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Curators' Picks: January 28 Tools at Play: The Hechinger Collection Modern & Contemporary Art Showcase Auction
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Taylor's Pick
Taylor Curry | Director, Modern & Contemporary Art
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This is a compelling example of Melvin Edwards’ sculptural language at a mature point in his career. In Kotoko, welded steel is shaped into a composition charged with tension and movement, where each element seems to pull against the next. The work reflects Edwards’ longstanding engagement with African diasporic history, labor, and resilience, expressed through materials that feel direct and uncompromising. Made in 1994, it captures his ability to fuse abstraction with lived experience, resulting in a sculpture that feels purposeful, urgent, and deeply considered.
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Nicholas' Pick
Nicholas Dawes | Senior Vice President, Special Collections
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I have been a fan of Fernand Leger since my youth and am especially fond of his work from about 1925 to 1935. This later work is a superb period piece however, representing the optimism of post-war western culture. A fine example and outstanding legacy of the French ‘Esprit Nouveau’. You will not get tired of looking at this one.
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Ezriel's Picks
Ezriel Wilson | Cataloguer, Fine Art
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The Hechinger Collection has been truly fascinating to work with, assembled around one of the most unexpected unifying themes I’ve encountered: tools. Within the collection, many works immediately stood out, but three exceptional pastels by Cuban artist Edgar Soberón left me wanting more. The Kiss, Dancing Scissors, and The Mouse Trap—all from Soberón’s 1989 Objects of Desire series—were created shortly after he received his MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York in 1987.
In each composition, a single dangerous object commands the center, tantalizing the viewer’s senses within a distinctly liminal space. In The Kiss, two electrical plugs interlock in a charged embrace reminiscent of Gustav Klimt’s iconic painting. In Dancing Scissors, a looming pair of shears balances precariously like a ballerina poised to fall toward a small plug below. The Mouse Trap places the viewer directly in the position of the prey, heightening the sense of vulnerability. Together, these works exemplify Soberón’s unique ability to merge the real and the surreal through masterful pastel technique. Don’t cut out your opportunity to add these striking lots to your collection today.
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American artist Mark Blumenstein’s two charming kinetic sculptures, Saw Bird and Barney Wiggle, are absolute favorites of mine. Each lot is composed of an inventive assortment of found objects and farm equipment, assembled into prehistoric bird-like forms that balance skillfully atop slender metal poles. Blumenstein’s ability to make materials that appear heavy, worn, and industrial feel weightless—almost defying nature—is a remarkable feat.
Blumenstein relocated from Philadelphia to West Virginia, where he purchased land to become a farmer and ultimately found his way into welding. Working primarily on a larger scale, he transforms recycled materials into kinetic sculptures using the "bones" and tools of what once was—old farm machinery, mechanical parts, and other salvaged objects. His deep connection to agriculture results in works that not only preserve elements of West Virginian history but also operate in harmony with the environment, moving with the wind and at times seeming to resist gravity itself. Whether formed from a long scythe for a beak or saw blades for wings, these clever birds would make a fantastic addition to any kinetic sculpture lover’s collection.
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Hannah's Picks
Hannah Ziesmann | Associate Specialist & Lead Cataloguer, Fine & Decorative Arts
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For Jim Dine, a tool is a biography you can hold. Raised around a family-owned hardware store in Cincinnati, Dine returns to hammers, saws, and wrenches the way other artists return to faces: as recurring characters that remember the hand that chose them. In A Tool Box,
those implements become a kind of self-portrait, standing in for the body through its most honest emissary, the hand. What could read as blunt, industrial silhouettes begins to feel intimate and lived-in: the weight of metal, the familiar cold, the implied pressure of grip and leverage. And because Dine is always insisting on the act of making, the motif also turns the work inside out – tools as the "tools of the trade," a declaration that art is built, not conjured. You don’t just see images; you sense process made visible: the stubborn labor of touch, the evidence of work, the quiet romance of craft – memory turned into method, method turned into feeling.
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Ellen Lanyon’s still life is much like a dollhouse, allowing viewers to peer into a private, simulacra of a room. The little table at center reads like a miniature piece of furniture set on a stage, holding an image of a framed house the way a child might hold a favorite toy: carefully, possessively, a little reverently. The house isn’t just an image; it feels like a tiny interior you could step into if you were small enough, a pocket of domestic story pinned in place. Around it, Lanyon gives us the tender clutter of a make-believe home: a bow like a sash, an unfurling cloth peppered with hand-colored pansies, curling striped ribbons that behave like lively limbs – soft, decorative things that stir only in the imagination. The result is close and quietly
nostalgic, like opening a long-kept shoe box and finding the past still neatly folded inside – familiar, comforting, and ready to be handled with care.
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Carter's Pick
Carter Adcox | Consignment Coordinator, Fine & Decorative Arts
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Through the assemblage of various bladed elements, a line level, and even a hair-brush along with a guitar neck and pickguard, Ken Butler recalls the theatricality of some heavy metal acts with humble household tools in Saw Blades/Scythe/Guitar. Fitting squarely into both Butler’s tradition of bricolage and this collection’s theme of hardware tools as art, this piece takes that common visual vocabulary and gestures towards a tool of a different artistic medium altogether: the musical instrument. At home on the wall of a tool shed or man-cave, Saw Blades/Scythe/Guitar finds the intersection between the literal and colloquial "axe"- my favorite touch being the spring doorstop as whammy bar.
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Taylor Curry
Director, Modern &
Contemporary Art
TaylorC@HA.com
(212) 486-3503
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Nicholas Dawes
Senior Vice President,
Special Collections
NickD@HA.com
(214) 409-1605
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Hannah Ziesmann
Associate Specialist &
Lead Cataloguer,
Fine & Decorative Arts
HannahZ@HA.com
(214) 409-1162
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Carter Adcox
Consignment Coordinator,
Fine & Decorative Arts
CarterA@HA.com
(214) 409-1136
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