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Curators' Picks: February 19 Contemporary Art Within Reach Showcase Auction
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Frank's Picks
Frank Hettig | Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art
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Robert Natkin’s "Apollo" from 1974 belongs to a long-running "Apollo" series that Natkin developed beginning in the 1960s. The title "Apollo" refers to the Greek god Apollo, traditionally associated with light, poetry, and harmony. Robert Natkin used the name to suggest the qualities he sought: visual brightness, color resonance, and a poetic sense of space, and, in my opinion, this is a highlight of the series.
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I like complexity and riddles: the drawing "K.C. Blues" from 1977 by William T. Wiley shows an everyday street scene — a house, a boat, and a streetlamp — that hints at choices between staying put, moving on, or simply hesitating. The handwritten text reads like an inner monologue, joking about bad luck, spare change, and the uneasy question of whether helping or asking for help really changes anything. Rather than offering answers, the drawing leans into humor and doubt, using ordinary imagery and casual language to turn a simple scene into a quietly funny reflection on uncertainty and human awkwardness.
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Holly's Pick
Holly Sherratt | Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art, West Coast
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Hunt Slonem, born in 1951 in Kittery, Maine, has lived in New York since the 1970s. After studying at Tulane and the Skowhegan School, he developed a bold style grounded in nature and spirituality. Rabbits, first inspired by his pet in the late 1970s, became his signature subject, repeated like a visual mantra symbolizing renewal and innocence. In some works, diamond dust (a material also used by Andy Warhol) adds a shimmering, light-catching surface that makes the paintings feel luminous. Some lucky bidder will adopt these bunnies. I’m drawn to their wide, watchful eyes and the way they peer from the canvas’s edge.
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Reyne's Pick
Reyne Hirsch | VP and Managing Director, Fine & Decorative Arts
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I love the work Backfire by Robert Deyber because it brilliantly captures his signature style of turning everyday idioms into surreal visual puns. It's very clever and literally shows what the saying "backfire" means. In this image, Deyber paints a polar bear walking calmly, but with a rocket on his back ablaze appearing as if he is about to blow up. I appreciate the contrast between the peaceful bear and the chaotic fire.
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Walter's Picks
Walter Ramirez | Consignment Director, Urban Art
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Rashaad Newsome's Albatross from 2016 is a striking collage on paper that exemplifies the artist's dynamic fusion of power, identity, and visual culture. Known for his layered, cut-and-paste aesthetic, Newsome draws from advertising, digital media, and Black and queer cultural histories to create richly textured works that challenge traditional hierarchies and celebrate self-determined narratives. Albatross captures Newsome's signature ability to transform fragmented imagery into a bold, commanding composition that feels both contemporary and timeless.
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Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe's Cowgirl is a richly expressive piece that exemplifies the artist's powerful engagement with contemporary identity, representation, and cultural narrative. Born in Accra, Ghana in 1988 and now based in Portland, Oregon, Quaicoe has become a leading figure in global contemporary painting, known for his lush, psychologically resonant portraits that foreground Black subjects with dignity, presence, and nuanced individuality. His work is informed by a deep art-historical awareness, from classic portraiture to diasporic visual cultures, and often employs bold color, meticulous rendering, and thoughtful composition to explore themes of empowerment, race, and self-fashioning in the modern world. In Cowgirl, Quaicoe not only celebrates a reimagined figure within
the Western genre but also contributes to a broader revisionist discourse in art history that challenges exclusionary narratives and asserts Black experience as central to contemporary visual culture.
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Desiree's Pick
Desiree Pakravan | Consignment Director, Modern & Contemporary Art
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This work is so captivating; it is both contemplative and dynamic. This painting reflects the artist’s bold visual language, where expressive figuration and vibrant color converge to explore themes of identity and inner clarity. Through layered textures, Nortey creates a composition that feels both intimate and powerful. The female figure who gazes back at us, which is often central in his work, carries an emotional presence that invites us to think about themes of innocence, self-awareness, and perception. It would make any wall come alive!
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Rebecca's Picks
Rebecca Lax | Consignment Director, Prints & Multiples
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A rare Leo Villareal work from an edition of 10, acquired by a private collector from the artist’s solo exhibition at Gering & Lopez Gallery, New York, in December 2010. (Please see the video on the lot below the description which shows the looping LED imagery.) Villareal is known for large-scale public light installations, including Pixel Dust, which illuminated every Times Square billboard nightly in November 2025, and Illuminated River, the LED transformation of nine bridges spanning the Thames in London (2019–2021). This work presents an undulating LED American flag, in the colors of red, white, and blue, the imagery implodes and expands in a meditation on the nation’s constant state of change.
