Trevor Paglen, Bridal Veil Falls, Deep Semantic Image Segments, 2021 (detail).
Trevor Paglen
Trevor Paglen, Bridal Veil Falls, Deep Semantic Image Segments, 2021. Dye sublimation print, 55 1/8 × 41 5⁄8 in framed, Edition 1 of 5, Edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Pace. Estimated value $35,000.
A favorite of institutions worldwide, Trevor Paglen (b. 1974 in Camp Springs, MD) is known for pushing photography to the frontier of 20th-Century technology. A conceptual artist and an activist — with a PhD in Geology in addition to an MFA — Paglen brings formidable intellect to bear in fusing art, science, and investigative journalism to create ambitious explorations into the role of state surveillance, militarization, and artificial intelligence in the history of landscape photography and our visualization of the contemporary world.
The scope of the artist’s ambition unfurls in an impressive array of inspired photographs and sculptural projects that include launching an artwork into perpetual orbit around planet Earth and creating a radioactive public sculpture for the Fukushima exclusion zone. In books and numerous articles, he has written extensively on experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality.
In this body of work, shot in Yosemite, the artist insinuates himself into the iconic American landscape tradition of Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins. Paglen notes that many early American landscape photographers were funded by the U.S. Department of War and were indeed unwittingly a part of the early history of government surveillance. There is a twist: the artist here feeds his digital images through AI to intensify each minute element and render an uncanny color palette overall that is startling and manifestly unreal — to create what he calls impossible images. On offer in this auction is Bridal Veil Falls, Deep Semantic Image Segments, 2021, which is among the strongest images in the series. It is a stunning work, with logarithms merging red, white, and blue into the natural original tones to transpose them into haunting veils of alluring fuchsia, with mere whisps of green. The emphatic iconic figural presence of falling water reminds one of a torch held aloft against the seductive and sumptuous plethora of hyper-realized nature.
Notably, Trevor Paglen is winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He is also a MacArthur Fellow. The artist is represented by Pace, Metro Pictures, and Altman Siegel. His latest solo was earlier this year at Pace in New York. Numerous other solos of his work have been presented at venues across the U.S. and abroad, including: the San Jose Museum of Art in 2022, Fondazione Prada, Milan in 2020, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul in 2019/2020, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2019, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C. in 2018. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. He holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. He lives and works in Berlin
Oliver Beer
Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Blue Nile), 2023. Pigment on canvas, 51.18 x 51.18 in (unframed). Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac. Estimated value $55,000.
Oliver Beer (b. 1985, Kent, England) is one to watch: the paintings in his “Resonance” series, of which Blue Nile is a prime example, are pure abstractions that evocatively capture the cosmic patterns and shapes of music. The artist doesn’t use a brush and never touches the canvas. He uses music to disperse the loose, finely-ground cobalt oxide pigment. His musical compositions blasted inside fine porcelain vessels turn the sonic contours into pictures of rich, subtle, and complex geometric splendor.
Beer began these unprecedented investigations in 2009, while still a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford — notably, two years after completing his studies at The Academy of Contemporary Music in Surrey, England. He started by observing a handful of flour on a vibrating Irish drum and quickly began composing music to control the pictorial compositions.
Family and friends often feature in the artist’s wider multidisciplinary performances and installations. His enduring affinity to the color blue comes from a blue-and-white vessel on his grandmother’s shelf. He notes, “The technology of cobalt oxide began in Mesopotamia, travelled to Turkey, arrived in China, reached Japan and, through Portuguese, Dutch and British imperialism, made its way all over the world… And with every vessel ever exchanged there has always been a musical note.”
The artist — who lives and works in Kent, England and Paris — has shown regularly since 2103 with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and more widely in solo and important group exhibitions throughout the world: in New York at Met Breuer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1; in London at Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE; in Paris, at Centre Pompidou, Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, and Chateau of Versailles; in Lyon, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain; and in the Sydney, Istanbul, and Venice biennales.
Sarah Awad
Sarah Awad, Candy Field, 2022. Oil and vinyl on canvas, 78 x 60 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Estimated value $22,000.
An emerging Los Angeles-based artist of Lebanese descent, Sarah Awad (b. 1981 in Pasadena, CA) is celebrated as a colorist of Fauvist intensity, who asserts the female nude as a figural presence in painting and embraces the complexity of pictorial space. As an artist of astounding talent and a unique, highly relevant personal vision, there is strong and growing interest in her work.
