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\n","auctionDetailsSmall","New York Auction 16 May 2023","extraInfo","

\n\n

Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
\n+1 212 940 1288
\nadolan@phillips.com

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Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Holiday, 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Afternoon Sale.

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Asuka Anastacia Ogawa

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Through the use of large-scale figuration and dreamy backdrops, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s otherworldly compositions explore themes of childhood and play. The artist’s intuitive sense of wonder is on full display in Holiday through the spellbinding eyes of her character, situated in fields of color which contrast its skin and piercing expression, and whose evocative, defamiliarizing expression implies a lost sentiment; one that suggests an inextricable distance between viewer and subject, of the world experienced through young and adult eyes. Born in Japan, Ogawa spent her formative years in Tokyo, rural Brazil, and Sweden before completing her BFA at Central Saint Martins in London. She currently works and resides between New York and Los Angeles. Her work sits in the collections of X Museum, Beijing, as well as the Dallas Museum of Art and several other institutions around the United States.

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Why Now: Ogawa exhibited her first solo show at Henry Taylor’s Los Angeles studio in 2017 and gained widespread recognition following her 2019 exhibition at Half Gallery, New York, where all of her works were sold before the show opened. Since then, she has held several shows at Blum & Poe, including Tokyo in 2020, Los Angeles in 2021, New York in 2022, and a fourth solo exhibition, pedra, which just wrapped up in Los Angeles this April.

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Ambera Wellmann

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Ambera Wellmann, La Pieta, 2018. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Afternoon Sale.

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Ambera Wellmann’s practice recontextualizes art-historical notions of the body and its relationship to power and intimacy through continuous interchange. Often, her nomadic limbs join into a single corporeal entity, as shown in the present work, wherein two figures consolidate in ways that recall the traditional Christian Pietà , and yet the artist deliberately blurs its directness in favor of potentiality. Wellmann pivots the ideal form to a vulnerable position, allowing for the viewer to consider fresh interpretations by way of this rearrangement. Equal parts reflective and energetic, Wellmann’s work has established the Canadian-born, New York-based artist as a standout talent.

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Why Now: Wellmann’s first solo show in Italy, Antipoem, is currently on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Her recent work has been exhibited across the globe, including group shows in Germany, Norway, Lebanon, Australia, and more, and her paintings are in the collections of ICA Miami, X Museum, Beijing, MUDAM, Luxembourg, and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

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Karyn Lyons

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Karyn Lyons, Hair, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Afternoon Sale.

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New York-based artist Karyn Lyons brings nuanced perspective to paintings of interior life, often depicting carefully balanced scenes of quietude and emotional ferment in which her subjects – ranging from still lifes in vivid lighting, to defiant adolescents – occupy a world where appearances and desires share a common space. Her expressionistic brushstrokes poignantly showcase a given moment with rich texture, and the deconstructed nature of her work adds dimension to her subjects’ urges to be at once seen and unseen. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hair, wherein a volte-faced sitter conjures a specter out of long, untamed tresses against a dark background. Lyons’ practice has solidified around these implied scenes, and her blending of covert and candid affairs is a sharp examination of life’s essential junctures, reduced to their critical elements.

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Why Now: After several noteworthy group exhibitions in 2022, including The Power to Dream at Galerie Hussenot, Paris, and Ojos De Perro Azul, at Marinaro, New York, Lyons is currently exhibiting a solo show entitled As Tears Go By at Stems, Paris. This follows recent success at auction, with many of her works achieving significant totals across Phillips’ 20^th Century & Contemporary Art sales in London and Hong Kong.

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Henni Alftan

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Henni Alftan, Library III, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Afternoon Sale.

