Chroma-Philia

Printmaker and textile artist Anni Albers is widely recognized both for her geometric patterned compositions and deep involvement with the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, teaching at the latter between 1933 and 1949. Albers arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 1922, and studied under painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, focusing on relationships between colors and the expressive potential of simple forms. In 1925, she married leading Bauhaus figure and renowned color theorist Josef Albers. In addition to frequent conversations with her many friends and colleagues, Albers drew inspiration from the pre-Columbian art she viewed during travels throughout Mexico and the Americas.

Beyond her integration of abstract modernism into textiles, Albers introduced cutting edge technologies to the weaving shop. Albers’ achievements became so widespread that in 1949, the Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling solo show of her work, cementing her reputation as the best textile designer in the world. Throughout the latter part of her career when she and Josef lived in Orange Connecticut, she developed an interest in lithography and screen printing, which lead to explorations of color play and patterning, like the four works here from the Double Impression Series.

Source: N.F. Weber et B. Danilowitz, The Prints of Anni Albers: Catalogue Raisonné, 1963-1984, Hartford, 2009, No. 61 (illustré en couleurs p. 142).

Printmaker and textile artist Anni Albers is widely recognized both for her geometric patterned compositions and deep involvement with the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, teaching at the latter between 1933 and 1949. Albers arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 1922, and studied under painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, focusing on relationships between colors and the expressive potential of simple forms. In 1925, she married leading Bauhaus figure and renowned color theorist Josef Albers. In addition to frequent conversations with her many friends and colleagues, Albers drew inspiration from the pre-Columbian art she viewed during travels throughout Mexico and the Americas.

Beyond her integration of abstract modernism into textiles, Albers introduced cutting edge technologies to the weaving shop. Albers’ achievements became so widespread that in 1949, the Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling solo show of her work, cementing her reputation as the best textile designer in the world. Throughout the latter part of her career when she and Josef lived in Orange Connecticut, she developed an interest in lithography and screen printing, which lead to explorations of color play and patterning, like the four works here from the Double Impression Series.

Source: N.F. Weber et B. Danilowitz, The Prints of Anni Albers: Catalogue Raisonné, 1963-1984, Hartford, 2009, No. 61 (illustré en couleurs p. 142).

Cat Balco is an artist, writer, and educator and who has shown her paintings, murals, and collaborative projects widely. She describes herself as a student of Josef Albers, and her process as similar to weaving a tapestry. She fills canvases with wheel-like forms, spinning the canvas as she makes them, in order to refuse the composition from sinking in one direction. While her early works used the star as a symbol, her more recent works, like Green Grid, Pink X, are about the action of crossing out information. The result is an interplay between dominant forms that overlap, negotiate one another’s status, get lost, and sometimes rise to the top again. Balco came to make this work through a process of scaling up and down a version which ranged from 8×8 inches to 6×6 feet—stopping when it“finds its right size”.

After college, Balco worked as a decorative trompe l’oeil painter in Connecticut, working on commissions for private homes. Her training in the depiction of shallow space is evident in her work, which retains stunning depth and dimensionality. She describes the evolution of trompe l’oiele as part of Western Civilization’s desire to depict the spiritual world. Just as the painted world provides a window into an alternative reality for some, and not for others, the spiritual world is also challenged as real and unreal, though continuously pursued.

Balco received a B.A. and an M.F.A. from Yale University, and is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Hartford, where she serves as the Chair of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Hartford. She has exhibited widely across the country and received awards from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The Weir Farm Trust, a Connecticut Arts Catalyze Placemaking Arts Leadership Grant, and the Albers Foundation.

Sources: Gorky’s Ghost, a video project by Chris Joy and Zachary Keeting.

Susan Clinard is a sculptor known for work that memorializes the struggles, pain, growth, and subtle beauty of everyday life. She manipulates wood, clay, bronze, stone, resin and other materials to visually express how these outside forces imprint themselves on the journeying human body– physically, spiritually and mentally. She often reflects on current events to activate relationships between two or more figures– mothers protecting children, the strong helping the weak, the recent Californian fires, bedroom whispers, voices of women protesting, a farmer’s labor, the travel ban, love throughout time, a prayer for the mass shootings…the list goes on. In this case, four powerful women stand quietly together and demand to be heard. Clinard’s hope for each work is to reveal something that the viewer already knows, but has never felt or considered before—someone else’s story or beauty—so that they may in turn, see themselves reflected.

Following a degree in Sculpture and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Susan moved to Chicago in 1995 where her gift for storytelling took root. While exhibiting her art at multiple venues throughout the city, she taught stone carving at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, sculpture at the Palette and Chisel Academy, and Gallery 37. The majority of her work incorporates found objects such as driftwood, photographs, tools, weavings and industrial wood patterns. In 2007, she moved to Connecticut with her family, and currently serves as the Artist-in-Residence at the Eli Whitney Museum and makes art for gallery exhibitions and public and private commissions. Her sculptures can be found in galleries, in public parks, and in collections worldwide, and include two notable bronze public statues in Bridgeport, CT.

Having emerged in New York’s East Village Art scene in the early 1980’s, Peter Halley is best known for his brightly colored geometric paintings made of Roll-a-Tex, a paint additive used in home improvement projects to create textured walls, and florescent Day-Glo paints. Developing his own visual lexicon, Halley engages in a play of relationships between what he calls “prisons” and “cells”—composed of rectangular shapes and vertical bars—evocative of geometric networks from the urban grid to high-rise apartment buildings and electromagnetic conduits. While his rigid planes of color, unitary shapes, and non-hierarchical compositions reference Minimalism, his works call the neutrality of the movement into question.

