Auction Results: Photographie, June 14, 2013 @Van Ham

The outcomes at the photography sale at Van Ham in Cologne last week were generally uneventful. While there were a number of positive surprises, an overall Buy-In rate near 50% and the failure of the two top lots to find buyers dampened the aggregate results. Overall, the Total Sale Proceeds fell meaningfully below the pre-sale estimate. (Van Ham does not provide an estimate range in many cases, just a single estimate number, so this figure is used as the High estimate in our calculations).

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 216
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: €566800
Total Lots Sold: 114
Total Lots Bought In: 102
Buy In %: 47.22%
Total Sale Proceeds: €322460

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 201
Low Sold: 95
Low Bought In: 106
Buy In %: 52.74%
Total Low Estimate: €306800
Total Low Sold: €218080

Mid Total Lots: 13
Mid Sold: 7
Mid Bought In: 6
Buy In %: 46.15%
Total Mid Estimate: €140000
Total Mid Sold: €104380

High Total Lots: 2
High Sold: 0
High Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 100.00%
Total High Estimate: €120000
Total High Sold: €0

The top lot by High estimate was tied between two lots: lot 1111, Christian Boltanski, Jewish School, Große Hamburger Straße, Berlin, 1939, 1993, and lot 1221, Candida Höfer, Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires, 2006, both estimated at €50000-60000; neither lot sold. The top outcome of the sale was lot 1108, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Industriebauten, estimated at €15000-18000, sold at €43750

88.60% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate. There were a total of 15 surprises in the sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 1103, David Hockney, Sur le Motif, 1974, estimated at €1000, sold at 2€000 (image at right, middle, via Van Ham)
Lot 1104, Luigi Ghirri, Atelier Giorgio Morandi, 1989/1990, estimated at €3000, sold at €10000 (image at right, top, via Van Ham)
Lot 1108, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Industriebauten, estimated at €15000-18000, sold at €43750
Lot 1122, August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit, 1929, estimated at €1500-2000, sold at €8130
Lot 1137, Lee Friedlander, Baltimore Maryland, 1962, estimated at €2000-3000, sold at €6250
Lot 1140, Jeanloup Sieff, Portrait avec Violette, estimated at €1200, sold at €3000
Lot 1175, Luigi Ghirri, Ferrara, 1979, estimated at €2000, sold at €6250
Lot 1185, Thomas Struth, Paradies, 2004, estimated at €1200, sold at €4380
Lot 1197, Ludwig Windstosser, Schallplatten, 1955, estimated at €1800, sold at €4130
Lot 1271, Claus Goedicke, III-17, 1995, estimated at €300, sold at €750 (image at right, bottom, via Van Ham)
Lot 1286, Felix Bonfils, Album mit Aufnahmen aus Indien, Japan, Vietnam, Israel, Syrien, Libanon, 1880-1900, estimated at €800, sold at €1750
Lot 1295, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wasser, 1948, estimated at €600, sold at €5380
Lot 1306, Albert Renger-Patzsch, 8 Anischtskarten, 1929, estimated at €800, sold at €2000
Lot 1310, August Sander, Madchenportrait, 1925, estimated at €800-1000, sold at €5000
Lot 1320, Karl Hugo Schmolz, Ohne Titel, 1950s, estimated at €800, sold at €2500

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Van Ham Kunstauktionen
Schönhauser Straße 10 - 16
D - 50968 Köln

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 2 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Miguel Abreu Gallery (here): Eileen Quinlan, $15000. This is a pulsating, attention grabbing color study - the shiny material of the woven rubber yoga mat picks up tiny reflections, dotting the electric yellow green with flecks of textured red.

Andrew Kreps Gallery (here): Roe Ethridge, $16000. There's something unexpectedly off about these red tennis tights (the racquet seems overly big as well). It's an eye-catching example of Ethridge's mix of commercial and fine art aesthetics working together to produce something puzzlingly compelling.

