Auction: Post-War and Contemporary Art, April 20, 2011 @Christie's South Kensington

On the heels of the spring Photograph auctions and before the main event Contemporary Art sales in New York in mid May, Christie's has jammed in a low end Post-War and Contemporary Art sale at its South Kensington office in London, scheduled for the middle of next week. It's an eclectic mop-up of contemporary art photography, with a variety of lesser known and more affordable images. I was particularly happy to see the abstract photographs by John Chamberlain (better known for his massive sculptures of swirled together car parts), which don't tend to surface much at auction. Mixed in with works from other mediums, there are a total of 43 lots of photography on offer, with a Total High Estimate of £328800.
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Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 21
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £68800

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 22
Total Mid Estimate: £260000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

The top lot by High estimate is lot 38, Robert Gober, Untitled, 1988, at £18000-22000. (Image at right, top, via Christie's.)

Here is the list of the photographers who are represented by two or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

John Chamberlain (3)
Candida Höfer (3)
Nobuyoshi Araki (2)
Dan Graham (2)
Gabriel Orozco (2)
Wolfgang Tillmans (2)
James Welling (2)
Erwin Wurm (2)

(Lot 87, Sean Scully, Santa Domingo Facade No. 2, 1999, at £7000-10000, image at right, bottom, and lot 150, John Chamberlain, Untitled, 1997, £2000-3000, image at right, middle, both via Christie's.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

Post-War and Contemporary Art
April 20th

Christie's
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD

Book: Sean Scully, Walls of Aran

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Thames & Hudson (here). 128 Pages, with 73 images, primarily in black and white. Includes a three part essay by Colm Tóibín and an afterword by the artist. (Cover shot at right, via Thames & Hudson.)

Comments/Context: The Irish painter Sean Scully is probably best known for his earthy abstractions: checkerboards, blocks and stripes of alternating color, fit together with soft painterly edges. What is less well known is that Scully is also an accomplished photographer, and this book gathers together a series of black and white images he made of the miles of limestone walls on the remote Aran Islands, west of Galway.

While I imagine most visitors to these rugged islands take "travel" photos of the amazing walls, Scully has made images that clearly feed off his own aesthetic. The best of the pictures are those that select fragments of the intricate dry stacked walls and highlight their startling patterns: layers of flat rocks built up, interspersed with sea worn rounded stones piled in haphazard groups, mixed with flat rocks inserted vertically into the walls for stability, crackled with dark shadows. Often the images are made from a bit further back, using the sky and the grassy meadows as additional stripes of contrasting color and texture.

Of course, all of the photographs bear a striking resemblance to Scully's paintings. It is as if he has found a real place in this world that matches what he sees in his mind's eye; I can certainly imagine him wandering through these stark landscapes for days on end, following the lines and patterns of the ancient stones. This is a fine group of well made photographs, and an unexpectedly resonant book worth adding to your library.

Collector's POV: Sean Scully is represented by Galerie Lelong in New York (here) and Kerlin Gallery in Dublin (here). His photographs have not yet made any consistent appearance in the secondary markets, so no pricing pattern is readily discernible. While these images reminded me tangentially of Aaron Siskind's images of rocks on Martha's Vineyard and of Andy Goldsworthy's sculptured walls, the photographs themselves eerily echo Scully's paintings and his fascination with the interplay of line, tonality and form.

Transit Hub:

• Walls of Aran exhibit, Kerlin Gallery, 2007 (here)
• Wall of Light exhibit, Met, 2006 (here)
• The Art of the Stripe, Hood, 2008 (here)
• Interview: Journal of Contemporary Art (here)
• Aran Islands (here)