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26 septembre 2010

Sotheby's Sale of Lehman Brothers Collection Totals $12.3 Million

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Untitled 1 (detail), by US artist Julie Mehretu. Est: $600,000 - 800,000. Sold for: $1,022,500 (£652,562) (€767,285). Photo: Sotheby's.

LONDON.- Sotheby’s sale of selected works from the distinguished Neuberger Berman and Lehman Brothers Corporate Art Collections brought a total of $12,277,751 today, reaching the high estimate ($8/12 million). Seventeen auction records were set for artists including Julie Mehretu and Glenn Ligon, and the sale was 83% sold by lot with more than half of those works bringing prices above their high estimates.

This collection was put together with great care and foresight,” said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art and lead auctioneer at today’s sale. “They were very well informed and bought from artists often at the early stages of their careers, before they had broken out and whom they recognized would have enough talent to ensure long term reputations.” Mr. Meyer continued: “While the Lehman name certainly attracted a great deal of attention, the people who bid today participated because they knew it was good art.”

Kimberly Macleod, spokesperson for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. commented: “We are delighted that Sotheby’s delivered the value we sought on behalf of the creditors and that the result was at the top of the pre-sale estimate.”

We were very pleased with the depth of bidding for the many categories featured in this collection,” said Gabriela Palmieri, Senior Specialist in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department. “The strong demand for Pop, Abstraction, Minimalism, Photography and Conceptual works reflects the strength of the collection and the health of the market. The number of new auction records established today was particularly exciting - recognition of rising stars and sought-after artists is wonderful validation of Neuberger Berman’s collection. Participation in today’s sale came from an international community of bidders, including several successful online purchasers.”

The top price in the sale was achieved for Julie Mehretu’s, Untitled 1, an iconic painting from the Ethiopian artist's intricate and energetic oeuvre, which comfortably exceeded the high estimate in selling for $1,022,500, a new record for the artist at auction (est. $600/800,000). The striking and colorful Untitled (Three Tier Perspective) by Mark Grotjahn that appeared on the catalogue cover fetched $782,500, among the highest prices achieved by the artist’s works at auction (est. $600/800,000).

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Julie Mehretu (B.1970), Untitled 1, ink and acrylic on canvas laid on board, 60 by 84 in. 152.4 by 213.4 cm, signed and dated 2001 on the reverse. photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: The Project, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in May 2001

EXHIBITED: London, Barbican Art Gallery, The Americans: New Art, October - December 2001
Seattle, Henry Art Gallery; West Palm Beach, Norton Museum of Art; Tampa Museum of Art; Chicago Cultural Center; Crosscurrents at Century's End: Selections from the Neuberger Berman Art Collection, June 2003 - June 2004, pl. XXXV, p. 81, illustrated in color

NOTE: Julie Mehretu's Untitled 1 is a dynamically iconic painting from the artist's intricate and energetic oeuvre. Mehretu's paintings, layered with swaths of acrylic and elaborately detailed with fine marks of pencil and ink, portray a compression of time, space and location. Informed by architecture, the city and a number of art historical references and executed with a frenetic and highly worked mark making, the artist creates a means of suggesting social agency.

Mehretu's paintings depart from the inspirations of cities, architecture, and urban planning designs and focus on dense and frenzied contemporary urban environments. She deftly fuses disparate architectural features and geographical elements such as columns, porticoes, façades, city maps and building plans, all of which structure and control the traffic of the masses and all of which the artist illustrates at once from varying viewpoints. The compounding of these these fragments form chaotic and exploding images that appear propelled by a tornado-like force as the bursting vectors of color and marks of immediacy extend from a centrifugal core. The marks, here, densely populated in clusters across the painting, are representative of individuals, of figures and crowds of people on the move. Grouped together, the individual becomes part of a social group, a collective force which engulfs the entire composition and is representative of the speed of the modern city. The partially abstracted picture emanates the sensation of speed and subsequently compounds the viewer's experience as one begins to visually travel through the layers, through time and through historical moments and references at once.

The historical references in Mehretu's paintings are further enhanced by the artist's frequent nods to the canon of art history while uniquely slanting each reference. Mehretu's brushwork recalls the techniques of Chinese calligraphy yet whereas with the traditional techniques characters are literally representational, Mehretu's mark making serves to connote the essence of the forms and ideas. Furthermore, that essence connects Mehretu's works to those of Wassily Kandinsky both formally and intellectually. The artist has found inspiration in Kandinsky's notion of the affective purpose of art which is based on the assumption that art must possess spirit in order to elicit a response from the viewer and that this soul, revealed through the balance of colors and composition, hinges on the integrity of the artist. Her ideas and depictions of the chaos of spaces reference Kandinsky's theories in his 1920 essay "The Great Utopia" where he discusses the inevitable implosion or explosion of our constructed spaces out of the sheer necessity of agency. With such informed inspirations, Mehretu is able to successfully reconcile many of the approaches of the past century's artists - uniting physical and sensual expressiveness and socially relevant reflection.

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Mark Grotjahn (B. 1968), Untitled (Three-tiered Perspective), oil on canvas, 87 by 72 in. 221 by 183 cm. Executed in 2000.  photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in July 2001

EXHIBITED: Los Angeles, Blum & Poe, Mark Grotjahn, May - July 2000
New York, Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York, David Brody, Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Siobhan Liddell, January - February 2001

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: "Group Show: Gorney, Bravin +Lee," The New Yorker, February 2001, p. 18, illustrated in color

NOTE: In Untitled (Three-tiered Perspective), Mark Grotjahn, the Los Angeles-based artist best known for his vibrant linear abstractions, challenges the time-honored relationships between space, depth and the picture plane. Grotjahn's genius lies in his revolutionary use of perspective and geometric manipulations of space. Turning Renaissance aesthetic ideology on its head, Grotjahn uses multiple vanishing points and topsy-turvy horizon lines to create deceptive spatial arenas for his viewers to navigate.