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Henni Alftan’s focus on sensuality and narrative depth brings to the fore a memetic style which plays with ideas of image-making, art history, and fragmentation – all coalescing around seemingly tranquil scenes from daily life. The Finnish-born, Paris-based artist imbues her work with ambiguities that invite the viewer to consider how the real and the imaginary combine in representation, as seen in Library III, which, in its tightly cropped frame and plateau-like textural elements, continually shifts our attention between the observable and the speculative, as if something is being withheld from both knowledge and view. The work references Giorgio Morandi – an artist renowned for his brilliant subtlety – atop the pile; the rest of the stack is, naturally, closed. Alftan’s work is held in the collections of the Helsinki Art Museum, Finland, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, among others.

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Why Now: Phillips' 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sale marks Alftan's auction debut. Following successful exhibitions at Sprüth Magers, London, in 2022, and Karma, New York, in 2020, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts graduate is currently presenting a solo show, Visitor, at Karma in Los Angeles. Alftan has also been nominated for the prestigious 2023 ARS FENNICA award, to be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, later this year.

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Mario Ayala

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Mario Ayala, Sunset, Haircut, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Afternoon Sale.

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To Mario Ayala, California is an empire of images: murals, car detailing, tattoos, graffiti, and street culture are all on the table in his multi-disciplinary practice, and the artist refines it all through the lens of the Latino and Brown communities of his home state. Ayala embraces a collective approach to collage, creating deeply lucid works that tell stories of shared experience as a means to signify unity in a rapidly changing landscape. Sunset, Haircut typifies Ayala’s layered style with easily identifiable elements – a barber pole, hairstyle options, tattoo-style florals, and stenciled linework – which, taken as individual parts, visually read like a sketchbook of vernacular Los Angeles. Altogether, however, the work narrativizes meeting points across the cultural and artistic movements he explores. Surreal finger-scissors cut through butterfly-paper. Public image meets private thought, all under a Golden State sunset.

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Why Now: Sunset, Haircut is Ayala's first work to appear at auction. The artist has gained major recognition in recent years, including exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, in 2022, and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, in 2021. International group shows with K11 Musea, Hong Kong, Barbati Gallery, Venice, and Jeffrey Deitch in Paris have cemented Ayala as an ascending artist.

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Lois Dodd

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Lois Dodd, Burning House with Clapboards, 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Morning Sale.

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Over the course of a practice spanning half a century, American painter Lois Dodd has captured the intersections of nature and domestic life. A founding member of the legendary artist cooperative Tanager Gallery, Dodd lives and works in New York City, Mid-Coast Maine, and rural New Jersey, with each location influencing her en plain air style in distinctive ways. The artist often completes a painting in a single sitting, creating an interplay between the observable moment and its lasting impression on the canvas. Burning House with Clapboards is part of a series of house fire paintings in which Dodd manages, through an incredible mastery of pathos, a combined sense of fear and tranquility, of organic elements and manmade devastation. We see a fundamental axiom in the work: that nature persists, and it compels us to observe.

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Why Now: At age 96, Dodd continues to feature in several exhibitions, including her sixth solo show at Alexandre Gallery, New York, in 2021. Currently, her first major museum retrospective in the New York Metropolitan area is on view at the newly renovated Bruce Museum, Greenwich, titled Lois Dodd: Natural Order, on view through 28 May.

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Sylvia Snowden

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Sylvia Snowden, Salvation, 1982. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York, Morning Sale.

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Known for her layered, textural works in which the "feel" of the paint itself takes center stage, Sylvia Snowden has been a pivotal figure in abstract painting from the latter years of the 20th century into the present day. Snowden's practice has, for decades, visualized an intense sense of identity and place, particularly among the people she encountered in her redlined Washington, D.C. neighborhood, whose Black residents the artist superbly renders with grace and dignity. Snowden embraces abstraction as a form of resilience, as visible in Salvation, with the relationship between expression, representation, and selfhood resonating with energy across every inch of canvas.

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Why Now: Snowden was a highlight artist in the landmark 2017-18 National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today. Since then, both critical re-examination and exhibition success have followed, including a solo show at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, in 2021 and the Rubell Museum, Miami, in 2022. Snowden is also featured in Whitechapel Art Gallery's current exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70, on view now in London through 7 May.

