A collection of 25 Surrealist works, valued at £13mn-£18mn, will be offered through two sales at Christie’s in London this season. Some of Europe’s Surreal stars are among the fare, including René Magritte, Óscar Domínguez and Yves Tanguy, but the collection is more notable for its relatively high number of female artists and for its “Surrealists in exile”, who left Europe for Mexico City, says Olivier Camu, deputy chair of Impressionist and Modern art at Christie’s.
The collection was amassed for more than 20 years by a tech-industry couple from the San Francisco Bay area, their interest piqued by a trip to Mexico, Camu says. Among the offerings are wispy works by the in-demand Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, while Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford — rarer at auction — also feature.
An institutional and market reappraisal of Surrealism has gained steam in recent years — Camu notes that the title of last year’s Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, was lifted from a fairy tale by Carrington. Many of today’s popular artists also show a Surrealist bent. “The Surrealists and [Sigmund] Freud opened the door to the mind, to the stuff of dreams and to psychological unknowns that are now possible to express,” Camu says. Christie’s dedicated Surreal evening sale on February 28 has 15 works from the collection, while another 10 are in a day sale on March 3.
‘These memories are not my own’ (2019) by Ryan Gander, from ‘Feelin’ everythin’, whilst doin’ nothin” © Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Delays in construction and planning processes have pushed back Lisson Gallery’s opening in Los Angeles, originally set for autumn 2022. “As can happen with extensive renovations, it has taken a lot longer than I’d anticipated,” says Alex Logsdail, chief executive of the gallery. The opening of the Hollywood space — previously an adult entertainment club — is now set for April 15, with a solo show of work by Carmen Herrera, as originally planned (until May 26).
In the meantime, the gallery is preparing an LA pop-up show of work by the British artist Ryan Gander in The Little House, the gallery of designer Dries Van Noten (February 14-March 25). This opens to coincide with Frieze Los Angeles (February 16-19), in which the gallery also participates.
Works in Gander’s Feelin’ everythin’, while doin’ nothin’ includes a personalized vending machine and a ticket generator that prints individual GPS coordinates. Among his new works are two animatronic animals — a life-size mosquito, seemingly twitching to death, and a magpie that counts down from 100.
‘Abortion Rights Protest after Roe versus Wade falls’ (2022) by Joy Gerrard © Courtesy artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery
Issues around abortion dominate at a London exhibition that pairs etchings from Paula Rego’s well-known and effective abortion series of 1999-2000 with recent Japanese ink works by Irish artist Joy Gerrard, whose powerful, protest-based pieces take in the US demonstrations against the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. Image as Protest at Cristea Roberts Gallery highlights the “stuttering” legal backdrop since the constitutional right to abortion was enshrined in the US 50 years ago, Gerrard says. “It is incredible and frustrates all women that some progress gets rolled back,” she says, though notes strides made in Ireland where anti-abortion laws were overturned in 2018. Other works by Gerrard in the show feature a recent rally in Berlin against human rights abuses in Iran and the UK’s vigils that turned into protests against the murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer in 2021.
“These are not easy subjects. Abortion is not something you would necessarily want up on a wall, but museums and even private collectors are increasingly interested,” says Helen Waters, senior director at Cristea Roberts. She reports recent interest from US museums in Rego’s work and says that a Northern Ireland museum has bought one of each of Rego’s and Gerrard’s work from the show, which runs until March 4. Rego’s abortion etchings are priced at £10,000 while Gerrard’s works on paper are priced at £4,000, her paintings at £9,000.
‘Two Black Crowned Cranes’ (2007) by Pilipili Mulongoy, est R70,000-R90,000
The boom in art from Africa has been mostly powered by buyers and market-makers outside of the continent. Now Strauss auction house, founded in South Africa in 2008 and based in Johannesburg and Cape Town, wants to bring more buyers from within. “We welcome the international demand for African art, but how do we compete? By being African,” says Frank Kilbourn, Strauss’s chair. This month, the auction house fields a new-format sale of 104 works by contemporary and modern artists from 17 countries in Africa. Six external curators, and the collector Serge Tiroche, have been brought in to supplement Strauss’s expertise for the February 28 auction.
One curator, Dana Endundo Ferreira, founder of the Pavillon 54 platform in the Democratic Republic of Congo, says: “It is time to make sure that growth is sustainable by not relying so much on the west to build markets for African artists.” Auction highlights from outside South Africa include the Modern DRC painter Pilipili Mulongoy — “Two Black Crowned Cranes” (c1980s) is offered at R70,000-R90,000 ($4,000-$5,200) — and Kenyan contemporary artist Cyrus Kabiru, whose sculpture “Amittai ” (2017) has a R150,000-R200,000 estimate. South Africa’s modern and contemporary successes — Gerard Sekoto, William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi and Cinga Samson — are also in the sale.
‘Palettes of Ambition’ (2022) by El Anatsui
Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art has made its “most meaningful acquisition for 50 years”, says director Eric Crosby, with a site-specific work by El Anatsui. The 33 ft-wide, 16 ft-high work made with the Ghanaian artist’s trademark discarded metal bottle-tops will hang in the museum’s public lobby from May.
Crosby, who met the artist when he had an even bigger work in the museum’s renowned Carnegie International show in 2018, ranks the acquisition of Anatsui’s “Palettes of Ambition” (2022) alongside pieces by Claude Monet, Winslow Homer and Richard Serra, among the artists bought by the museum since its 1895 founding by Scottish steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. “El is one of today’s most relevant sculptors, with works that travel around the world and exist against the backdrop of the history of labor in Nigeria [where Anatsui works],” Crosby says. Anatsui’s auction record sits at $1.95mn, set in 2021 for a smaller-scale bottlecap work.
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