Frith Street Gallery (here): Dayanita Singh, $19400. This work is actually three, housed in a custom wood box with interchangeable slots. The overflowing piles of ledgers are documented in all three images, giving the entire work a richer resonance.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder, £15000. A simple image intervention interrupts this self-portrait, creating a jarring hybrid face..

Maureen Paley (here): Gillian Wearing, £35000. Another in Wearing's ongoing series of self-portraits in the guise of famous photographers, this time peering out from the face of Weegee.

Salon 94 (here): Katy Grannan, $14000. This booth had a powerful wall to wall installation of images from Katy Grannan's new 99 series. Taken along California's Route 99 and set against blistering, eye squinting white backgrounds, the images get close up to a parade of weathered faces and forgotten lives. They recall Dorothea Lange and Richard Avedon's In the American West, mixing unflinching harshness and quiet authenticity.

Cheim & Read (here): Adam Fuss, $60000. While I had seen this same mattress covered with a tangle of writhing black snakes in Fuss' last gallery show, I hadn't seen the snakes replaced by a black female mannequin before; it adds another detail to Fuss' garden/Eve story.

Sean Kelly Gallery (here): James Casebere, $45000. Casebere's picture perfect stage set world given a darker, worn out alter ego, with a moss covered rooftop, a broken fence, and a landscape of barren, lifeless trees.

Galerie Krinzinger (here): Otto Muehl, complete portfolio €150000. This booth was dominated by an edge to edge hanging of images documenting 10 different actions/performances by Muehl - Viennese Actionism captured in raw, transgressive, experimental brashness.

Massimo Minini (here): Luigi Ghirri, $12000. A street scene through an ice cream store window, seen with Ghirri's subtly surreal playfulness.

Continue to Part 3 here.

Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome @Marks

 JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 color photographs, framed in silver and matted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are either vintage c-prints or vintage cibachrome prints, taken between 1971 and 1977. Physical dimensions range from roughly 4x6 to 18x12 (or reverse); no edition information was available. MACK Books published a second edition of Ghirri's 1978 monograph Kodachrome in 2012 (here). The show is sequenced to match the order in the book. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In the years that have followed the recent rediscovery of the work of Luigi Ghirri, there has been a strong tendency to try to understand him in the context of Eggleston, Sternfeld, and Shore and 1970s American color. His work was made in color (check), his work was made in the 1970s (check), at first glance, his work has the appearance of a snapshot aesthetic (check), therefore, he's the "Italian Eggleston". But having spent time with this exhibit and the associated reissued monograph, I've come to the conclusion that such a categorization is both overly easy and ultimately misguided. As we see and digest more of his work, his vision seems increasingly innovative and original, with more logical ties to European Surrealism than to anything happening in American photography.

 

The works in this exhibit come from Ghirri's first self published book, and the photographs are full of visual dislocation and wry disorientation. Compositions are often interrupted, with a vertical board bisecting a beach view, a cross shaped window pane quartering the gardens at Versailles, and a dark shadow falling directly across a framed picture. Other works play with subtle optical illusions and the flattening of perspective, almost with conceptual glee: a perfectly straight contrail in the sky connecting the two sides of a mountain valley, the curve of a man's face echoed by the arc of a souvenir Eiffel Tower, and two men sitting on the corner of a gravel roof, its dark edges receding with mirrored precision. Many images have a constructed, collage-like aesthetic, combining painted murals and found cut outs with tourists walking by and bored couples, creating juxtapositions that are unexpected and often absurd or mysterious. While a few images are inherently about photographic color (the blown pink beach umbrella, the glow of foggy red traffic lights, the wall painted half yellow half blue), most of Ghirri's pictures seem less about color itself and more about a specific way of seeing. Time and again, he confounds your expectations (using his own understated brand of Dada), making photographs of the frames not the paintings, or the postcards not the sunset itself.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed Ghirri's sense of visual wit, his images carefully composed to make everyday Italian reality seem altogether more surreal and odd. He never crosses the line into heavy handed trickery, staying instead within the confines of the quietly poetic and the unassumingly puzzling. In the end, his pictures are consistently smart, comforting us with their familiar subject matter and then upending our sense of balance with their deft surprises.

