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Contemporary Art

Select Highlights from Contemporary Art Online Auction

New York
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S otheby's Contemporary Art Online, from 19 September – 2 October, features works by renowned artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Lenore Tawney, Alexander Calder and others. A selection of highlights will be on view in our New York galleries from 20 September – 2 October.

Past Auction
Contemporary Art Online | New York
19 September–2 October 2019 | 12:00 PM EDT | New York

Select Highlights from Contemporary Art Online Auction

  • Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1981
    Estimate $50,000 – 70,000

    "One has the feeling that her pictures are an environment into which we look, and, in a similar way, that it is an environment, a place, where she has been."

    - E.A. Carmean in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective, 1989, p. 8
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  • Lenore Tawney, Untitled, 1967
    Estimate $5,000 – 7,000

    Lenore Tawney is a pioneering American fiber artist who, along with artists such as Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks, elevated the craft of weaving to a fine art. Tawney attended the Institute of Design, Chicago, studying under Alexander Archipenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, both of whom deeply influenced her practice. In the late 1950s, she moved to Coentis Slip, an old sea port at the tip of Manhattan, where she worked beside Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and others, all of whom were interested in capturing the delicate and ephemeral aspects of natural beauty. Tawney’s interest in natural patterns continued throughout her career and is reflected in the current lot, which incorporates found shells.
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  • Mary Bauermeister, Chinese Flowers (from the series No Fighting on Christmas), 1967-2017
    Estimate $30,000 – 50,000

    “I’ve always collected things from nature. Then I would contemplate them, and that gave me the idea that somehow people should be given a way of seeing these things as art. Someone should say: just look! I mean, not change, anything. And I didn’t change anything.”

    - Mary Bauermeister
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  • Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Storefronts (Project Part IV ANO III), 1964-65
    Estimate $30,000 – 40,000

    Among Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s most celebrated series are the Store Fronts from the early and mid-1960s, whereby the couple would construct a façade for a gallery or other sidewalk-facing space that gave air of a closed commercial space by nature of its covered up store-like vitrines. As noted by Lawrence Alloway, “the store fronts radiate a kind of suspense, as if the blocked windows or the closed door might admit one if you only knew the hours of opening… What Christo [and Jeanne-Claude have] done is to turn physical space into psychological response, as the façade becomes a wall, absolutely canceling the inside… [They] cancel the internal space that we anticipate and define space as what is between us and the glass. The spectator’s investigative, voyeuristic impulse is converted into an experience of himself, as an object in space” (Lawrence Alloway, Christo, New York 1969, p. VII). The present work is a rare multimedia assemblage for these Store Fronts in the mid-1960s, one of the few remaining relics of this pivotal initiative by the artists.

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  • Louise Nevelson, Night Zag IV, 1973
    Estimate $30,000 – 50,000

    “I go to the sculpture, and my eye tells me what is right for me. When I compose, I don’t have anything but the material, myself, and an assistant...Sometimes it’s the material that takes over; sometimes it’s me that takes over. I permit them to play, like a seesaw. I use action and counteraction, like in music, all the time. Action and counteraction. It was always a relationship – my speaking to the wood and the wood speaking back to me.”

    - Louise Nevelson
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  • Niele Toroni, Black Installation, 1989
    Estimate $30,000 – 40,000

    “What renders the paint visible? The color of the impressions made by brush no. 50 repeated at regular 30 cm. intervals, their disposition, inscription, in that place, the place in itself, the dance between the paint and the non-paint. This to say one job of the painter (and not the artist!), is to try not to impose his obsessions nor artistic intents, but in accepting the constraints and the sole possibilities connected to one method of working.”

    - Niele Toroni
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  • Alexander Calder, L’Âne, 1930-66
    Estimate $25,000 – 35,000

    “I feel that the artist should go about his work simply, with great respect for his materials… Sculptors of all places and climates have used what came readily to hand… It was their knowledge and invention which gave value to the result of their labors… Simplicity of equipment and an adventurous spirit of attacking the unfamiliar or unknown are more apt to result in a primitive, rather than decadent, art.”