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Auction Information /

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20th Century & Contemporary Art

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Morning Session / 16 May 2023 10am EDT

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Afternoon Session / 16 May 2023 2pm EDT

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Viewing 6 May – 15 May
\nMonday-Saturday 10:00am-6:00pm
\nSunday 12:00pm-5:00pm

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15 May 10:00am-4:00pm

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Recommended Reading

\n\n

The World of Rosa and Aaron Esman >

\n\n

Agnes Becht on Kusama >

\n","publishDate","2023-04-25T21:46:15.000000Z","authorCredit","Arian Murati","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/120963129/artists-to-watch-new-york-contemporary-art","displayOrder",2,"auctionEditorialID",1813,"editorialID",4200,"flocklerID",120963129,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/rosa-and-aaron-with-albers-c16e0bc7-9f31-4978-80cf-84287cf04eb1_s600x0.jpg","More from the daughters of Rosa and Aaron Esman on their parents’ collection.","Scenes from an Art Family Life","

Rosa and Aaron Esman at home. Pictured above mantle: Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square: Bright, 1962. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Phillips is pleased to present Property from the Collection of Rosa and Aaron Esman, a collection of over 150 works from their Manhattan residence. Iconic masterworks by Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and others will be offered in upcoming New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art sales.

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Our series of interviews with the daughters of Rosa and Aaron Esman continues below.

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Discover Previous Installments:

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The World of Rosa and Aaron Esman >

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All for Love of Art >

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Phillips: Which dealers did your parents have the strongest formative relationships with — and at what stages in the life of the collection?

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Susanna: Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis were the most influential and the dealers with whom they had the closest relationship.

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Marjorie: Castelli and Emmerich in the glory days of the ‘60s.

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Abigail: Leo Castelli, without question, who was a very close friend (and had a heart attack in our living room!). Rosa’s first gallery exhibition was a show of drawings she borrowed from Leo. Her Ten From Leo Castelli portfolio was a project she created for him. He and they socialized often. This was from the early years of their marriage, but they were already collecting. Others include Ileana Sonnabend, André Emmerich, and Ivan Karp (when he worked for Leo). Although they were friends with many other dealers, I would say none had the same influence on their collection as these.

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P: Certain key pieces appeared to function in your family home as focal points. Was this planned? Did your parents fall in love with a piece and then find a place for it — or were they actively looking for key crescendo moments?

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S: Obviously they knew which works were most important, but they hung works where they fit and where they thought they looked best and actually didn’t move them around too much.

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M: Absolutely. They fell in love with a piece and found a place for it.

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A: Everything they bought was something they fell in love with and found a place for. Nothing was planned. Nothing was pre-created, the way collections are built now, with checklists of artists and deliberate curation. They saw it, they loved it, they bought it.

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Joan Miró, Femmes devant le soleil (Woman in Front of the Sun), 1942. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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P: How did your father’s career as a psychoanalyst inform his eye? And your mother’s as a fine arts editions publisher and gallerist? Did they ever debate and disagree on what to purchase?

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S: I would say that my father was the real “collector” and that he was the one who was more interested in having the Pre-Columbian works, African works, and even the Outsider works (which of course were directly related to his profession). My mother loved the Russian Constructivist works but they collected together, and agreed on everything they bought. The only things I heard them argue about was whose fault it was that they didn’t buy…

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M: He was largely interested in art forms as an expression of creativity, which was a big interest of his professionally. The creative process was the subject of much of his writing. Her work speaks for itself, she published and represented artists that she valued. I’m not aware of a particular philosophy other than the decision to publish the multiples, which she did, and he supported, in large part because as a young couple with children they couldn’t afford to buy what they wanted. Her goal was to work with artists to create multiple originals that could sell for lower prices for people like themselves.

