#artbasel2020

Painting Mixed media on canvas 287.0 x 359.4 (cm)113.0 x 141.5 (inch) 

‘The Press of Democracy’ (2020) features a loose urban grid in bright blue, with organic golds, browns, and blacks radiating from the center, evoking the release of mounting pressure caused by the suppression of kinetic energy. Using his signature techniques of layering paper, rope, and other materials onto canvas and processing the surface to reveal complex intersections between layers of meaning, Mark Bradford’s most recent work examines a world undone by crisis. Named after a chapter from ‘Gotham’, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s monumental history of New York City, ‘The Press of Democracy’ considers the unspooling of generations of established power structures. Bradford makes a case for the animating power of abstract painting at a moment when everything seems up for grabs.

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Gladstone Gallery

Untitled, 1982 Keith Haring $4.75 million

Painting Enamel and dayglo on metal 230.0 x 184.0 (cm)90.6 x 72.4 (inch) Provenance: The Keith Haring Foundation, New York

Throughout his career, Keith Haring (b. 1958, Reading, Pennsylvania) used his signature artistic vocabulary to become a spokesperson for his generation, responding to many of the urgent social and political issues that defined his lifetime. Beginning with his first works in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Haring developed a universal language comprised of iconographic motifs – including barking dogs and dancing figures – that remained accessible and recognizable to a global audience. 

The painting ‘Untitled’ (1982) is an iconic representation of how Haring employed these motifs to create an exuberant composition that speak to both formal expertise and brilliance in conveying social messages. Here, his use of day-glo paint captures the vibrant energy of his age, one shaped in part by a popular underground club culture, street art , and Neo-Expressionist painting. As an artist, Haring provided a unique take on universal concepts such as birth, death, love, and war, ultimately creating an oeuvre that remains as relevant today as it was during his lifetime.

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David Zwirner

Untitled (Blot), 2015 Kerry James Marshall $3 million (to an American museum)

Painting Acrylic on PVC panel 213.7 x 303.5 (cm)84.1 x 119.5 (inch)

Experience Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Blot) in depth and explore Basel Online: 15 Rooms on David Zwirner Online → Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) has deftly reinterpreted and updated its tropes, compositions, and styles. At the center of his prodigious oeuvre, which also includes drawings and sculpture, is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility so long ascribed to black figures in the Western pictorial tradition. For his Blots series, Marshall utilizes the language of abstraction to suggest alternative ways in which black experiences are formally manifested in painting. Like his more familiar figurative images, the artist’s Blots invite viewers to consider what, and whom, the history of abstraction has obscured.

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Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, New York

The Nineties (1980) Ed Ruscha $2.4 million

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Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco

Untitled (87-33) (1987) Donald Judd $1.85 million

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White Cube

Komplementär bräunlich (2012) Georg Baselitz $1.66 million:

Baselitz cites as an influence Italian abstract painter Lucio Fontana, who made his images by slicing or digging into monochromatic fields of colour to reveal black voids behind the picture plane: “I wanted an apparition, something that appears out of the depth”.

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Hauser and Wirth

The Fragile (2007) Louise Bourgeois $1.5 million

Diagonal Evolution (2020) George Condo $1.4 million

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Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Elke in Frankreich II (2019) Georg Baselitz $1.35 million

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Luhring Augustine, New York

Untitled (1990) Glenn Ligon $1.2 million

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Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

White Snow Cake (2017) Paul McCarthy $1.2 million

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Galerie Max Hetzler

Intervals 6, 2019 Bridget Riley  $1.2 million

Painting oil on linen 271.0 x 181.0 (cm)106.7 x 71.3 (inch)

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Hauser and Wirth

Untitled, 1972  Ed Clark $1.2 million

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David Zwirner

Pastel (1991) Joan Mitchell > $1 million

Work on Paper

City, 1928 - 1936 Josef Albers $1 million

Painting Tempera on Masonite in artist's frame 56.2 x 109.9 (cm)22.1 x 43.3 (inch)

