NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s presents a selection of works from a prestigious collection to be sold in New York in September. Assembled by Arlene Goldman and George Hartman over the past ten years, approximately 100 works will be sold during the First Open live auction on September 23rd as well as the First Open Online sale from September 18th to 30th. With estimates ranging from $1,000 to $500,000, this sale will offer works for the seasoned and new collector alike.
Goldman and Hartman became well known international collectors with an appetite for cutting edge, experimental art, often selecting artists in the early phase of their development. They have championed artists with passionate conviction by donating numerous important works to leading Canadian art museums. David Altmejd's breakout 2007 Venice Biennale installation, "The Index," as well as large-scale works by Marcel Dzama, Jonathan Meese, Wangechi Mutu have been gifted to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; while works by Thomas Houseago and Folkert de Jonge among others, have been donated to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. They also gave over 100 works to The Glenbow Museum in Calgary.
Highlights from the Goldman and Hartman collection include works in all media that reflect Twenty- First Century tendencies of experimentation, often embracing global cultural tendencies emanating from Europe and Africa as well as Canada and the United States. "This is Now: Property from the George Hartman and Arlene Goldman Collection" accurately reflects the adventuresome and keen eye of collectors operating at the forefront of the international art world.
Highlighting the sale is Joe Bradley’s Berlin Duck #2, (estimate $500,000-700,000), which displays the organic, rather than calculated, process the painter developed. Bradley describes his method as time consuming, with long intervals lacking action, simply focusing on the canvas stretched across the floor, "stalking his prey," waiting alone for a motivating impulse. Bradley explores the piece from vantage points, circling it on the ground, pinning it up to the wall, and often from the reverse side allowing the paint to bleed through the unprimed canvas and only deciding later which side to present.
Also featured in the sale is Mark Bradford’s Tony, a rare sculptural work which is an ideal example of Bradford’s appropriation and manipulation of advertisements and posters, and his repurposing of visual pollution into stunning condensations of urban life, drawn from his native South Central Los Angeles, California, (estimate: $120,000-$180,000).
David Ostrowski’s paintings are the results of a total analysis of the fundamental nature of painting. Striving to undermine composition, style and “typical gestures,” Ostrowski experiments with speed and imperfection, opting for minimal visual elements that may have maximal effect, as seen in F (A Thing is a thing in a whole which it’s not), (estimate: $60,000-80,000). By curtailing his focus to the edges of the composition, Ostrowski's less-is-more aesthetic is derived from his deliberate attempts to distance himself from a prevailing emphasis on technical skills that often defines painting today. His most recent body of work, the F series, investigates the notion of the error in painting where the artist attempts to use his right hand as he would his left to purposefully create process-based seemingly abstract canvases.
The cyanotype (or blueprint), created in the 1840s is one of the earliest non-camera photographic processes, allowing images to be formed with the aid of the sun rather than artificial light. The process created inexpensive copies of drawings in an era long before the age of photocopy machines. In Hugh Scott-Douglas' hands, the cyanotype is used to produce works imbued with motifs designed through computer-generated algorithms. The patterns are output onto transparent film, and then exposed on canvas. The resulting chromatic variation from one canvas to the next is a bi-product of the contingent environment -- the intensity of the sun passing over the canvas at its time of development. Untitled, is estimated $35,000-45,000.
