CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM AUCTION PREVIEW

Live Auction to take place during the Contemporary’s Annual Spring Benefit Party on Friday, May 14, 2010.

Please call (410) 783-5720 with questions or to arrange for absentee bidding.

Special Thanks to Jon Levinson of Alex Cooper Auctioneers and s.c. lord design and archival framing.

OUR AUCTION

Sanford Biggers Top
Cheshire (hanging/orange), 2010
Digital C-Print
20 x 30" Edition 2/10
Estimated value: $2,500
Minimum opening bid: $1,500
Courtesy of the artist

Informed by living in the United States, Europe, and Japan, Sanford Biggers’ work references Buddhism, African American history, hip hop culture and a range of other influences to explore notions of cultural interconnectedness. Biggers’ toothy smile sculpture entitled Cheshire refers to both Lewis Carrol's infamous cat and the iconic grin of blackface minstrels. In this image, the smile is fully lit up and photographed hanging in a large dramatic tree, a scene that speaks of theatre and fantasy while also evoking the horrific images of lynchings and racial violence.

Biggers’ exhibition at the Contemporary Museum in 2004 featured a dozen recent projects and a new performance and video work created in collaboration with the choir of Baltimore’s Douglas Memorial Community Church and local gamelan musicians.

Joseph Grigely Top
Songs Without Words (Eartha Kitt), 2009
Pigment print
Ed 4/12
Estimated value: $1,100
Minimum opening bid: $700
Courtesy of the artist

Joseph Grigely Top
Songs Without Words (Andrea Bocelli), 2009
Pigment print
Ed 4/12
Estimated value: $1,100
Minimum opening bid: $700
Courtesy of the artist

Joseph Grigely creates works that explore the idiosyncrasies of language and the dynamics of everyday communication. Grigely has been deaf since the age of ten, a factor that has shaped his work and become a central aspect of his artistic practice. Songs Without Words is part of a series of works that explore Grigely’s interest in music, which includes recalling his own memories of music as a child and his current relationship to music as a deaf man, fascinated with way music "looks". In this series Grigely clipped images of singers and musicians from the New York Times and deleted any identifying captions, leaving us with an experience of these performances with only their gestures sound and without words.

Joseph Grigely exhibited at the Contemporary Museum in the summer of 2007. His exhibition entitled St. Cecilia featured a newly commissioned two-channel video produced in collaboration with Baltimore’s Choral Arts Society.

John Waters Top
Last Call, 2003
8 chromogenic color prints 7 x 43.5 inches framed Edition of 8
Estimated value: $3,000
Minimum opening bid: $1,500
Courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore

John Waters began producing still photographic works in the early 1990's, scrutinizing videotapes of movies—first his own, and then over-the-top Hollywood movies and forgotten art films that have long fascinated him—and then photographing video images off of his television screen. The hilarious, rude, revealing and sometimes poignant moments that he captured became the raw material for artworks that Waters calls his "little movies."

John Waters participated in the Contemporary Museum’s exhibition entitled Snapshot in 2000.

David Reed Top
Color Study #15, 2010
Oil and alkyd on illustration board
8 x 12 inches
Estimated value:

Well-known for his abstract paintings, David Reed’s working drawings and color studies provide a rare glimpse into his process and contemplations. The color studies display Reed’s experiments with color, light, and form, they reveal his signature winding, wrapping, rhythmic ribbon-like shapes, and lay the groundwork for the paintings. These works provide a kind of diary of the artist and each painting, recording Reed’s aesthetic deliberations.

David Reed was an artist in residence at the Contemporary Museum in 1995 on the occasion of the exhibition Going for Baroque September 24, 1995- February 4, 1996

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry Top
Man With White Shirt (Sidney Poitier, New York Public Library Image Collection, From the Projection Series), 2009
Oil on Linen, Toner on Silk 48 x 37 1/4"
Estimated Value: $12,000–$14,000
Minimum opening bid: $6,500
Courtesy of the artists

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry
To the Highest Bidder (After Mahogany, from the Projection series) 2009
Oil on Linen, Toner on Silk 18 x 26 inches
Estimated Value: $6,000
Minimum opening bid: $3,600
Courtesy of the artists

A husband and wife collaborative, artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry have produced an incredible body of work that possesses a potent combination of seductive, exquisitely crafted images and incisive content that reflects on subjects such as the legacy of the civil rights movement, the history of race representation, and their own circumstance as an interracial couple. In 2009, McCallum and Tarry began as painting series inspired by film stills and archival photographs of stage performances. Works in this series explore the intersection of race and the entertainment industry by exploring racial stereotypes in theatre and cinema from the 1930s through the 1970s.

A large-scale survey of McCallum and Tarry’s work entitled Bearing Witness is now on view at the Contemporary and at seven venues throughout Baltimore.

Kelly Nipper Top
Pipsan Saarinen’s Theater Curtain, Kingswood School for Girls, Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2008
Framed chromogenic print
49 x 60 in.
2/3
Estimated value: $10,000
Minimum opening bid:
Courtesy of the artist

Kelly Nipper creates austere and carefully executed works based in photography, video, and performance that explore nuances related to time, space and dimension. This image was shot in the auditorium of Eliel Saarinen’s iconic Kingwood School for Girls on the campus of Cranbrook. Theatres and stages hold great interest for Nipper as a site for transformation and escape.

Kelly Nipper was featured in the photography and video exhibition Girls’ Night Out presented at the Contemporary Museum in 2007.

Kenneth Noland Top
Mysteries: Solar Blaze (Yellow Center), 2003
Archival inkjet and oil on paper
Estimated Value: $5,000-$8,000
Minimum Opening Bid: $3,500

Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) is one of the foremost American Color Field painters. In the 1960s, his paintings, championed by critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, were emblematic of high modernist painting which emphasized non-representational forms, sensuous, radiant colors, frontality and opticality. Late in his career, Noland returned to the circular, target-like imagery that had brought him critical renown and commercial success in the 1950s and 60s. This return is evident in the series of paintings he produced in the early 2000s titled Mysteries. The print, Mysteries: Solar Blaze "Yellow Center," 2003, is from this series. Unlike Noland’s earlier pictures that seemed to avoid any external referent, the Mysteries series, as the title suggests, contain allusions to the solar system and beyond. Kenneth Noland’s work is in collections world-wide, including the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and Tate Collection.

Louisa Chase Top
Untitled (Bees), 2000
Watercolor
16 X 12 1/2 inches
Signed lower right
Courtesy Goya Contemporary & the Artist
Estimated Value: $3,200
Minimum opening bid: $1,200

Christian Marclay Top
Tokyo, 2003
From an Edition of 35
Lithograph
13 1/4 X 19 inches
Signed and dated on the back
Courtesy of Goya Contemporary and the Artist
Estimated value: $3,400 Unframed
Minimum opening bid: $1,900

Known as both a critically acclaimed visual artist and a musician, Christian Marclay creates works that explore ways in which sound is experienced. Taking his cue from both music and noise, he has produced a remarkable body of work exploring the space between what we hear and what we see. In a series of images created between 2000 and 2003, Marclay photographed spaces where instruments are being stored and where music is usually performed or practiced. Absent of sound and musicians, these images are quiet studies of the potential of music and sound.

Joyce J. Scott Top
He Seems Different, 1999
Single print from Soul Erased series
Lithograph, embossing and hand work on Rives BFK
CTP From an Edition of 20
30 X 22 inches
Signed and dated on the front
Courtesy of Goya Contemporary and the Artist
Estimated value: $3,000
Minimum starting bid: $1,800