NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s shared highlights from their Contemporary Curated auction on 25 September in New York. Reflecting a dynamic ensemble of works from the Post-War and Contemporary periods with many exceptional highlights appearing at auction for the first time, Contemporary Curated is the foremost destination for new and seasoned collectors to acquire works by both established and emerging artists across varying price points.

This season, Swizz Beatz lends his exceptional creative vision and passion for collecting art to select his favorite works from 300+ lots on offer. The internationally acclaimed music producer and entrepreneur’s top picks include works by Sam Gilliam, Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Avery Singer, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kehinde Wiley and more.

The Contemporary Curated pre-sale exhibition opens to the public on 20 September, alongside works from the 13 -28 September Contemporary Art Online auction.

THE CURATOR | KASSEEM DEAN (SWIZZ BEATZ)
“The sky is not the limit, just the view.”

SWIZZ’S PICKS
Both established and emerging Contemporary artists are represented in the 16 works selected by the internationally acclaimed Grammy-Award winning music producer, global entrepreneur and graduate of Harvard Business School, Kasseem Dean (Swizz Beatz). Works by African American and Latin American artists feature prominently in the exceptional group curated by Dean. Below is a look at some of his top picks from the sale.

Kerry James Marshall, Study for Past Times, 1997. Estimate $900,000 – 1.2 million
Following the $21.2 million sale of Kerry James Marshall’s pivotal Past Times in May 2018 – shattering the artist’s auction record and cementing a new top price for any work of art by a living African American artist sold at auction – Sotheby’s is honored to offer the artist’s Study for Past Times (estimate $900,000/1.2 million), an intimate composition that grants rare access into Marshall’s process.

Completed in the aftermath of his now iconic Garden Project series, Study for Past Times combines the most thought provoking and aesthetically engaging features of Marshall’s most celebrated larger scale paintings, with a level of insight into his compositional and conceptual developments that are seldom afforded by his grander examples.

The perimeter of the Study is lined with numbers scaling from one to thirteen, referring to the grid system that Marshall used to scale the painting. Thus, the study is perfectly proportioned to the canvas as he used an arithmetical preparatory approach to plan his scene. Countering this exactitude, Marshall preserves marks that lay out the development of the scene from idea to execution; faint lines ensconce his figures throughout the sprawling work on paper, while every ruled line is countered with a splash of expressionistic color.

The present work is emerging from the collection of Joel Straus, the art advisor who curated the monumental Past Times into the McCormick Place Art Collection. Straus felt so strongly that the Study allowed a rare insight into Marshall’s work, that he aspired for it to be in his family’s personal collection and acquired it from the artist directly.

Keith Haring, Untitled, 1983. Estimate $600/800,000
Another of Swizz’s selections from the sale is a powerful, vibrant wooden sculpture that epitomizes Haring’s artistic playfulness and cultural criticism, Untitled from 1983 takes the form of one of Haring’s iconic figures, its body caught somewhere between a graceful dance move and a warrior-like stance. Haring utilizes this duality, engaging notions of pleasure and violence, to speak to the nuance of contemporary society and the shared human condition.

The present work was executed in collaboration with Kermit Oswald, Haring’s close childhood friend, who provided the wood on which the artist incised his vision. Haring was both a keen observer of, and a significant participant in, shifts in contemporary street culture, and strove to find new ways to integrate the spirit and vitality of hip-hop in particular into his artistic practice. Untitled is born of this influence, elegantly compressing the vibrancy and movement of breakdancing into a solid stationary form.

SWIZZ BEATZ
From Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Madonna, to Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Metallica and more, Kasseem Dean (Swizz Beatz) has worked with some of the greatest talents in entertainment and music, contributing to the sale over 350 million records worldwide. A natural observer and strategic thinker, he has collaborated with Reebok, Christian Louboutin, Aston Martin, Lotus, Audemars and Piguet. In 2015, Dean joined global spirit giant Bacardi Group as its Chief Creative for Culture, where he oversaw several brands in the company’s portfolio and developed the No Commission art and music festival.

Dean attributes his love for art to his experience with graffiti while growing up in the Bronx. This early passion led him to begin collecting in his twenties and in 2014 he formed The Dean Collection, a contemporary art, family collection and artist support platform. Today, Dean sits on the Board of Trustees at the Brooklyn Museum, NY and Serpentine Galleries, London.

In addition, Dean is deeply involved in many charities, with a particular focus on children. He works closely with Keep a Child Alive, the charity founded by his wife, Alicia Keys, to fight AIDS and poverty in Africa, and adopted the Bronx Charter School for the Arts. He is also the Global Ambassador for the Harlem Hospital for Children and serves on the board of Children’s Rights.

ADDITIONAL AUCTION HIGHLIGHTS
Frank Stella’s Scramble: Descending Green Values/ Descending Spectrum (estimate $2/3 million) from 1978 is a remarkable embodiment of the exhilarating visual energy that characterizes the very finest of his oeuvre and boasts the highest-ever estimate for a work offered in Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auction. Enveloping the viewer in a dazzling surge of painterly force, the present work captures Stella’s incisive intellectual rigor as applied to the very tenets of painting. Embracing pure geometric abstraction, Stella relies on mastery of color and symmetry of line to manipulate space, imbuing the two-dimensional picture plane with a complex physical dimension.

The 1970s were a crucial decade in Stella’s artistic career beginning in 1970 when, at the age of 34, Stella had his first full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and became the youngest artist ever to receive this prestigious honor.

Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 169 (estimate $1.5/2 million) is a classic example of the artist’s most acclaimed body of works and another rare addition to this season’s Contemporary Curated sale. The present work, once in the collection of Motherwell’s daughter, Lise, distills the gestural dynamism and tremendous painterly force of the artist’s monumental paintings into a more intimate and poignant format. Motherwell painted his first Elegy composition in 1948 to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic I, and continued exploring this series in depth over the course of his career. This work is magnificently distinguished by the incorporation of rosy pink hues. Seeping out from beneath the stoic black slabs and executed in quick, gestural strokes, these delicate blush tones conjure an image of faded blood, a dying life force, or alternatively breathe life into the otherwise monochromatic canvas.