    - Alexander Calder
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  • Alfonso Ossorio, 3 Couples, 1950
    Estimate $25,000 – 35,000

    “The impetus is definitely an idea. Not always a verbal idea; many times it’s a visual idea; there’s a relationship. But then immediately it involves the total human being."

    - Alfonso Ossorio
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  • George Rickey, Six Rotors One Cube, 1993
    Estimate $15,000 – 20,000

    "Time is an undeniable component in all kinetic art: motion can occur only during a span of time. Rickey's works can gently heighten viewer's awareness of time actually passing and, in a marvelously indirect way, persuade them to recognize the beauty of pure abstraction... We observe the seemingly random movements and note that fluctuating air currents cause different actions. Some appear to defy logic and the laws of physics, even as they operate within those laws... With patience we discern some patterns, but also realize that they are not consistently predictable; patterns involve in an open-ended process."

    (Valerie Fletcher "George Rickey, Poetry in Motion," George Rickey, Kinectic Sculpture: A Retrospective, p. 26)
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  • Richard Anuszkiewicz, Untitled, 1961
    Estimate $20,000 – 30,000

    “The image in my work has always been determined by what I wanted the color to do. Color function becomes my subject matter, and its performance is my painting.”

    (Richard Anuszkiewicz, as quoted in: Karl Lunde, Richard Anuszkiewicz, New York 1977, p. 9)
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  • Sam Gilliam, Untitled (Proposed Project for North General Hospital, Harlem), 1990
    Estimate $20,000 – 30,000

    “My work consists of solids and veils: the union of solids, or metal forms, seen as volumes against a raked and grooved paint surface. It is constructed painting, in that it crosses the void between object and viewer, to be part of the space in front of the picture plane. It represents an act of pure passage. The surface is no longer the final plane of the work. It is instead the beginning of an advance into the theater of life.”

    – Sam Gilliam, with Annie Gawlak, “Solids and Veils,” Art Journal, 50:1, Spring 1991, pp. 10
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  • Sanford Biggers, Quilt #19 (Rockstar), 2013
    Estimate $20,000 – 30,000

    “I often say time is malleable, but the reception of an artwork is malleable too. When the culture changes, the view and the way you see that work, your perspective, changes. It's something that you can't control. It's sort of daunting and intimidating, but at the same time very fascinating, extremely fascinating.”

    - Sanford Biggers
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  • Adam Pendleton, Tree (Black), 2006
    Estimate $30,000 – 40,000

    “Pendleton… sets up a laboratory in which our social and political desires can appear, however fleetingly. Historical materials (images, sounds, and printed language) become a point of departure for making present what cannot be grasped by representations of history (narratives, archives): the emergence of events and situations, which can only become known retroactively. Recent live art has rarely been more conscious of its origins in civil disobedience and the civil rights movement, where we view the body as a site of social antagonism, and as a ‘case’ for struggles for recognition and justice. With Pendleton’s work, even though we are often left with aporias and blind spots, we feel the force of historical matter self-organizing and finding form beyond representability and essence. We discover the protest of the object—works of art and performance resisting their subsumption by common epistemological frameworks and modes of narration posing as truth.”

    (Thom Donovan, Adam Pendleton, BOMB Magazine, 1 Jan 2011)
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  • Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Intense Black, 2002
    Estimate $15,000 – 20,000

    “The paintings of Callum Innes have a remarkable emotive presence. As objects they are charged with an intense energy; as images they are startlingly minimal and devoid of elaboration. Seeming to lack intent upon us, depicting nothing, inexpressive, they have nevertheless a powerful effect. Their quietly insistent claim upon the attention doesn’t elicit word so much as contemplative silence. The spectator is confronted as if by some beautiful or mysterious natural phenomenon: brilliant lights ascending in a dense night sky; soft rock, wind-scarred or stained by mineral-bearing water; random organic deposits.”

    - Mel Gooding, “A Poet of Common Sense”, Callum Innes: Paintings and works on paper at the ICA, London, UK, 1992
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