Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, New York.
Martha Jungwirth
Martha Jungwirth, Fruchtfleisch 1, 2012–2014. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session, New York.
For Martha Jungwirth (b. 1940), painting is rooted in the oscillation between the physicality of outward movements and the interiority of the mind. Having been a constant force in contemporary abstraction since the 1960s, when she regularly exhibited as the only female member of the loose association of artists known as “Wirklichkeiten” (Realties), her practice has recently earned wider acclaim through lauded retrospective exhibitions that contextualize the significance of her works. Her practice is personal, subjective, often spontaneous, raw, and emotive, and frequently leaves behind traces of the artist’s hand. The works on offer in our Evening and Day sales are highly characteristic of this approach. As she explained to ArtForum last year, “My art is like a diary, seismographic. My state of mind plays a big role. Am I energized, tired, or distraught? That’s all in there. When I’m euphoric, when I’m sad, when I’m angry, that’s when I’m at my best, painting.”
There’s a freshness to Jungwirth’s work that has recently garnered significant international attention. In 2025, the Long Museum in Shanghai presented her first institutional exhibition in China. Last year, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presented a major career retrospective of her works, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice hosted a solo exhibition of her work, Herz der Finsternis (Heart of Darkness), alongside the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Untitled, 1990. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session, New York.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996) was renowned for her vibrant, colorful works inspired by her deep ties to the Aboriginal culture of Australia’s Northern Territory. A member of the Anmatyerr people, Kngwarreye developed a unique style which combined traditional elements with innovative mark-making in ritual and mythological forms, creating a supernatural relationship between her works and their ties to ancestral land, its totems, and its inhabitants. Kngwarreye’s international breakthrough in the 1990s brought global attention to Aboriginal painters — shortly after her passing in 1996, the artist represented Australia posthumously at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and her dreamlike canvases continue to bring new perspectives to contemporary notions of abstraction. Since her first major retrospective in 1998, Kngwarreye’s work has featured in shows and surveys around the world, including Women in Abstraction at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), a retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia (2023), and solo exhibitions at Gagosian Paris (2022), and now currently at Tate Modern, London (2025).
Untitled (1990), with its richly layered composition, is emblematic of Kngwarreye’s final few years of dot painting, before her assemblages connected through lines from 1992 onward. Its palette is distinctly atemporal: the brightness of the overlapping orange dots suggests desert heat, a scorched daytime, yet the interspersed blue-grey against the deep brown background brings forth the desert night sky, connecting past and future as an Everywhen — a concept central to many Aboriginal cultures, and one which Kngwarreye masterfully explores in the present work.
Suzanne Jackson
Suzanne Jackson, Two Faces of Bernie Casey, circa 1973. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session, New York.
Multidisciplinary American artist Suzanne Jackson’s (b. 1944) influential practice spans over half a century and continues to this day through her activism and teaching. A trained performer, Jackson first toured as a ballet dancer before opening Gallery 32 in 1968 in Los Angeles, which became an important space for Black artists at the height of the civil rights movement. Jackson’s community focus and commitment to fostering new generations of artists made her a sought-after educator throughout the United States, but it was her expressive paintings and installations that brought Jackson’s visual art to the wider art world. Her style is characterized by lyrical abstraction that approaches painting as almost sculptural, often working with layered pigment to create translucent surfaces, as seen in Two Faces of Bernie Casey, and rhythmic movement centered on intuitive forms, such as the wreathed hearts of Totem.
Suzanne Jackson, Totem-Red-Hots, 1977. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session, New York.
Her first major museum retrospective, Suzanne Jackson: What is Love, opened in September at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is on view through March 2026. The exhibition will then travel to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, from May to August 2026, and then to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it will run until February 2027. Other recent shows include Suzanne Jackson: light and paper at Ortuzar Projects, New York, and she was prominently featured in the Whitney Biennial 2024.
Alexis Ralaivao
Alexis Ralaivao, Milano, 2022. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session, New York.
Named to the 2022 Artsy Vanguard — the same year this painting was executed — Alexis Ralaivao’s (b. 1991) rise in the art world has been steady, marked by critical acclaim and increasing market demand. His solo exhibition at Kasmin New York, Éloge de l’ombre (In Praise of Shadows), was a standout moment this past summer, and it’s easy to see why. There’s an airy lightness and cinematic sense of freedom to his paintings that belie the meticulous nature of their composition. By honing in on small details, Ralaivao magnifies them to a grand scale, giving our eyes a break from the deluge of imagery on small screens encountered in contemporary life. His paintings reach us with an immediacy akin to photography and a painterly skill reminiscent of the Dutch Golden Age artists. His works are sensory, reveling in an ecstasy of texture and tone and imparting a sense of the artist’s closeness to his subjects. Milano is a sterling example of these aspects of his practice: we see a masterful impression of the soft textures of the shirt and skin, our eyes drawn to the luminous reflections off the shirt buttons. It draws us in, making us long to touch and feel these textures, and to see what’s beyond the frame.
Having been represented by Kasmin since 2024, Ralaivao has recently joined the roster of the newly-formed Olney Gleason gallery, and his works are now part of institutional collections internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; He Art Museum, China; and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes — the capital city of Brittany, where he was born. Beyond Kasmin, his solo and group exhibitions have been presented by Nahmad Project, London (2024); T293, Rome (2022); Bill Brady Gallery, Miami (2022); LGDR, Hong Kong (2022); and ATM Gallery, New York (2020).
Ana Segovia
Ana Segovia, Loving Me Is Like Chewing On Pearls I, 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session, New York.
Ana Segovia’s (b. 1991) paintings are marked by bold, cinematic composition and an incisive engagement with cultural imagery through queer identity and camp aesthetics. Drawing on Mexican popular culture and masculine tropes, Segovia stages his subjects in subversive performances, emphasizing their ambiguity through deft figurations and fluorescent arrangements. With Loving Me is Like Chewing on Pearls I, Segovia pinpoints the moment before the curtain rises in the presentation of a foul in football. For both players, what follows is always theater: the offended must sell the foul; he must insist that it was reckless, dangerous, and worthy of punishment. For the offender, his opponent clearly took a dive; he folded like a cheap suit; he’s selling a story to the ref and has no honor as a man. Reverse the roles and the drama plays out no differently, of course; at the heart of machismo, there is a whining boy. The work is particularly resonant now in the era of the Video Assistant Referee, when such theatrics are repeated on the screen for the entire stadium to view repeatedly and judge the honor and disgrace of their heroes and villains.
Ana Segovia received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2020, he participated in the Casa Wabi Residency, Puerto Escondido, Mexico. In 2024, Segovia featured in a MOCA Focus solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, along with group inclusions at the Venice Biennale and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico, in the same year.
Tyler Mitchell
Tyler Mitchell, Albany, Georgia, 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session, New York.
American artist Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995) is lauded for his vivid and fluid images that blur lines between lyric documentary, fashion, and fine art photography. Foregrounding the experience of Black joy through depictions of leisure, Mitchell rose to prominence in 2018 when he became the first Black artist to photograph the cover of Vogue in the publication’s 126-year history. That now-iconic cover image, of Beyoncé wearing a floral headdress, showcases Mitchell’s visual motivation, which he describes as “an urgency to visualize Black people as free, expressive, effortless, and sensitive.”
The work on offer here is a testament to Mitchell’s approach, presenting a Black family impeccably dressed and at play against the backdrop of sand dunes in Albany, Georgia. Executed in 2021, at a moment when COVID lockdowns instilled a sense of nostalgia in the artist, another example of this edition was included in the exhibition Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space at The High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; the other is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
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