NEW YORK—
SALES IN THE CITY: FAIR TRANSACTIONS
Less
Pricey on the Piers
Canvas works were at a high premium at London’s
Victoria Miro, as a riveting and late 1950s portrait by
American legend Alice Neel, The Baron’s Aunt, fetched
$350,000. On a smaller and decidedly younger scale, Verne
Dawson’s spacey oil, Blue Planet from 2005, sold for $25,000;
and a large-format oil-on-board figurative work by Chantal
Joffe from the same year, Mother and Child III, made $34,000.
2004 Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry proved
his mettle with two elaborately glazed and narratively quippy ceramic pots,
which sold at £18,000 and £22,000 apiece. "We've done a lot of business,” said
the gallery’s James Lindon, “but we tend to take more expensive
things to the Basels in Basel and Miami Beach.”
Swell Fair for
Swiss Gallery
The action was brisk at Zurich-based Galerie
Eva Presenhuber, as an early ink-on-paper, large-scaled work by
Ugo Rondinone, No.3 from 1991, sold
for $130,000. A sassy new group of 24 C-prints by Doug Aitken,
Crystal Corna, taking up an outside wall of the stand, sold for
$85,000. Continuing on the hot photography front, Candida
Hofer’s 2003 Schloss St. Emmenenam Regensburg XXIV, one of her
signature ornate interiors, went for $36,000. Paintings also drew interest as
the rather hauntingly surreal Steven Shearer oil on canvas,
Larry with Blue Nose, made $19,000.
Time to Pay the Paper
Works on paper sold
briskly at New York’s Nolan/Eckman Gallery, including two new
untitled India ink on paper drawings by Carroll Dunham at
$15,000 apiece, as well as two smaller drawings at $5,500 each.
The Longo and Shaw of It
New York landmark
Metro Pictures registered brisk sales including a
galactic-themed and jumbo-scaled charcoal on paper Venus from 2006 by
Robert Longo for $90,000 and a jaunty and humorous wall-mounted
sculpture by Jim Shaw from 1996, executed in wood, foam,
plaster and pastel, for $70,000. Metro also sold a cleverly conceived,
Constructivist-like sculpture by Whitney Biennial newcomer
Yuri Masnyj, This Ship is Listing from 2006, in
plaster, painted wood and plexi for $18,000.
Thermovision
Mouse
One of the most intriguing–and hi-tech–pieces in the entire
show is German artist Stephan Reusse' laser projection of a
snuffling, scurrying mouse on the bare wall of the Artcore
booth. "People who work in labs with mice have come by and told me how
astounding the likeness is," said a gallerist. Reusse took thermovision
footage–the same technology used by the military to detect foes in the dark–of a
mouse on a staircase and then rendered only the rodent's shifting outline with
the green laser, so the projected shape morphs from an abstract quivering blob
into an unmistakable, and surprisingly cute and cartoonish, little rodent.
Artcore has sold a couple of editions at $15,000 to museums that already have
the expensive laser projector necessary for the work. Powerful projectors could
beam the mouse great distances, making it seem enormous, the gallerist told us.
Artcore plans a Jenny Holzer-size city block projection soon in
Toronto, but wasn't at liberty to give details.
Alles Gut at
Eigen
Berlin/Leipzig-based Galerie Eigen + Art
continued its art-fair spree of German cutting-edge art with the much talked
about David Schnell and his eerie 2005 oil-on-canvas landscape,
Aussicht, that sold for $54,000. But it wasn’t only the Germans selling
as two large-format and photo-based works by Swiss artist Remy
Markowitsch, C-prints in plexi and wood frames, On Travel 041
and On Travel 126, sold at approximately $24,000 each. Several standout
Chinese ink on paper compositions by the Israeli artist Yehudit
Sasportas, identically titled Mechanical Garden and dating
from 2004, sold for $7,500 apiece.
Couldn’t Sell Much
Moore
L.A.’s Mark Moore Gallery was thrilled with
the sales it had at Pulse, with very little available in its
booth by early Monday afternoon. Two paintings—glistening close-ups of bacon—by
Belgian artist Cindy Wright sold: Baconcube 4 for
$13,500 to a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum, to which the painting is promised
as a gift; and Baconball for $12,000 to a local buyer who sits on the
Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Council. In addition to her
“meat” works, the artist, whose handling of paint is flawless, also does
portraits (including one that has shown at London’s National Portrait Gallery),
and the gallery still had Girl in Pink available for $11,000. The
gallery also sold a vaguely apocalyptic painting in orange, Overlap (Version
I) for $10,000. And it sold all three editions of Red Indian by
Yoram Wolberger for $29,500; the fiberglass sculpture is meant
for outside display. Also leaving the gallery was a small, round painting by
Todd Hebert for $5,500, and a Simon Willems
painting for $7,200.
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