Displaying items by tag: Abstract

A painting from Cy Twombly’s celebrated “blackboard” series could set a record for the artist at auction. “Untitled” (1970) is expected to fetch between $35 million and $55 million on November 12 at Christie’s in New York. Before being offered to buyers at the auction house’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, the work will be exhibited in London and San Francisco.

Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, executed his “blackboard” series  between 1966 and 1971. Using contrasting lines against a light or dark background, these rhythmic works feature geometric shapes, words, letters, and numbers, calling to mind a classroom blackboard or a pupil’s notebook. With its swirling landscape of loops drawn in white crayon against a dark gray background, “Untitled” is hypnotic, entrancing the viewer with its formulaic loops.

The Linda Pace Foundation, which is dedicated to the charitable vision of its founder, the late Linda Pace, will sell Gerhard Richter's 1992 painting "Abstraktes Bild (774-4)" on November 12 in New York. The painting, which has been consigned to Christie’s, is expected to fetch between $14 million and $18 million. Proceeds from the sale will help fund an exhibition space to showcase the Linda Pace Foundation’s growing permanent collection to the public. The British architect David Adjaye has been selected to design the building in San Antonio, Texas, where the foundation is based. Additional funds for the space will come from the foundation.

"Abstraktes Bild (774-4)" is a seminal example of Richter’s multi-layered abstract style, which he began exploring in the late 1980s.

Christie’s sold 46.9 million pounds ($75.3 million) of postwar and contemporary art at the start of Frieze week in London, as a Gerhard Richter estimated at as much as 10 million pounds failed to find a buyer at the auction.

Richter’s “Netz,” a red, yellow and green abstract painting, was sold after the auction to a private U.S. collector for 5.5 million pounds, Francis Outred, head of postwar and contemporary art, Europe, said at a news conference after last night’s sale.

The 44 works, from the Essl Collection of contemporary art in Austria, produced a total that fell within the auction house’s presale estimated range of 40 million to 56.8 million pounds.

Barbara Babcock Millhouse has given a painting by one of American art’s most distinguished abstract expressionist artists to Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Allison Perkins, museum executive director, revealed “Birth,” a large-scale oil painting by Lee Krasner to an audience of more than 300 at the museum’s annual black-tie fundraising gala on Friday night.

The painting is on view in the museum’s exhibition “Love and Loss." The show examines the power of art to transform individual loss into expressions of shared experience.

It has been over a hundred years since abstraction was adopted in Western painting, and we’re still trying to make sense of it. Despite the rather clunky subtitle and the fact that the exhibition is drawn from a single collection, “Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell” offers an excellent, compact survey of some of the key arguments.

One thing highlighted at the beginning of the show, which includes works by 23 painters, is that, along with the rise of abstract art, our concept of traditional art history — how one movement or artist invariably influences the next generation — has changed.

Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer II, one of two formal portraits that the artist made of Adele Bloch-Bauer, an important patron of the artist, is on view at The Museum of Modern Art as a special long-term loan from a private collection.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy industrialist in Vienna, where Klimt lived and worked. Completed in 1912, the composition emphasizes Bloch-Bauer’s social station within Vienna’s cultural elite. Her towering figure, in opulent dress, is set against a jewel-toned backdrop of nearly abstract patterned blocks that suggest a richly decorated domestic interior.

Just another face lift on Manhattan’s tony East Side? Not quite.

On September 16, representatives of the United Nations’ 193 member states will return to a completely renovated General Assembly Hall — and the famous Fernard Léger murals that flank its iconic green marble podium will be there, restored to their original glory.

“I just don’t understand this. It looks to me to be scrambled eggs,” Harry S. Truman reportedly declared in 1952 when he first laid eyes on the abstract larger-than-life murals.

The most spectacular artistic rivalry in British history will be revived in September when blockbuster exhibitions by two of the nation's most renowned painters pitch them into direct competition, just as they were in their lifetimes two centuries ago.

The simultaneous shows unavoidably provoke the question asked ever since the artists were showing side by side in the Romantic age: who is the greatest British painter ever?

Is it Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose glowing, occasionally abstract, visions of sea and sky and the violent elements are celebrated at Tate Britain from 10 September? Or is it his contemporary John Constable, whose acute observations of the clouds, trees and changing light of his native Suffolk are examined at the V&A 10 days later?

The fall gallery season is almost upon us and on September 11, Gagosian will kick off its 980 Madison Avenue venue with a series of early paintings by postwar abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler. “Composing with Color: Paintings 1962-1963” is the first exhibition of Frankenthaler’s work collaboratively organized with the recently established Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

“Gagosian Gallery was delighted to cooperate with the estate of Helen Frankenthaler in organizing an exhibition of her 1950s paintings last spring,” John Elderfield, curator of the exhibition, told Artinfo.

 An abstract mural depicting the GPS-tracked movements of Brooklyn Navy Yard workers was unveiled Thursday.

Artist Paul Campbell asked 10 Navy Yard employees to track their steps all over the city for one day using smartphone apps, and then recorded their movements on a 66-foot-long wall on Flushing Avenue at Vanderbilt Avenue.

The mural shows the workers' routes using different colored lines that wriggle across the length of the wall, tangling with each other.