Yu Nishimura, marin drive (after the rain), 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York.
Yu Nishimura
Yu Nishimura, lovers, 2020. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.
Japanese artist Yu Nishimura’s captivating works blend traditional oil and tempera techniques with the visual traits of postwar Japanese photography and street photography. Throughout his works, we frequently see the blurred, hazy impressions of afterimages or double exposures that add unique emotional resonance to everyday scenes. This effect is clearly seen in marin drive (after the rain), which explores the relationship between perception and memory. By contrast, in his 2020 work lovers, we see the artist approach a shared sense of interiority between two figures, the multiple impressions of their eyes creating a sense of motion at rest. All told, his works often show us how the pleasure of looking can enhance the experience of a life lived slowly, so it’s no surprise that art lovers around the globe have taken notice.
Born in 1982 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, where he continues to live and work today, Nishimura is rapidly gaining momentum. His first solo exhibition in the United States, Yu Nishimura: Clearing Unfolds, is currently on view at the 69th Street location of David Zwirner Gallery, New York. His recent solo exhibitions have been held at Sadie Coles HQ, London, and ARCH, Athens, among many others. His work is also held in several institutional collections around the globe, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Jack Whitten
Jack Whitten, Her Majesty’s Angle, 1980. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.
Known for his experimental practice and approach to painting as an art form, Jack Whitten situated abstraction within the legacy of African American history. His work during the 1980s, “driven by his proclivity towards the cosmic and quantum,” engaged with painting as a sculptural composition, often manipulating a work’s dimension, depth, and plane to explore the dynamism of abstraction on a nearly computational scale.
Executed in 1980, Her Majesty’s Angle depicts a rainbow of geometric shapes and markings against a black vacuum — the otherworldly precision of the dashed lines, rippling circles, and trapezoidal center made human by Whitten’s raised triangles and the honeycomb panel texture of the canvas. Whitten’s characteristic balance between the ordinary and the sublime feels especially prescient in hindsight: at the dawn of the digital age, with the frictionless kaleidoscope of all to come, Whitten’s protrusive simplicity makes the artist’s presence a material reality, an immediacy — something spotted on the radar, and coming right for us. Jack Whitten: The Messenger, on view through 2 August at MoMA, New York, highlights the artist’s commitment to activism through non-representational art and his intersections with race, music, and technology as new forms of seeing. “Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world,” the New York Times writes of the retrospective and Whitten’s desire for “only life,” adding that “life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with.”
Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez, Untitled, 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.
Firelei Báez’s practice reorients the Western art-historical canon through the lived experiences of those it never centered. The artist often explores traditional visual elements in ways that challenge the racial and class structures of their origins and subsequent ascension into artistic doctrine. In 2017’s Untitled, we see an assemblage of colors that recall the 19th century icons today considered “high” art. In the present work’s flowing green and blue undercurrent, one can be transported to Monet’s Water Lilies, whose ubiquitous palette acts as almost a skeleton key to the work’s inquiry. The tranquil scene is made active by splashes of orange, pink, and yellow, which flow throughout like submerged strands of hair and bring a mythical exchange to Báez’s confrontations with history, realizing a Caribbean vitality while establishing a new locus for action. “I tend to work hypersymbolically,” says the artist. “I know what every single element means for me.”
Marina Adams
Marina Adams, Stone Cold Fox, 2022. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.
For Marina Adams, color provides an opportunity to find a rhythm in an otherwise guideless environment. “Meaning and intellect in abstract art can be difficult to locate,” the artist notes, “I use pattern and color to create the voice. And I use structure and form to channel it.” Movement then becomes the site of interaction between figuration and gesture, with graphic shapes, each carrying their own visual weight, creating a flowing aggregate work.
There is an almost mosaic quality to Stone Cold Fox, with its column of diamond-shaped green and blue tessellating over a deep purple base and building high and out of our reach. At each side the white tracts act more as bonding agents than negative space — an interplay with Matisse wherein each section of the image plays a part in its overall motion.
Uman
Uman, The Shaman, 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.
