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Curators' Picks: January 21 Prints & Multiples Showcase Auction
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Frank's Picks
Frank Hettig | Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art, Dallas
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Robert Rauschenberg’s Doctors of the World (1997) reflects his ongoing interest in art’s connection to global and humanitarian concerns. Using layered photographic images and abstract marks, Rauschenberg creates a dynamic composition built from fragments rather than a single narrative.
The title refers to international medical aid, and the image echoes this idea through overlapping forms that suggest movement, connection, and shared responsibility. Rauschenberg’s collage-based approach reinforces the theme of collaboration, turning visual layering into a metaphor for collective action.
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Marc Chagall’s Le grand cirque (1971) draws on the artist’s recurring fascination with the circus as a symbol of imagination and human emotion. Floating figures and performers create a dreamlike scene that blends fantasy with lived experience. Executed as a print, the work preserves the lyricism and poetic storytelling that define Chagall’s art, highlighting his ability to transform familiar subjects into timeless, emotional imagery.
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Holly's Pick
Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art, San Francisco
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In The Knife in Brüglingen Park (1992), Claes Oldenburg transforms an everyday object into an engaging image that is both playful and slightly unsettling. He depicts the knife, a recurring motif in his work, as an oversized Swiss Army knife set within the real landscape of Brüglingen Park in Switzerland. Oldenburg printed the work on Japanese washi paper, valued for its durability and handmade qualities. The Schweizerische Graphische Gesellschaft, Geneva, issued the print as part of its annual subscription edition, continuing the Society’s long tradition of commissioning original prints for its members.
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Desiree's Picks
Consignment Director, Prints & Multiples, Beverly Hills
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Robert Deyber’s Firecracker is a playful yet sophisticated example of the artist’s signature blend of surrealism, wit, and symbolism. Featuring a firecracker emerging from a familiar Ritz Crackers box, the print transforms a recognizable piece of everyday Americana into a moment of visual surprise. The print invites viewers to pause, smile, and reflect on the poetry hidden in the ordinary, making it a fun purchase for collectors who appreciate art that is clever, contemporary, and enduringly personal.
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There’s something about Janet Fish’s work that is graceful and refined. The richly textured pear, set against a scattering of autumn leaves, glows with a quiet intensity that reflects Fish’s sensitivity to surface and atmosphere. Now taking on added significance following the artist’s recent passing, the lithograph stands as part of her enduring legacy, an elegant meditation on color, perception, and the beauty of the natural world, and a meaningful addition to any art collection.
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Rebecca's Picks
Rebecca Lax | Consignment Director, Prints & Multiples, New York
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For minimalist art lovers, there are two Paul Mogensen prints in this auction that would look striking together. This one stands out as a drypoint, a process where the artist scratches directly into a copper or zinc plate with a steel tool. No acid, no shortcuts. The pressure raises a fine burr of metal that holds extra ink, creating rich, velvety lines when the plate is printed. What you see is pure, direct mark-making. Drypoint is essentially drawing in printmaking, and it’s worth a close look in the lot image.
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A Richard Lindner lithograph on a generous sheet of standard printmaking paper, roughly 30 x 22 inches. This print is unapologetically 1970s, and if I were a redhead, I’d already be bidding. What’s great at first glance is that it doesn’t immediately read as Lindner. Known for flattening figuration into bold, graphic forms, here he loosens up. The portrait feels freer, almost casual, with the sitter’s eyes washed in a smoky gray shadow. Produced as a benefit print for the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, the image may be inspired by the era’s political celebrity and pioneering feminist Bella Abzug (1920–1998), shown in a version of one of her iconic hats, her hat game was strong.
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Hannah's Picks
Hannah Ziesmann | Cataloger and Associate Specialist, Fine Arts, Dallas
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Sean Mellyn’s Queen Size Sleeper turns an ordinary couch into a quiet little theater of suspicion and uneasy laughter. Central to the work is a clean-lined, mid-century sofa rendered in soft grisaille, but cuddled into each corner is a circular pillow-eye, calm and unblinking, staring at the viewer as if the furniture has developed opinions about how you live: "Another
episode of Law & Order... seriously?" The effect is both amusing and faintly unnerving: you’re invited to sit, but also gently reminded that lounging is performative, and the domestic sphere is never quite as private as it pretends. Mellyn’s humor is the dry kind – no punchline, just the creeping sensation of being looked at by something that should not be looking back. It’s a sofa, so familiar it could be background noise, made suddenly alert; a living room turned lookout, where comfort comes with a quiet stare, a judging side eye, and a wink of uneasy laughter.
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In this Paul Jenkins lithograph, color feels uncorked and tidal with inks that behave like liquid distillations of natural elements as they seep, swell, and retreat. At the left, a garnet red pours over the sheet like spilled sauvignon – lush, staining, and slightly wicked – pooling into a velvety maroon where the pigment thickens as the paper gulps it down. At the right, a cerulean blue runs with the ebb and flow of the ocean, deepening from foamy surf into an inky undertow as it feathers along the edge of the paper pulling at it like little grains of sand back into its depths. Between these two forces runs a tight, prismatic band – citrus yellows, ember oranges, verdant greens, and bruised violets – like thin slices of a sunset on the horizon. The broad
negative space of the untouched sheet is not blankness but breath: a salt-air pause that lets each bloom, bleed, and stain register as something elemental – land, sea, sky – nature distilled into pure sensation.
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Find these and other outstanding modern and contemporary prints in Heritage's Prints & Multiples Showcase Auction. The auction's session is 1:00 PM Central Time, Wednesday, January 21.
Sincerely,
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Frank Hettig
Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art
Dallas
FrankH@HA.com
(214) 409-1157
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Holly Sherratt
Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art,
San Francisco
HollyS@HA.com
(415) 548-5921
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Desiree Pakravan
Consignment Director,
Prints & Multiples,
Beverly Hills
DesireeP@HA.com
(310) 492-8621
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Rebecca Lax
Consignment Director,
Prints & Multiples,
New York
BeckyL@HA.com
(212) 486-3736
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Hannah Ziesmann
Cataloger and Associate Specialist,
Fine Arts, Dallas
HannahZ@HA.com
(214) 409-1162
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