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Leo Villareal's Bulbox 2.0, presents a soft light work that installs on the wall. Glowing blue green orbs undulate and slowly light up and recede. This work would calm anyone’s nerves. (Please see the video on the lot below the description which shows the looping imagery.) The co-publishers of this multiple, were dealers and publishers in the New York’s contemporary art market. Sandra Gering, who has since closed her gallery, supported Leo very early in his career and Joe Fawbush (passed in 1995) was a wonderful art dealer in soho who published significant editions by emerging and established artists and gave many blue-ship artists of today, their first solo exhibitions.
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Ezriel's Picks
Ezriel Wilson | Cataloguer, Fine Art
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How could I not be excited about this fantastic work by Aryo Toh Djojo? His acrylic and airbrush on canvas painting, If You Seek Amy, transports me out of this world and back some twenty years, to the nostalgic pull of late nights spent waiting for the ethereal tones of The X-Files
and the dialogue of everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist, Agent Mulder. Centered on one of the artist’s preferred rabbit holes—Ufology, or the study of UFOs—the painting taps into our enduring fascination with the unknown. Toh Djojo harnesses the soft edges achieved through airbrush to emulate photographic realism, creating images that feel at once cinematic and otherworldly. The softly rendered California landscape, occasionally punctuated by the hovering presence of a flying saucer, underscores the imperfect and elusive nature of perception. Both nostalgic and visually striking, If You Seek Amy
offers collectors the opportunity to acquire a work that bridges pop-cultural memory with contemporary technique—an evocative addition to any collection attuned to mystery and imagination.
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American artist Lesley Dill consistently captivates me with her powerful works that exist at the crossroads of visual art and the written word. In Poem Wedding Dress (1995), Dill masterfully blends media, centering the composition on a screen-printed image of her 1994 Dada Poem Wedding Dress.
A headless form inhabits the text-laden garment, which appears worn and fragile against its gauzy textile support. The sharp, declarative words—drawn from an unidentified poem—seem to cut through the dress itself, transforming language into both adornment and incision. Across the top, Dill has hand-painted, cut, and applied the evocative phrase, "The Soul Has Bandaged Moments," further reinforcing the emotional weight of the piece. Her restrained, monochromatic palette recalls turn-of-the-century Spiritualist photography, imbuing the work with a spectral, almost devotional presence. As both a wordsmith and visual artist, Dill creates works that envelop the viewer in language, much like this haunting wedding dress wraps the absent body in poetry.
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Ed's Pick
Ed Beardsley | Vice President and Managing Director, Fine & Decorative Arts
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If you have a big wall, I mean an enormous wall (think corporate office lobby), and like post-Minimalist abstraction like I do, Gary Stephan’s acrylic, "When Women Art Great," measuring 108" x 168" will be an extraordinary buy. The work came from the Mary Boone Gallery around its creation in 1986, to a Chicago collector who gifted it to St. Laurence Church, Elgin, Il. Stephan’s paintings are abstract in form but pictorial in effect, built from sharp and soft shapes, discontinuous color fields, and carefully calibrated space, the combination not only creating visual ambiguity and tension, but with a certain beauty in color and form. Stephan’s work has been included in the Whitney Biennials of 1971 and 1973 and a major retrospective of his work was presented at
the Kienzle Art Foundation in Berlin in 2018, affirming his international standing and contribution to contemporary abstraction.
This work is as lovely as it is enormous. Maybe it will fill a long hallway in your home or an entrance to your place of work, but you’re bound to get the deal of your life, as only so many people have a wall that’s 14+ feet long. Let us know if you’d like a shipping pre-quote, and let’s go to town!
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Frank Hettig
Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art
FrankH@HA.com
(214) 409-1157
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Holly Sherratt
Vice President, Modern &
Contemporary Art, West Coast
HollyS@HA.com
(415) 548-5921
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Reyne Hirsch
VP and Managing Director,
Fine & Decorative Arts
ReyneH@HA.com
(214) 409-1204
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Walter Ramirez
Consignment Director,
Urban Art
WalterR@HA.com
(212) 486-3521
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Desiree Pakravan
Consignment Director,
Modern & Contemporary Art
DesireeP@HA.com
(310) 492-8621
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Rebecca Lax
Consignment Director,
Prints & Multiples
RebeccaL@HA.com
(212) 486-3736
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Taylor Curry
Director, Modern &
Contemporary Art
TaylorC@HA.com
(212) 486-3503
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Ed Beardsley
Vice President and Managing Director, Fine & Decorative Arts
EdB@HA.com
(214) 409-1137
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