NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips de Pury & Company announces MOSS, an auction of art and design including works from the personal collection of Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell, founders of Moss, a beloved New York design institution. The auction, prefaced by a ten-day exhibition, will juxtapose contemporary and historical design with paintings, sculpture and photography. The assemblage was done in collaboration with ArtAssure, Ltd.

The exhibition and auction will include important works by prominent contemporary designers including Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, Studio Job, Marcel Wanders, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Tokujin Yoshioka, Enzo Mari, and Alberto Meda, as well as master works by mid-century design master Gio Ponti and sculptor Leo Amino. Design icons will be paired in vignettes with sculpture and paintings by Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, Alberto Giacometti, George Rickey, George Condo, and Candida Hofer, amongst others.

Kazimir Malevich's Ceiling plan for the Red Theater, Leningrad, from 1931
This important Suprematist sketch fully embodies Kazimir Malevich’s embrace of that ideology in the mid- 1920s, and its power to create new, vital space analogous to the artist’s notion of contemporary society. This ink drawing - his 1931 design for the ceiling of the Krasny Theatre in Novosibirsk, Soviet Russia - was a commission affording Malevich the opportunity to confirm the influence of geometric non-objectivity in the New Order of architecture. The design was never realized due to a fire which destroyed the building. Before the Revolution, the eclectic building had been a cathedral, built at the end of the 19th century. In Malevich’s Suprematist redesign, the overlapping symmetrical rectilinear forms, as arranged on the ceiling, allowed for individual vaulted segments. Usurped from the Bolshevik ideologues, Malevich used the color red - energetic and filled with power - as he did black and white, the three colors corresponding to his theory of three levels of Suprematist development.

Gio Ponti, ‘Parete Organizzata’ illuminated wall organizer, 1950-1953
Ponti’s ‘Parete Organizzata’ illuminated wall organizer assembles, all in one wall panel, shelves for objects and books, glass racks for magazines, protected nooks for more fragile objects, and a small plinth–nearly a reliquary–begging for art. In addition, the wall organizer provides lighting, which, placed behind the various containers, causes the sundry receptacles to appear ¥oating, adding an overall quality of lightness. The idea of assembling and combining disparate items within an organized structure is of course akin to my af¦nity for creating montage; this wall unit, which Franklin and I have lived with and treasured for over 22 years, is to me the de-facto ‘poster child’ of Moss: Dialogues Between Art & Design, most representative of what Moss was and is now. It is an architecture at the service of Babel, encouraging multiple dialogues, visual cacophony, comparison, evaluation, and playfulness through hands-on participation, all the while ensuring an overall harmony and sense that all of the noise is in fact music.