaged during his childhood in a Serbian work camp, which he escaped at age fourteen.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • A painting of a white rose on a white background with white abstract geometric shapes by Beatriz Milhazes.
    Beatriz Milhazes, Sans titre. Estimate $10,000–15,000.
    Rio de Janeiro-based artist Beatriz Milhazes’ abstracted scenes are based on the natural world. Influenced by Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Tarsila do Amaral, Milhazes has developed an original multi-layered art making technique; she composes her paintings on plastic sheets then transfers them to canvas or paper. This process, which creates textureless images, fulfills Milhazes’ ambition of removing the hand of the artist from her paintings. Milhazes' paper collages implement various media in addition to paper, such as paint, candy wrappers, found graphic papers, and leaves.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • An abstracted drawing in graphite and white, orange and red pastel.
    Hannah Wilke, Untitled (Colored). Estimate $3,000–5,000.
    Hannah Wilke is acclaimed for pioneering feminist art with work that boldly questions the objectification of the female body, the male gaze, and the inherent contradictions within the feminist movement of the time. Wilke was also at the forefront of performance art, using her body as a living sculpture in the Performalist Self-Portraits series. She made pastel and graphite drawings throughout her life, the later ones grappling with her battle with cancer.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Sculpture of a kneeling skeleton with a can suspended above its head and an empty clear liter bottle in its chest cavity.
    Tim Hawkinson, Penitent. Estimate $7,000–9,000.
    Tim Hawkins, a Los Angeles-based multi-media artist, turns found objects, such as plastic bags and old socks, into intricate sculptural systems that muse on the perceived separation of nature, machine, the body, and human consciousness. His work often combines mechanical and the natural material, playing with the differences as well as the similarities within the two mediums. Penitent , a motorized skeleton, explores the limitations of human mortality, while disrupting the perceived separation of machine, body and being.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • A abstract drawing by Karel Appel with swirling marks of red, yellow and green over bold markings of black, royal blue and exposed white
    Karel Appel, Three Concealed Animals. Estimate $12,000–18,000.
    Dutch painter and sculptor Karel Appel was one of the founding figures of CoBrA, a collective of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam who, in the wake of World War II, rejected the notions of geometric abstraction and surrealism in pursuit of pure expression acheived through the use of heavily applied primary colors, stark contrast, and vibrant expression. Appel and CoBrA sought to emulate child-like spontaneity and movement in their work, ignoring the principals and order of the then-prevailing Modern Art aesthetics.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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  • Two gestural works by Amy Sillman. The image on the left is dark blue with white marks. The image on the right has red marks on a blue foreground.
    Amy Sillman, Untitled. Estimate $6,000–8,000.
    American artist Amy Sillman once described her painting process as a physical continuation of her inner dialogue. As such, Sillman’s paintings are thoughtfully gestural, witty and often times humorous. Sillman’s strong sense of composition, color and line continuously produce works with bold personality and sense of space.

    Contemporary Art Online: NYC
    13–20 July
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