Louise Nevelson’s room-sized wood sculptures and massive outdoor sculptures have been hailed as emblematic of many different movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Monochromatic and usually black, with isolated departures into white and gold, Nevelson assembled the sculptures using discarded pieces of wood that she received or found on the street.

Born in 1899 in Kiev, Ukraine, Nevelson and her family made a permanent move to the United States in 1905. Her art education began in 1928 at the Art Students League in New York. During the 1930s while studying with Hans Hoffman in Munich she was able to travel through Europe discovering the art of other cultures. In 1931 Nevelson discovered a source of energy and power from African sculptures at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Her interest in non-Western sculpture was satiated through several trips to Mexico and South America in the late 1940s. She continuously sought new means of expression, and prints became another forum for her creative vigor.

From 1970-1973, Nevelson published a series of six lead intaglio relief prints with Pace Editions, Inc. at Sergio and Fausta Tosi’s workshop in Milan, Italy, including this work, Night Tree. These prints resonat with her iconic sculptures, as her process began with assembling wood relief elements into a vertical composition, which were then bonded to a wood backing. At Tosi, thin pieces of lead were applied over the maquettes, embossing them. The lead reliefs were then attached to heavy rag paper. The play of light across the shiny and matte areas of the lead form another dimension within the print.
Nevelson represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1962, and today her work is held in over ninety public collections worldwide.

Sources: Pace Prints: press release from Louise Nevelson: Prints and Multiples 1953-1983 (September 16, 2010 – October 23, 2010), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

When Artist Georgia O’Keeffe created the original drawings published in this limited edition print portfolio, she was still an unknown artist. Begun in 1915, the drawings are considered by art historians to be among the earliest and most individual manifestations of abstraction in American modern art.

In 1968, O’Keeffe personally selected ten of her drawings — those which represent the range and variety of her work — for this project. Chip Benson, MacArthur Prize winning artist and former Dean of Yale School of Art, worked with Doris Bry, leading authority on O’Keeffe’s art, to create a limited edition of 230 numbered and signed copies. The lithographs were then published by Atlantis Editions, (the imprint founded by Bry). The drawings were printed in 300-line screen offset lithography; nine of the plates were made in black-and-white, and Blue Lines was printed in blue.

The works exemplify O’Keeffe’s use of undulating, spiraling motifs, their swirling and delicate forms drawing the eye in and creating dynamic compositions. This box also includes a booklet with an Introduction by art historian Lloyd Goodrich. It is number 183.

This lot also includes a private tour of the New Britain Museum of American Art exhibition The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, led by the Museum’s Associate Curator Lisa Williams, along with a year-long Museum membership.

William Powhida is both an artist and a fictional persona, POWHIDA, created by the artist to satirize notions of individual genius, the dependence on personal biography, and the art world’s often entanglement with wealth and class. Powhida makes fun of the art world to highlight the paradoxes and absurdities of economic and social value systems that keep the sphere of visual art afloat on a surging tide of inequality. His work relies on research and participation to diagram, list, perform and critique the forces that shape perceptions of value.

In 2004, he began compiling lists of enemies, which featured graphite and gouache portraits of celebrities, business moguls, friends and even family members with insulting captions written beneath. In 2005, he created a Seattle Enemies List specific to the Pacific Northwest, targeting Tacoma-based artist Dale Chihulyand the Northern spotted owl among others. In 2006, he debuted a drawing of over 300 small head studies entitled Everyone I’ve ever Met from Memory (That I Can Remember), which Brooklyn Rail critic James Kalm described as a “meta-drawing” demonstrating a level of ambition and commitment to carry out the kind of stoner idea many people have but most would not actually do. The exhibition also included hex drawings of then United States president George W. Bush and gallerist Zach Feuer, and a fictitious Artforum Top 10 penned by himself.

Powhida created Notes for New Lists specifically for Artspace. The following note is inscribed on the verso: “To benefit Artspace in New Haven, CT. If you re-sell this, donate 50% to Artspace or your name will be cursed forever.”

Powhida is currently represented by Postmasters Gallery, NYC, Charlie James Gallery, LA, Poulsen Gallery, DK, and Platform Gallery, WA. He holds a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, The San Diego Museum of Art, The Orange County Museum of Art, Casa Maaud, and JP Morgan. He recently exhibited After The Contemporary at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which will travel to Copenhagen in 2018. He sporadically contributes to ArtFCity and Hyperallergic, and is a member of the Artists Studio Affordability Project, an artist-led advocacy group working towards commercial rent regulation, and the co-host of Explain Me, a biweekly podcast with Paddy Johnson exploring the intersection of art, money, and politics.

Willie Stewart is a mixed media artist whose work investigates memories, both personal and cultural, through different perceptions of time. He embraces sentimentality, fixing instants between two points – a beginning and an end. His works explore how we regard and arrange time, where we place longing, and what reminiscence looks like. Many of his pieces feature a layering or nesting of images that can be considered an homage to the square, (a reference to Josef Albers), but also as a reference to how we organize mementos and memories.

The VHS tape in this work references how time might be measured through the obsolescence of technology. As a child of the 1990’s, Stewart collected hundreds of VHS tapes, and this iconic image frequently appears them in his works, both as larger-than-life replicas, and as flattened, deflated versions. The tape also references how time might be measured or remembered through a life-altering first encounter with a movie or music album. Additionally, this work contends with art historical time, the vernacular wooden paneling a nod to the romantic history of trompe l’oiele painting.

After receiving his BFA from Cooper Union in 2016, and his MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2018, Stewart joined Artspace as one of their 2018-2019 Artists-in-Residence. His work has been included in exhibitions at Soft Opening, London, UK; Seed Space, Nashville, TN; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; and Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis, IN. Ten new large paintings, which he created during his time in residence at Artspace, are currently featured in his debut solo show at Morán Morán Gallery in Los Angeles.