The kaleidoscopic creation that is the present work is flamboyant and electric yet deliberately enigmatic at the same time. The essence of Grotjahn's work lies in its own polarities. It is at once infinite and the banal, rational and absurd, methodical and chaotic. A graphic exploration of illusionist space, Untitled (Three-tiered Perspective) deploys colorful orthogonals which recede into three independent horizon lines, thus creating a composition with three conflicting vanishing points. Beginning in the last years of the 1990's with pencil studies and continuing in the impressive tour-de-force of the Butterfly drawings, in which the axis of his image was turned ninety degrees from a horizontal to a vertical, Grotjahn set out to manipulate the hyper-rational system of Renaissance one-point perspective, the visual embodiment of the age of reason. Thwarting these traditional notions, Grotjahn opens the eyes and minds of his viewers, expanding and multiplying Raphael and Brunelleschi's paradigms so that they flutter off the canvas like birds in flight.

Hovering between abstract geometry and idiosyncratic illusion, Grotjahn's canvases convey a sense of graphic clarity though often born out of spontaneous artistic processes. After ceremoniously drafting an infrastructure of non-parallel lines, the artist randomly chooses colors to fill in the each fragment. Though the production process embodies the artist's inherent paradox, the offspring is a seamless whole, a fluid masterpiece greater than the sum of its parts. Somehow the abstract conglomerations of irregular triangles come together to form a harmonious creation, a balanced and clear composition ironically in line with Enlightenment ideologies. Thus as viewers we are left suspended in a plane of parallel realities, questioning all that we have ever know as rational and orderly..

Three works by Gerhard Richter were also major highlights, with each selling well above its high estimate. Abstraktes Bild (763-9) from 1992 sold for $506,500 (est. $300/400,000) with a similar painting from the same year, Abstraktes Bild (763-5) fetching the same price - more than double the low estimate (est. $200/300,000). Betty, a Richter lithograph from 1991, fetched $458,500 - three times the high estimate and a record for a photographic work by the artist at auction (est. $100/150,000).

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Gerhard Richter (B.1932), Abstraktes Bild (763-9), B.1932, signed, dated 1992, and numbered 763-9 on the reverse, 20 1/2 by 24 1/2 in. 52 by 62 cm. photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1993

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné: 1962 - 1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 763-9, illustrated in color

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Gerhard Richter (B.1932), Abstraktes Bild (763-5) Abstraktes Bild (763-5), oil on canvas, signed, titled, dated 92 and numbered 763-5 on the reverse, 14 1/4 by 16 1/4 in. 36.2 by 41.3 cm. photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1993

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES; Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné: 1962 - 1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 763-5, illustrated in color

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Gerhard Richter (B.1932), Betty,color offset lithograph, signed, dated 1991 and numbered 7/25 on the reverse, 38 by 26 in. 96.5 by 66 cm. photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1991

EXHIBITED: Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art; Omaha, Joslyn Art Museum; Greensboro, Weatherspoon Art Gallery; Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, September 1994 - March 1996 (another example exhibited)

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert and the Dallas Museum of Art, eds., Gerhard Richter Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, cat. no. 75, p. 222, illustrated in color
Dieter Schwarz, Gerhard Richter: Übersicht, Cologne, 2000, p. 23, illustrated in color

A further highlight was Glenn Ligon’s Invisible Man (Two Views), a 1992 work by the American artist which sold for $434,500 after a prolonged bidding contest - over four times the low estimate and new a record for the artist at auction (est. $100/150,000).

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Glenn Ligon (B. 1960, Invisible Man (Two Views), oil and gesso on canvas, in 2 parts, each signed, titled and dated 1991 on the overlap, each: 28 by 20 in. 71.1 by 50.8 cm. photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: Max Protetch Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1991

EXHIBITED: Fukui Fine Arts Museum; Tokushima Modern Art Museum; Nishinomiya City, Otani Memorial Art Museum, Dream Singers, Story Tellers: An African-American Presence, November 1992 - May 1993

Among the bidders in today’s sale were a number of institutions including the Museum Art Center Buenos Aires (MACBA) that purchased three lots -- Callum Innes’s Exposed Painting Charcoal Black, Gold Green from 2000 doubled the low estimate to sell for $45,000, a new record for the artist at auction (est. $20/30,000), Psyce, a 1998 painting by Karen Davie also doubled the low estimate to sell for $74,500 (est. $30/40,000) and Robert Longo’s Untitled (November 2), a 2003 ink and charcoal depiction of a rose sold for $92,500 (est. $80/120,000).

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Callum Innes (B.1962), Exposed Painting Charcoal Black, Gold Green, oil on canvas, signed three times and dated 00 twice on the overlap, 83 5/8 by 81 3/4 in. 212.4 by 207.6 cm.  photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE:  Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in December 2000

EXHIBITED: Seattle, Henry Art Gallery; West Palm Beach, Norton Museum of Art; Tampa Museum of Art; Chicago Cultural Center, Crosscurrents at Century's End: Selections from the Neuberger Berman Art Collection, June 2003 - June 2004, pl. XXVII, p. 65, illustrated in color

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Robert Longo (B.1953), Untitled (November 2), charcoal and ink on paper, 49 by 49 1/4 in. 124.5 by 125.1 cm. 49 by 49 1/4 in. 124.5 by 125.1 cm. photo courtesy Sotheby's

PROVENANCE: Metro Pictures, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in October 2003

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