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A: Our father was particularly fond of Surrealist work, and adored Miró and Max Ernst; in addition, he and our mother together became fascinated with Outsider Art and worked together on a catalogue and an exhibition at the gallery in the 1980s. He also translated the biography of Adolf Wölfli from French to English during his sabbatical in 1988. Dada was also a favorite for both of them.

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I for one am not sure how Rosa’s “eye” would have been informed by her work as a publisher and gallerist. Rather, I would say it was the other way around: her selections were influenced by her “eye” — what she found amusing, what she found intellectually compelling, what she felt mattered. Those choices would have been made by her, but I can’t imagine one instance where he would have disagreed. They had very similar taste and vision.

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If they disagreed on a work, sometimes the one who wanted it would buy it personally rather than them buying it together (which usually meant that our mother paid for it, rather than our father). That didn’t happen often though.

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Dr. Aaron Esman with artist and close friend Arman.

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P: Which pieces received the most attention from visiting friends and family? And what did your parents see as their proudest highlights?

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S: I would say their favorites were probably the Albers, Rauschenberg, and the Miró (which they felt very proud that they acquired when they were young, when they didn’t have much money and my mother was pregnant with me — the oldest) and the Armans because of their close friendship.

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Also, they went to galleries every Saturday (often dragging their kids along) and we were dragged on Sundays to museums. When I became director of the John Weber Gallery, I kept toys on my desk so that kids, who were being dragged to galleries like I had been, had something to play with.

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M: It’s hard to say what received the most attention, and some of those are no longer in the collection, such as the very large Stella painting that hung in the living room for decades before they sold it. They were proud of the Miró, I think, and the Albers. But I don’t know that they were proud of anything more than anything else.

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A: I don’t believe that anything in particular received “the most” attention. As children, we had child friends who were particularly fascinated by certain pieces, but nothing else. The collection itself was their proudest highlight.

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Robert Rauschenberg, Bath, 1964. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.

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They saw it, they loved it, they bought it.
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\n—Abigail Esman
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P: Were there any museums your parents particularly loved visiting, or private collections they admired?

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S: They loved private museums (the Frick, Barnes, Clark) but the Met was probably their favorite. My mother had worked at MoMA and of course MoMA was a huge influence on them and on everyone who cares about modern art. More recently, because of my close friendship (and subsequently theirs) with the director of the Whitney, that became a favorite as well. They traveled a lot and went to every museum in every city they visited. They loved them all. My mother was very social, so she of course loved seeing collections in people’s homes.

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M: Every museum in every city they ever went to. They loved all of them. He especially liked the small personal collections such as the Frick, the Morgan, the Barnes, the Gardner. But they loved any institution that had art.

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A: MoMA, of course (our mother worked there, for René d’Hanoncourt). The Met. The Guggenheim. The Louvre. When they traveled to Europe, they visited every museum they could. They were not particularly struck by any private collections that I can recall.

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P: How has growing up in an art-focused family impacted you later in life, both personally and professionally?

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S: One year after I graduated from college (with a major in Art History), I got a job at the John Weber Gallery in SoHo, first as a secretary and subsequently as the director. The gallery represented Sol LeWitt and Robert Mangold (among others) and four years later, I left the gallery to work with them privately. I managed their archives, set the prices, edited the catalogues (including the catalogues raisonnés), helped curate their shows and sent the LeWitt crews around the world installing the Wall Drawings. I worked in that capacity with Sol from 1980 until his death in 2007, and still work with Bob, mainly in an archival capacity.

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I go to galleries and museums at least once a week and am still very involved in the art world, so my parents’ interest in art had a huge impact on my life.

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M: Of the three of us I am the one who has not had an art-focused career. But growing up in an art-focused family certainly gave me not just an appreciation for art but also a sense of the importance and value of art in general. This applies to other art forms besides visual arts, particularly music.

