NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's announces that it will again commence its major spring auction series in New York with an innovative addition to the traditional sale calendar. 'Bound To Fail' is the title of a curated capsule sale of Modern, Post-War and Contemporary art that explores the theme of failure, with the understanding that failure for any artist is the risk that they take when pushing boundaries and challenging the concept of fine art and commercial success. Comprised of 39 works by major artists including Maurizo Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Marcel Duchamp, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley and Richard Prince, the sale focuses on artists who are known for having pursued a singular creative vision, which sometimes comes at the expense of critical acclaim or commercial success.

The sale, which was conceived by Christie's Loic Gouzer, takes its name from the Bruce Nauman sculpture, Henry Moore, Bound To Fail, a cast of the artist’s bound hands that channels the anxiety of constrained artistic expression (estimate: $6-8million). Gouzer previously helmed Christie's highly-successful curated sales, The 11th Hour Charity Auction presented in with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in April 2013, If I Live I'll See you Tuesday in May 2014 and the record-breaking Looking Forward to the Past auction in May 2015.

Loic Gouzer, Christie’s deputy chairman of Post-War & Contemporary Art remarked: “So much has been written about the commercial success of the auction market in recent years, we felt it was time to explore the flip side of that from a curatorial standpoint. Taken together, this capsule auction shines a spotlight on works that have purposefully pushed the envelope of what the art market would be willing to call ‘successful’ in the pursuit of creating something new and ground-breaking.” Gouzer continued, “We are very proud to lead this sale with two masterpieces within the canon of contemporary art, Jeff Koons’ One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank and Maurizo Cattelan’s Him. Koons and Cattelan are among the greatest image makers of our time. In creating Him and Equilibrium, both artists were able to harbor an intangible element that propelled these works into international notoriety, breaching the boundaries of the art world and becoming viral sensations before the rise of social media. In doing so, Koons and Cattelan took enormous risks. They confronted the concept of failure head on and accomplished the impossible. Koons managed to defy the laws of gravity by suspending a basketball in water without any visible means of support. And Cattelan defied the taboos of representation, by disguising evil incarnate under a cloak of innocence.”

Bound to Fail’s concept is emphasized by the auction’s two leading works:

Maurizo Cattelan’s Him, 2001 (estimate: $10-15million) – is among the most recognizable and provocative works within the artist’s body of work. Depicting Hitler’s likeness, Him is cast kneeling in prayer - raising challenging questions about action and absolution. The sculpture is intended to be approached by the viewer from the back, a viewpoint from which the subject’s face goes unseen and his anonymous form appears vulnerable and childlike. Once the viewer circles around to the front, the reviled subject is immediately identified. In doing so, the viewer’s initial impression is forcibly redefined, the realization becoming a powerful reminder that the face of evil is not always obvious. In describing the conception of this work, the Cattelan remarked:

"I wanted to destroy it myself. I changed my mind a thousand times, every day. Hitler is pure fear; it's an image of terrible pain. It even hurts to pronounce his name. And yet that name has conquered my memory, it lives in my head, even if it remains taboo. Hitler is everywhere, haunting the specter of history; and yet he is unmentionable, irreproducible, wrapped in a blanket of silence. I'm not trying to offend anyone. I don't want to raise a new conflict or create some publicity; I would just like that image to become a territory for negotiation or a test for our psychoses."

Now recognized as a tour de force for the artist, the present example of Him, was exhibited as a central component of Cattelan’s landmark retrospective at the Guggenheim, New York. The work comes from Cattelan’s series, which reimagines modern and contemporary figures such as President John F. Kennedy and Pope John Paul II within a range of challenging contexts. In doing so, the artist effectively incites deliberation about some of the darkest corners of humanity—just as he does with Him.

Jeff Koons’ One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985 (estimate on request), has become one of the defining artworks of the late Twentieth Century. A lone basketball hovering impossibly in the middle of a tank filled with water, it is a work that mesmerizes its audience and holds them enthralled through a sublime combination of the ordinary, the familiar and the seemingly impossible. Created in 1985, at a time when the contemporary art-world was dominated by the vast, anguished splashes of Neo-Expressionist painting and the raw energy and color of graffiti art, this startlingly simple, almost minimal, matter-of-fact, ready-made-type-work is one that ran directly counter to the prevailing tendency of its time. But, like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain before it, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank is a work that can now be seen to have single-handedly announced and epitomized an entirely new direction in art – one that directly acknowledged and addressed the socio-economic realities of 1980s, late Capitalist consumer-culture.

An encapsulation - in one simple, unforgettable image - of the key theme upon which Jeff Koons’ first major exhibition in an established gallery was built, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank is the first and finest representation of the new and distinctly post-modernist generation of young artists that emerged in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. This generation was the first media-savvy, commercially-aware, MTV-watching generation of artists who, both cognizant of and undaunted by the newly commercialized art-world of the junk-bond era, were the first to make art that directly addressed, mimicked and mocked the mechanisms of the marketplace.

This will be the first time for both Him and One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank at auction.