Through a swirl of colors, reflections, and chant-like repetitions, Uman’s The Shaman undulates with an energy that traverses the physical and spiritual realms, exploring abstraction, the figure, and the self. “I think everything I do now is a self-portrait in different ways,” the artist explains. “Even my abstract paintings, mythical in nature, are self-portraits. I love drama, and so I depict myself with several mouths, and several eyes, just like a creature.”
There’s an appealing cultural and gender fluidity in the self-taught multicultural artist’s works. They are as likely to take inspiration from Yayoi Kusama, Keith Haring, or Henri Matisse as they are from her memories of the kaleidoscopic Islamic visual culture of her East African upbringing. Looking closer at The Shaman — which was included in the lauded 2021 exhibition Uman: I hope this finds u well at Fierman, New York — we discover that the figure is at once a mystic and muse, male and female, self-portrait and icon, and ultimately, both the seer and the seen.
Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, Uman undertook rigorous study of traditional calligraphy as a child, eventually discovering her love of Western art while visiting family in Europe. She settled in New York City following a stint in Denmark, and now maintains her studio upstate. Represented by Hauser and Wirth in equal partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery, Uman has presented solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece; Fierman, New York; Anne De Villepoix, Paris; and White Columns, New York — in addition to several group exhibitions.
Richard Hunt
Richard Hunt, Life Force (5472), 2007. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.
Born in 1935 on the South Side of Chicago, Richard Hunt was the first Black sculptor to have a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Where others saw metals as industrial, man-made materials, Hunt was quick to point out that they emerge from the earth. Holding a lifelong interest in biological science and the natural world, Hunt’s sculptures result from an alchemy that turned what were frequently scrap metals into imaginative biomorphic forms, the artist once explaining that his intention was “to develop the kind of forms nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her.” Life Force (5472) is a defining example of the artist’s work, its enticing curvilinear bronze form negotiating the tensions between natural growth and industrial production, tangible forms and intangible ideas.
Hunt, who passed in 2023, has long been included in prominent institutional collections, but his works take on a newfound significance today as global culture continues to wrestle with the impacts of marginalization and climate change. White Cube Gallery now represents the artist’s estate and presented the lauded exhibition Richard Hunt: Early Masterworks last year in New York. Today, the artist’s first major posthumous retrospective is on view at White Cube London through June. His works are also in the permanent collections of notable institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Joan Snyder
Joan Snyder, OH Elena, 2020. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.
Joan Snyder’s autobiographical style connects personal and communal experiences through symbol, gesture, text, and expression. A touching personal tribute to the artist’s longtime friend and gallerist Elena Zhang, the work achieves a universal feeling of remembrance and celebration. OH Elena combines a floral arrangement surrounding a central, radiating bloom with blended text at the top and bottom of the canvas. As the bright yellow Ohs provide light to the garden below them, the colors root and seep downward into Elena, the substrate which provides vibrancy to all above it.
Snyder, now 85, has recently seen substantial performance at auction, with many of her large-scale works achieving well above presale estimates. This surge reflects interest in both her ongoing artistic practice and a renewed appreciation for her earlier work, which together highlight a lifetime of feminist painting. Recent shows include CANADA in New York and Thaddaeus Ropac in London (both of whom jointly represent the artist in the US and UK, respectively). The latter hosted “the most comprehensive presentation of her work in Europe to date” last fall into early this year, and her work has been featured in museum shows over the past few years at Tate London, MFA Boston, and more.
Soumya Netrabile
Soumya Netrabile, The Meadow, 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.
Soumya Netrabile’s large-scale works envelop the viewer in the hazy atmosphere of nature at transitory moments — sunsets, the dewy stillness of dawn, or those moments just before a storm. They are physical expressions of sensory memory, often gleaned from the forest preserve near her Chicago home. On daily explorations, she focuses on the impressions nature leaves on each of her senses. The resulting works, like 2021’s The Meadow, seem to impart the scent and sound of an environment as much as the sight of it. They’re experiential and refined, with the misty quality of a memory or a dream, where one loses grasp of the difference between touch and sight, sound and scent.
Born in India and emigrating to Chicago with her family when she was seven, Netrabile first studied engineering, working in the field for a few years to support herself through art school. She graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and continued to refine her practice over the next several years. Her works gained momentum in 2020, and a spate of recent exhibitions and fair presentations has pushed her into the limelight.
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