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A: I became an art writer because I believed, from my earliest years, that understanding art had a direct connection to empathy (little did I know that research decades later would prove this to be true!) and could replace religion in the way that it can shape psychology; and for a practical reason, because it was what I knew. Later, I became a private art dealer, working often with my mother but not only. That said, as a child, I wanted to be one of two things when I grew up: a writer or a psychologist, echoing my father.

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

The World of Rosa and Aaron Esman >

\n\n

Agnes Becht on Kusama >

\n","2023-04-27T15:55:00.000000Z","Jesse Limbacher","https://www.phillips.com/article/120513824/scenes-from-an-art-family-life-auction-new-york",1810,4194,120513824,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/political-and-personal-lead-6b76bbcc-fe6b-453c-8484-9d2e61ee822a_s600x0.jpg","Arts writer Flossie Skelton on the impact of the AIDS epidemic on New York's downtown artists in the '80s and '90s.","Personal and Political: Art in 1980s & 1990s New York ","

Keith Haring at an ACT UP protest in front of St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, 10 December, 1989. Photo by Rita Barros / Getty Images.

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Ahead of Phillips’ May 20th Century & Contemporary Art Auctions in New York, we invite arts writer Flossie Skelton — contributor to AnOther Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Dazed, i-D, et al. — to offer her thoughts on this transformative era.

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When AIDS first took root in America in 1981, it’s unlikely anyone could have anticipated the magnitude of its impact on art. As the Village Voice journalist Richard Goldstein observed in 1990, no preceding epidemics had garnered such a fierce creative response: not yellow fever, cholera, or influenza. Yet 42 years later, with the AIDS epidemic still ongoing, the global art community remains captured — and changed — by the work that erupted from New York through the ‘80s and ‘90s.

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So what is it that’s made AIDS different? It may be fitting to look to David Wojnarowicz for an answer. The way Wojnarowicz (and many others) saw it, maybe the virus was making people sick. But it was willful inaction and abandonment by the US government that was killing them. “IF I DIE OF AIDS — FORGET BURIAL — JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A,” read a jacket he wore to a 1988 protest organized by ACT UP, his radical AIDS activist group. (When he did die of AIDS-related causes in 1992, his ashes were scattered on the White House lawn.)

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\n
We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.
\n—David Wojnarowicz
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David Wojnarowicz, The Anatomy and Architecture of June 19th, 1953, 1987. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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As a virus hitting queer people, poor communities, immigrants, and racial minorities the hardest, the Reagan administration’s initial response to AIDS was one of silence — and on occasion, literal laughter (when a reporter asked White House press secretary Larry Speakes about America’s burgeoning “gay plague” in 1982, he made a joke and shrugged it off). It wasn’t until September 1985, four years after the crisis “officially” began, that the president even mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time. But religious attitudes toward gay sex thwarted conversation and education around the issue; stigmatization of AIDS-sufferers contributed to the mishandling of the virus by medical professionals, and drug development was botched and slow.

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Bringing a sudden, cataclysmic end to New York’s iconic downtown art and club scene of the ‘70s, “there was a period where, basically, the social scene was funerals,” said the artist Kenny Scharf in a recent documentary. “Visiting people in hospitals.” By 1990, over 100,000 Americans were dead.

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An artist of many intersecting disciplines, David Wojnarowicz famously employed them as a tool to castigate the government (and society at large) for its neglect. His anger boiled over when his once lover and longtime friend and mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar, died due to AIDS in 1987 (Wojnarowicz received his own diagnosis a few months later). Moving away from a Hujar-inspired stint in painting, and channeling his emotion into collage, photography and writing, his tone was one of fervent, unbridled rage. Some of his best known works are clearly — and uncomfortably — formulated to distress the viewer: from the piercing portraits he took of Hujar on his deathbed to his mixed-media One Day This Kid, which sees a photo of a prepubescent, grinning Wojnarowicz surrounded by graphic text about the dehumanization he — and every other gay man in America — would go on to suffer.

