Julia Gould, Scouts (detail), 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
Phillips New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art online auctions typically present an opportunity to discover cutting-edge, ultra-contemporary works, as well as artists returning to the spotlight and even being rediscovered. Our upcoming auction is no different and features several exciting auction debuts in addition to the second offering of works by Yung Jake, Jaime Muñoz, and Ryan Cosbert following their successful auction debuts at Phillips.
Below, we highlight this season’s auction debuts, showcasing a breadth of artists and works — open for bidding 11–20 March.
Brandi Twilley
Brandi Twilley, Smoke and Rain Buckets, 2016. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
For Brandi Twilley, a house fire that claimed her childhood home when she was 16 has served as a fruitful starting point for her paintings. Smoke and Rain Buckets, included in her 2016 exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters titled The Living Room, showcases the painter’s approach to the depiction of memory, recreating the smoke-filled living room of the home from a combination of Polaroid photos and her own recollections. Her impressive painterly skill is on display in the wispy atmosphere of the painting. Details of the scene fade from clarity towards the edges of the canvas, as though the image is a memory that we can’t quite fully remember through recollection alone.
Twilley’s ongoing works exploring interior scenes of the house are not only a consideration of a personal trauma, but a poignant depiction of the material realities of American poverty, accurately cued via visual elements like buckets that catch the drips of leaky ceilings, makeshift walls, dangerous heaters, and questionable electrical wiring. These elements call to mind the precarities of impoverished life — simple repairs can be too costly and improvised solutions can ultimately destroy one’s shelter. But in Twilley’s reverent depictions, she also shares her affection for her home and childhood.
Having earned her MFA at Yale in 2011, Twilley’s distinctive paintings have gained notoriety in the art world. Her work has been included in several solo exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters, as well as galleries throughout the United States and Europe.
Jack Walls
Jack Walls, Mona Lisa No. 2, 2011. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
An outsider legend of New York’s downtown scene and longtime partner of Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Walls has been well-known by those in-the-know for his painting, collage, prose, and poetry for decades, but it’s only now that he makes his auction debut with Mona Lisa No. 2. A stylized portrait of a figure with an inscrutable expression, the work is highly characteristic of his approach to portraiture, which he likens to character studies. Walls’ longstanding rejection of the changing tastes and fashions of the mainstream art world may explain his late-in-life auction debut, but it’s also a result of having carved out his own path.
Coming to New York from his hometown of Chicago at a young age, Walls quickly moved in with Mapplethorpe and the pair remained together until the photographer’s death. Speaking of his years living with Mapplethorpe, Walls recalled that “he encouraged me in my artistic endeavors but at the same time I don’t think he wanted me to succeed because then I would be competition.” The artist cultivated his painting practice more fully following Mapplethorpe’s death and a stint in film school. These days, Walls continues to produce visual and literary art, but has exhibited more widely as younger figures that he has mentored have become his champions. He remains a bit of a rebel however, remarking “I am what I am, but I’m still not a mainstream artist. I’m still on the outside, basically. I was never really accepted by the art world. I wanted to be left alone for the most part.”
Chloe West
Chloe West, Things Tend To Fall Apart, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
Chloe West’s paintings are inspired by Medieval and Renaissance European art alongside her childhood experiences of nature in the American West. Her works focus on art historical symbolism and occupations of the gaze, as seen clearly in Things Tend to Fall Apart. The work is part of her most striking body of work, which utilizes bones that recall memento mori symbols placed against the form of the female nude.
Typical of her approach, the figure is anonymized in this work by the intentional cropping out of her face, forcing our gaze to become voyeuristic, as though the subject’s presence is at once enticing and objectified. The placement of animal remains against young female flesh not only presents a striking metaphysical juxtaposition but presents a painterly challenge that she meets with an otherworldly Baroque, green-tinted chiaroscuro. A child of two artists, West earned her BFA at the University of Wyoming in 2015 and her MFA at Washington University St. Louis in 2017.
Tae Kim
Tae Kim, Faceless Gamer - 'DS Industry - You You You', 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
Korean artist Tae Kim explores portraits inspired by chance encounters with others in online games through her Faceless Gamer series. The artist has written that what draws her to gaming is the freedom it gives players to create their idealized existence in a utopic universe. “You’re in a beautiful world where physical restrictions are gone, a total cyberspace. And you can upload and customize your own character,” she wrote.
Kim studied traditional Korean painting techniques at Seoul National University and holds a graduate degree in painting from the Slade School in London. With this background, she has spent years creating Joseon Dynasty replica paintings for institutions to display and draws on those techniques in this series. She works primarily on the verso of the silk ground, rendering skin tones from underneath and clothing on the surface. The effect is a subtle visual depth that brings the mythic presence of these imagined characters to life.
Julia Gould
Julia Gould, Scouts, 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
Julia Gould’s compelling figurative paintings explore the physicality of the human form and how our bodies can express desire, contradiction, love, and myth. Depicting intimate, frozen moments that are unfolding between her subjects, Gould probes her own identity, relationship to nature, and personal mythology. These ideas are clearly seen in Scouts. The subtle drama between the figures is captured through their touch on the verge of embrace, their outward facial expressions, and relationship to their verdant surroundings.
Gould recently earned a BFA in painting with a minor in printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and remains based in her hometown of Baltimore. Her works have been exhibited and awarded by a variety of organizations including the Baltimore Museum of Art and the National Society for Arts and Letters in Washington DC.
Ayanah Moor
Ayanah Moor, Lotion That Adds Even More, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art: Online Auction New York.
Ayanah Moor’s conceptual works consider the way popular culture both reflects our current desires and imparts new ones. Working across diverse media including painting, printmaking, drawing, and performance, Moor explores these ideas as they relate to blackness, gender, and language. In Lotion That Adds Even More, the artist utilizes a page from a vintage Ebony magazine, calling out the intent of the page’s message in the title of the work. Her visual treatment of the imagery confronts the prevailing myths and stereotypes that may frame our impression of it.
Now based in Chicago, Moor earned an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Though this sale highlights her auction debut, her work is already held in numerous public and private collections, including the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Soho House in London, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.