Cindy Sherman, Untitled #96, 1981. Christie's
Gearing up for its first set of major 20th- and 21st-century art sales of the fall season, Christie’s has announced that it will offer a group of works by Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, and Elizabeth Peyton this November. All 29 works come from a private collection. They are set to hit the auction block during the auction house’s 21st century art evening and day sales on November 9 and November 12 in New York.
The auction is titled “Image World”—a reference to the name of a 1989 Whitney Museum show about artists dealing with mass media in their work. Sherman, Kruger, and Prince are often considered part of an ’80s art movement known as the Pictures Generation, whose members relied on photographic material to consider the proliferation of images in the world today.
The sale “pays homage to the Pictures Generation artists who disrupted the status quo of the art world of the 1980s and 1990s,” said Ana Maria Celis, a senior specialist in Christie’s 21st century art department, in a statement. “The collection also features very contemporary image makers who owe much of their careers to this generation.”
Among the highlights from “Image World” is Christopher Wool’s large-scale untitled canvas from 1995, an abstract painting that features broad black and white brushstrokes. It is expected to fetch a price of $6 million–$8 million.
Alongside Wool’s 1995 painting coming up for sale are three photographs from Sherman’s 1981 “Centerfolds” series. Originally commissioned for Artforum, the series never made it to print because the editors feared they would be misunderstood as pornography. These images feature Sherman as a despondent protagonist dressed in various guises, and today, they rank among Sherman’s most well-known works. Together, the three works are expected to fetch between $5 million and $7.5 million. It’s possible, however, that they will bring in far more than that. This past May, the Akron Museum of Art sold an edition of Untitled #96, in which a sweater-wearing Sherman is shown lying on a tiled floor, for $2.8 million at Christie’s. It became the second-most expensive work by the artist ever auctioned.
Kruger’s text collage Untitled (Your Manias Become Science), from 1981, will also head to auction. Featuring an image of a cloud of smoke bearing the title’s text and framed in the artist’s signature red outline, it is expected to fetch $500,000–$800,000. The sale will coincide with an upcoming retrospective dedicated to the artist opening at the Art Institute of Chicago on September 19.
Also scheduled to hit the block at Christie’ this November is the Impressionist art collection of Dallas oil tycoon Edwin L. Cox. The group of 25 works including paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Gustave Caillebotte, is expected to fetch $200 million and will be auction during a single-owner evening sale at the house’s New York headquarters.
Highlights from “Image World” are now view at Christie’s Southampton outpost and will travel next to Hong Kong, London, and Los Angeles before they go up for sale in New York.
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