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David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Time/Money) from the Ant series, 1988–1989. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.
\n—David Wojnarowicz
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On offer at Phillips in New York are two works produced at this pivotal time in Wojnarowicz’s career, showcasing some of the facets of his practice that made him such an influential figure. The Anatomy and Architecture of June 19th, 1953, 1987 — which speaks to the execution of a couple accused of spying on the US for the Soviet Union during the Cold War — exemplifies his merging of disparate styles, at once surreal, abstract, and figurative. Untitled (Time/Money), 1988–1989, meanwhile — taken from the artist’s Ant series, showing ants crawling over photographs of subjects including an effigy, a nude male body, and a gun — is a marker of his musings on sexuality, power, religion, and death (like humans, ants “have queens,” “create wars,” and “keep slaves,” Wojnarowicz once said of the motif, referencing the curious hierarchical violence of nature).

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Wojnarowicz’s contemporary Keith Haring had an urgency and political directness to much of his work of the era, too; a mission to make as much noise about AIDS as he humanly could. Likewise a staunch supporter of ACT UP, he’s well known for pieces incorporating slogans like “'IGNORANCE = FEAR,” “SILENCE = DEATH,” and “STOP AIDS” in rallying cries for the crisis to be addressed. Except, where some of Wojnarowicz’s pieces felt dark, or imbued with despair, Haring’s trademark visual vocabulary — primary colors, cartoonish characters, and quirky symbolism — was one of fun. Hope. Joy. The paradox between substance and style constituted a powerful message: Look at all this aliveness, at risk of being lost to barbarism.

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I am quite aware that I have or will have AIDS … my days are numbered ... Important to do as much as possible as quickly as possible. WORK IS ALL I HAVE AND ART IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE … time will tell but I am not scared. I live every day as if it were the last.
\n—Keith Haring
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Keith Haring, Untitled, 1982. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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The vibrancy and dynamism of Haring’s works seem to evoke New York’s formerly thriving downtown nightlife scene, too: an entire culture built on “free love” and sexual liberty that was lost when AIDS tore through the city. Untitled, 1982 captures this energy, fusing it with his recurring motif of matryoshka nesting dolls to conjure a call for change and rebirth. In Untitled, 1981 meanwhile, Haring’s keen interest in phallic symbolism — which he often used to explore AIDS, sexuality, and power — is as alive as ever.

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One of the most commercially successful artists amongst the East Village cohort, Haring held a firm belief that art should be for the masses — and political protest should be, too. After using his platform and money to fight fiercely for New York’s queer community, Haring died just two years after his AIDS diagnosis, aged 31.

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Keith Haring, Untitled, 1981. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Of course, not every artist of the era was so direct in their messaging. In fact, the art historian and activist Douglas Crimp observed that what “dominated the art world’s response to AIDS” was the other side of the coin: more solemn and poetic approaches that avoided didactic politicism, aligning more closely with traditional aestheticism. Close friends Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Jim Hodges (also on offer) are examples, both of whom used deceptive simplicity and ostensible innocuousness in their installation work as a kind of decoy.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Me and My Sister), 1988. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Cuban-born Gonzalez-Torres — who died of AIDS-related illness in 1996, aged 38 — was perhaps the most famous member of Group Material, an artist-activist collective who worked to shine a light on the pervasive stigmatization of people with AIDS, and the homophobia that was informing public policy. His personal artistic response to the crisis, though, was covert — often marked by missing context and unsaid things, employing everyday objects, layered subtleties, and audience participation to explore themes of love, loss, life, and death.

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Group Material’s "Democracy: Politics and Election" roundtable discussion at Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988. Left to right: Eva Cockroft, Judge Bruce Wright, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Source: Dia Art Foundation.

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Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid.
\n—Felix Gonzaelz-Torres
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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1988. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Hodges, who never contracted AIDS himself, but was deeply enmeshed in the crisis as a gay man, transformed similarly commonplace materials into magnificently intricate creations: cascading curtains stitched from individual silk flowers; sprawling spider webs made up of links of silver chain, or an 18,000-piece collage of Pantone color swatches, which is on offer at Phillips. At the heart of his work was rumination on the exquisite beauty of the everyday — but also on the passing of time, the fragility of life, and our inevitable mortality.