The artist builds up fluid matrices of paint to both flesh out and enmesh the female body in a manner reminiscent of Cecily Brown, but she reverentially asserts the soulful solitude of their figural presence, wielding the materiality of paint and vibrant chromatic intensity to infuse the whole of her compositions with her women’s deeply internal subjectivity. Awad’s richly layered compositions are profoundly intimate portrayals of the feminine psyche, unfolding into nuance and depth only slowly over time — a startling counterpoint to the traditional presentation of the female nude as a merely delectable object.
On offer is Candy Field, 2022, a beautiful, bright monumental work of vibrant fleshy pinks dotted with emerald and blue. Two women in an abstract landscape — one leaning back, the other standing — appear deeply absorbed in self-reflection. Awad isn’t interested in illustrating a narrative. There’s only the mood of a long moment of precarious selfhood and solitude made manifest in the collisions of color and space — a theme the artist came to during the isolation of the Pandemic.
After four solo shows in her native Los Angeles — at Night Gallery, Blossom Market, and a duo at Diane Rosenstein Gallery — in 2022 she launched her first abroad at The Third Line in Dubai. Her works have been shown at LA Louver in Venice, CA; PRJCTLA, Los Angeles; Chan Gallery, Pomona, CA; V1 Gallery in Copenhagen; and Galerie Ernst Hilger in Vienna. Reviews of her work have appeared in Artillery, Modern Painters, Art in America, Artsy Editorial, ArtScene, and New American Paintings. She is in the permanent collections of Dallas Museum of Art, The Britely in West Hollywood, CA, and Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles. Awad received her BFA from Art Center College of Design and her MFA in Painting from UCLA. She has taught at Art Center in Pasadena and is on the faculty of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine.
Eddie Martinez
Eddie Martinez, Untitled, 2022. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist. Estimated value $125,000.
With a portfolio spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints, Brooklyn-based Eddie Martinez (b. 1977 in Groton, Connecticut) is best known for his floral still lifes, Blockheads, and Bufly compositions. Often guided by three primary materials — oil, acrylic, and spray paint — Martinez deploys an instinctive approach to each composition, creating bright, bold, and colorful paintings. Typically beginning with a bulbous outline, the work is then transformed into the likes of a head of a Bufly, or in the case of Untitled, 2022, the pistil of a flower. The central outline hints at the possibility of an alternative canvas, where the flower petals could be presented as Bufly wings, or, within this work, offer a reflective surface from the moonlit atmosphere and night sky.
Throughout his artistic practice, Martinez explores and implements themes such as pop culture, sports, nature, and domesticity — extending this to include found materials from his seaside walks in Long Island, chiefly within his sculptural practice — repurposing and reimagining materials to challenge the way audiences perceive and interact with artistic genres and compositions, and to reinforce the continued layers and exploration found within his work.
Martinez has an upcoming solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor in London, opening in October 2023 that will feature a selection of large-scale abstract paintings. This year, Martinez had a solo exhibition at Capitain Petzel in Berlin as well as solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in 2021 and 2022. Additional solo exhibitions include: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, and Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, in 2021; Galerie Perrotin in Shanghai (2021) and Hong Kong (2019); Timothy Taylor, London (2018); and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2014). He has further been featured in numerous solo museum exhibitions, such as the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2019–2020), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2019), and the Bronx Museum, New York (2018), to name a few.
His work has been included in numerous national and international collections such as National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, TX; Aurora Museum, Shanghai, China; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, and National Gallery Australia, Sydney.
About the Gala + Auction
Dallas Contemporary is a kunsthalle presenting the vanguard of contemporary artistic practice and production through exhibitions, performances, and public programs. Phillips is proud to support the museum through a silent and live auction partnership featuring offerings by over 30 global stars including those above, plus Jonathan Gardner, Alicja Kwade, Nikki Malloof, Patrick Martinez, Pedro Reyes and more...
To view the catalog, register, and place bids online, please visit:
https://dallascontemporary.muradBid.com
The gala and auction raise vital operating funds for Dallas Contemporary to continue presenting new and challenging ideas through contemporary art exhibitions, unparalleled public programming, and education initiatives —all at free admission.
Dallas Contemporary’s 2023 Gala is co-chaired by Jacquelin Sewell + William Atkinson, Brandon Maxwell and Jordan Jones Munoz with art chair Sarah Calodney. The gala is presented by Sewell + Headington, with thanks for generous support to Ann + John McReyonlds and Gene + Jerry Jones Family.
Recommended Reading
Back Again by Popular Demand >