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Almine Rech, Brussels

The Dreamer (2008) George Condo $950,000–1 million

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Skarstedt

Ralf III (Remix), 2005 Georg Baselitz $900,000

Painting oil on canvas 300.0 x 250.0 (cm)118.1 x 98.4 (inch)

'Ralf III (Remix)' belongs to Georg Baselitz’s acclaimed Remix series, a self-referential body of work that the artist began in the autumn of 2005, in which he revisits and re-interprets subjects from earlier decades of his practice. Addressing his own personal history through the lens of retrospection, the Remix series confronts how perceptions evolve and transform over time, especially within the context of Germany’s dark and troubled past which so persistently reveals itself in Baselitz’s work. Often enlarged and rapidly painted, the spontaneity with which the works in the series are executed gives rise to mnemonic flashes of things in the past, present, and future. Extreme transformations of the their muted, more ponderous forerunners, this particular work makes reference to Baselitz’s Ralf series painted in 1965. 'Ralf-kopf' pre-dates Baselitz’s inverted pictures by four years and sits within a seminal body of work that would form the basis of Baselitz’s artistic investigations that still continue today. The character Ralf is an imaginary depiction of fellow neo-expressionist painter A.R. Penck (real name Ralf Winkler) who is depicted once again in the present work, held in a moment of isolated introspection. Baselitz would paint three versions of Ralf in 1965, one of which now resides in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Galerie Max Hetzler

The Flaming Fields, 2020 Walton Ford $850,000

Painting watercolour, gouache and ink on paper 212.1 x 151.8 (cm)83.5 x 59.8 (inch)

VAT, where applicable, is not included in the asking price.

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Hauser and Wirth

$850,000: Lee Lozano, No Title (ca. 1964) $730,000, $619,000: Günther Förg, Untitled (2007)

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David Zwirner

Im Turm, 2019 Neo Rauch $500,000

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Levy Gorvy

Mother, 2020 Dan Colen $500,000

Painting Oil on canvas 149.9 x 383.5 (cm)59.0 x 151.0 (inch)

“I have a natural inclination towards using nostalgia as a creative prompt. I have always been interested in the power of cliché. But I still feel very connected to the idea that an artwork must be a reflection of my most individual self and an expression of my most intimate feelings. And so these Mother paintings allow me to explore that tension between the deeply personal and the universal.” —Dan Colen

Dan Colen began his Mother series in 2013, using stills from animated Disney films as source imagery and translating their compositions into traditional oil-on-canvas paintings.

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Lisson Gallery

Listening to the Poets, 2020 Stanley Whitney $450,000

Painting Oil on linen 243.8 x 304.8 (cm) 96.0 x 120.0 (inch)

“I don’t worry about what the color does. If it feels right, if it sits right... To me, it’s all about how things feel. I never know what the colors are going to be... I’m trying to open up space, for people to wander.” — Stanley Whitney

Discussing color entails abstraction; any color represents much more than its literal color, and the discussion is abstract especially when the paintings aren’t representational.

The effects of color call up many responses: visceral, physical, neurological, instinctive, impulsive, adjectives that require others to satisfy or elucidate usage. I can say: the eye communicates with the brain, so that we see. The brain receives signals and creates, constructs, or pieces together an image. It’s involuntary activity, as are sensations, which have no organic basis.

“I don’t know what color does,” Whitney tells me, and says he doesn’t have a theory of color. His art engages with and is about that question, actively playing and working with perception, involuntary responses as well as voluntary ones. Knowing something about painting will usually charge a viewer’s relationship to a painting, and bring other meanings to it.

– Lynne Tillman, Afternoon Paintings, Lisson Gallery catalogue, 2020

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Stephen Friedman Gallery

Happiness Beyond Paradise, 2020 Luiz Zerbini $400,000-450,000

Acrylic on canvas300 x 600cm (118 1/8 x 236 1/4in)

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Hauser and Wirth

Still Life, 2020 Nicolas Party $250,000