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Jim Hodges, As Close As I Can Get, 1998. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Conversations about beauty were central to AIDS-era art. The ‘80s and ‘90s were a time of immense pain in New York, but it was the restoration of beauty — of joy, compassion, and laughter — that so many were raging for. It was appreciation of the beauty that remained which kept them going. As the New York Times recalled in 2018, when the artist Zoe Leonard was afraid her cloud photographs seemed trivial in light of America’s political turmoil, David Wojnarowicz told her: “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”

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There seems to be a buzz. …I’m in such a strange state of being, and nothing’s ever going to be the same
\n—Hugh Steers
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It’s a sentiment exemplified, too, in the mesmerizing paintings of Hugh Steers: figurative canvases steeped in longing and loss, at once grieving individuals, a collective community, and New York’s entire downtown culture. Steers, who was lost to AIDS in 1995, aged just 32, placed himself in the tradition of American artists whose works embody “a certain gorgeous bleakness … [who] found beauty in the most brutal forms.” He believed a “soft glow of brutality” characterized all of America, and it runs throughout his oeuvre. At the Armoire, 1994, also on offer, is a bewitching example.

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Hugh Steers, At the Armoire, 1994. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Devastating though Steers’ scenes can be, his use of light and color is a marvel to behold, the details of each setting and pose pulsing with a rare kind of realness. Quiet domestic snapshots — ebbing and flowing with joy, pain, eroticism, and irreverence — are a different kind of AIDS activism to screaming in the streets. They differ, too, from the graffiti, conceptualism, and neo-expressionism that was dominating the art world in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But they are all the more of a sacred contribution to the canon for it.

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Steers isn’t the only painter of the era to have received heightened recognition in more recent years for his figuration. Both he and his contemporary, the Chinese-American artist Martin Wong, helped carve and inform the shift towards identity-driven art that materialized in the ‘90s. An eccentric character known for sporting a handlebar mustache and cowboy hat, self-taught Wong was initiated into the arts scene by poet Miguel Pinero — a cofounder of the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, who would go on to become Wong’s lover for a period — and developed an intricate visual vocabulary, as illustrated in Mandala, 1988 and St Joseph’s, 1988.

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Marin Wong, St. Joseph’s, 1988. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Chiefly, Wong enlisted a spectrum of rich browns in gritty love letters to the urban environment, New York’s Lower East Side (known as Loisada by its Hispanic community), and queer erotics. Despite his raw and rugged compositions, Wong’s works overflow with romance and tenderness, merging harsh realism with fantasy and desire: elsewhere, we see firemen passionately kissing in front of a burning building, or Pinero’s poetry filling a gray New York sky. Wong is often described as a “dreamer,” preoccupied with hope, possibility, and redemption, even in the darkest of times. Though as he began dying due to AIDS in the ‘90s, his work is observed to have gotten “quieter” and more solemn.

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In no way does making art render a person’s life more worthy, or worse to lose. But one wonders what these artists — and so many others not mentioned — would have gone on to create, had their time not been cut short. Perhaps there is some small consolation to be found in all the art that was made — which maybe wouldn’t have been — thanks to the shifts in culture they helped bring about. Artists from this era, in their multitude of responses to AIDS and other struggles, played a seismic role in a movement that blurred the boundaries of art and activism forever; in the shift that harnessed creative expression as a formidable force to propel personal things — identity, illness, struggle, sex — onto the political agenda.

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“To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications,” David Wojnarowicz wrote in his 1991 memoir, Close to the Knives. We continue to benefit from such ramifications — in art, and in the world — today.

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Discover More from 20th Century and Contemporary Art >

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104

Lynne Drexler

Matoaka Aflame

Full-Cataloguing

Lynne Drexler