AMSTERDAM.- Christie’s Amsterdam presents two auctions this Spring, the already announced online sale The Curator’s Eye: The Collection of Prof Dr Karin von Maur, running from 11 -25 May The Curator's Eye: The Collection of Prof Dr Karin von Maur and the traditional Post-War & Contemporary Art, an online-only auction live for bidding from 13-27 May. This sale comprises lots across the entire post-war era, including works on paper, paintings, sculpture and a charity section benefitting tinyBE . living in a sculpture.
tinyBE offers the unique opportunity to spend a night experience in a sculpture. Eight international artists – Thomas Schütte, Christian Jankowski, collective MY-CO-X, Laure Prouvost, the duo Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, Terence Koh, Onur Gökmen and Alison Knowles have created habitable works for tinyBE – a global platform devoted to artistic ideas about sustainable living – and proceeds from the sale will benefit the organisation’s activities. The works will be displayed as part of tinyBE’s first project: a three month event – part exhibition, part sculpture park – which will take place between June and September 2021 in Frankfurt, Darmstadt and Wiesbaden in Germany. Successful bidders will be able to occupy their chosen sculpture for the first night of the event: thereafter, the experience will be open to the public. Conceived as a collective Gesamtkunstwerk, the project aims to spark debate about the relationship between art, architecture, society and the environment.
The main sale features a strong selection of works by ZERO, the artist group formed by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in the second half of the 1950s. Using light and motion in their approach to art making, the ZERO artists felt their work opened up new forms of perception.
At the heart of Piene’s practice were the Rasterbilder, which inaugurated a careerlong alchemy of light, texture and colour. This is uniquely represented by La Force Pure (Gelbes Rasterbild /€200,000-300,000), dating from 1959 which hails from an important private collection. Almost a metre in height, the solar yellow canvas is textured with concentric rings of raised dots, which radiate outwards from a pale bar of pigment at its centre. Created by applying thick coats of paint through a stencilled screen, this beaded surface creates a shimmering interplay of light and shadow, and a flux between two and three dimensions.
Also featured in the sale is Günther Uecker, who joined the group in 1961 and who is best known for his signature use of nails arranged into tactile, sculptural paintings. Uecker is represented by two works from an important German collection: Splitter (1982 /€40,000-60,000) and Splitter (1999 /€25,000-35,000).
The sale furthermore features contemporary names such as Matthias Weischer, Wurm (estimate €50,000-70,000), A. R. Penck Whale-hunting (estimate €40,000-60,000), Marina Abramović Shoes for departure (estimate €12,000-18,000) and Albert Oehlen’s Würfel. Held in the same private collection for three decades, Würfel (1986) is a rare and impressive large-scale etching by Oehlen. Over a sheet of paper more than two metres high, Oehlen depicts an unfolded die, its six sides splayed open into a cross shaped diagrammatic form. Instead of the numbers one through six, each face is labelled with different terms: Projektion, Malerei, Plastik, Schwein, Paranoia, Grafik (Projection, Painting, Sculpture, Pig, Paranoia, Illustration). With the options ranging from modes of art-making to figurative and abstract subject matter, the die presents a tool for the artist who has run out of ideas, or who wishes his creations to be guided by the laws of chance (estimate €30,000-50,000).
