Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee), Family, 2013. Modern & Contemporary Art Online Auction, New York.
Jeffrey Gibson
Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson frequently combines commercial objects with the materials and techniques of traditional Indigenous art. In Family, an array of commercial light fixtures is modulated by color gels to glow blue, pink, and yellow, the simultaneous brightness and softness of the light playing disruptively against the work’s title. Is family here an anchor or a containment, a lineage, or a disciplinary apparatus? The work’s Minimalist leanings are complicated by the question of heritage: Gibson also incorporates deer hide and artificial sinew, purposefully drawing together the so-called natural and that which we think of as outside it — deer hide must be sourced and processed to be used, after all, and artificial sinew posits both imitation and transformation. Gibson’s precise composition invites reconsideration of category and cathexis.
Arman
Arman, Souvenir de Geneve, 1970. Modern & Contemporary Art Online Auction, New York.
French artist Armand Pierre Fernandez, known as Arman, was a co-founder of Nouveau Réalisme alongside Yves Klein, Pierre Restany, and others. His works commonly bring everyday and found objects together in assemblages cast in polyresin boxes. In Souvenir de Genève, the pieces of many broken violins pile together inside a clear Plexiglas casing. In this dynamic jumble, the smooth curves of a violin’s outer edge are juxtaposed by the jagged linearity of wood broken into shards. Some fragments are burned black, while in others we see the warmth and gloss of varnished wood or the naked grain of the violins’ unfinished interiors. This arresting play of materials silences the purpose-built nature of the instrument, opening its voice to the visual.
Sterling Ruby
Sterling Ruby, EXHM/DS29, 2011. Modern & Contemporary Art Online Auction, New York.
In his EXHM collage series — the title short for exhumation — Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby repurposes scraps of cardboard used to protect his studio floor during the creation of other works. Visible on the textured surface of EXHM/DS29 are splashes of polyurethane, footprints, and pieces of tape, such that this wall work makes vertical what had once been grounds to walk on. Added to the layered cardboard pieces are aerial photographs and the flattened cardboard box of a prescription medication for asthma. This combination of selection and chance, composition and unplanned traces, seems to oscillate between topography and architecture, calling to mind both the formal process of mapping and the richness of a city street experienced in the first person.
Sergej Jensen
Sergej Jensen, Untitled, 2013. Modern & Contemporary Art Online Auction, New York.
Sergej Jensen’s practice explores and explodes the canvas of painting. Often working with textiles, Jensen recasts the modernist grid as a gathering of imperfections and irregularities. In Untitled, pieces of found fabric are sewn together, mounted on panel, and coated with acrylic. The grid’s insistence is mottled by the varied patterns of the fabric, and the uneven seams pull each would-be square into slight misalignment, causing wrinkles and puckers to intercede against a deferred rectilinearity and flatness. Many of the fabric pieces are striped, drawing attention to the relationship between what we perceive as line and what we perceive as negative space. In Jensen’s hands, palpably conjured by his stitchwork, Minimalist impulses circle back upon gesture and toward the picture.
Hulda Guzmán
Hulda Guzmán, The medicine, 2019. Modern & Contemporary Art Online Auction, New York.
Plywood does not typically present as a vibrant material; rather, in its utilitarian duty, it tends to disappear. Not so in Hulda Guzmán’s The Medicine, a geometric abstraction on mahogany plywood and wood veneer. The shifting tones and contrasting grain of each piece of the work’s substrate showcase the painterly possibilities of natural growth, while actual painted shapes, some bright and solid and some in ombré or other variation, construct what might be a landscape or an architecture. Guzmán often works in figuration, drawing references from her Caribbean home environs as well as from Surrealism’s colonial fascination with that imagery. In this work, no clear figures present themselves, but through the restrained means of its color and composition, the painting suggests the cycling of the natural world — perhaps a horizon, a sunset, a river becoming rain — along with the smallness of human presence within it.
Kaari Upson
Kaari Upson, Untitled, 2009. Modern & Contemporary Art Online Auction, New York.
Kaari Upson’s wide-ranging artworks tend toward the strange, the psychological, and the intimate. Best known for her obsessive “Larry Project,” a multi-year series in which the artist explored the real and imagined identity of an unknown man who was her parents’ neighbor, Upson takes a quieter and more focused approach in Untitled. Made by applying soot directly onto panel, this work encourages a patient viewer. Even in the composition’s darkest areas, subtle variations in the density of the soot create an unstable sense of depth and movement. The few lighter patches then appear as if from another dimension — they might be fingerprint smudges, lights in the distance, or objects floating up out of the darkness. Upson’s handling denies us any simple foreboding, proffering the gentle fascination of surface as a way to experience what is within.
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