 

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $12000 and $20000, based on size. Ghirri's prints have only been sporadically available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging from roughly $1000 to $34000.

 

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: American Suburb X (here), LPV Magazine (here), New Yorker (here), NY Times (here), Gallerist NY (here)

Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome

Through April 20th

 

Matthew Marks Gallery

526 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Auction: Photographs, May 19, 2011 @Bonhams London

Following up on its New York Photographs sale earlier this week, Bonhams has another Photographs auction scheduled for London next week. The sale includes mostly lower end material, with few standouts that really caught my eye. Overall, there are a total of 102 lots on offer, with a Total High Estimate of £340900.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 81
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £155900

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 21
Total Mid Estimate: £185000

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

The top lot by High estimate is lot 56, Irving Penn, Five Dahomey Girls, Two Standing, 1967/1985, at £15000-20000. (Image at right, bottom, via Bonhams.)

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

Willy Ronis (12)
Horst P. Horst (5)
Edouard Boubat (4)
Mario Giacomelli (4)
Jürgen Schadeberg (4)
Jock Sturges (4)
Brassaï (3)
Robert Doisneau (3)
Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (3)
André Villers (3)

(Lot 77, Mario Testino, Kate Moss in Blue Cafe, 2005, at £1500-2000, image at right, middle, and lot 88, Luigi Ghirri, Mirrors, 1977, at £1000-1500, image at right, top, both via Bonhams.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 19th

Bonhams
101 New Bond Street
London W1S 1SR

Photography at the 2010 Armory, Part 3 of 6

Parts 1 and 2 of this multi-part Armory review post can be found here (part 1) and here (part 2). This post refers to the second section of the longest hall of Pier 94, including the Armory Focus: Berlin area.

Peter Blum Gallery (here): Chris Marker (22, from Koreans), Matthew Day Jackson (1 work made up of 16 panels), Superflex (1), Adrian Paci (1)

Island + Venice Projects (here): Hitoshi Kuriyama (4), Koen Vanmechelen (4). To make the images at right, Kuriyama constructed an elaborate table, covered with a netting of small electrical fuses and wires. Depending on the amount of energy delivered to the fuses, they would blow at different rates or temperatures, creating the marks on the sensitive paper laid on top. These works seem to draw on a conceptual combination of Marco Breuer and Cai Guo-Qiang (and the process centric wing of contemporary photography more generally); regardless of their antecedents, the colors and compositions are bold and eye catching. The prints are priced at $4500 each.

Galeria Filomena Soares (here): Allan Sekula (1 diptych), Tracey Moffatt (1 triptych), Pilar Albarracín (1), Helen Almeida (5), Dias & Riedweg (2 and 1 group of 9 images), João Penalva (1), Daniel Canogar (1)

Rena Bransten Gallery (here): Candida Höfer (1), Vik Muniz (2)

Galleri Charlotte Lund (here): Maria Friberg (1). The image of the underside of a car at right was not made via clever Photoshop, but was shot from underneath a clear glass ramp, creating the illusion of the car floating through space (I was reminded a bit of Jeffrey Milstein's images of airplanes). There is also a video, where multiple different cars roll over the glass ramp in succession, surrounded by a quiet whoosh of air. The individual prints are made in editions of 3 and are priced at $25000.

Klemm's (here): Sven Johne (2)

Johann König (here): Annette Kelm (1 triptych)

Galleri Christina Wilson (here): Alicja Kwade (2)

Galerie Grita Insam (here): Susan Hefuna (4)

Honor Fraser (here): Jeremy Blake (1 diptych). The work at right is entitled Every Hallucination on the Sunset Strip. With a nod to Ed Ruscha, this wall sized mural captures a trippy montage of swirling neon lights, dark blurs of color, and night time sidewalks. The work is made in an edition of 3 and is priced at $55000.

Galería Oliva Arauna (here): Per Barclay (1), Concha Prada (1), Malick Sidibé (4), Joan Carlos Robles (1), Alfredo Jaar (7), Jorge Molder (2), Gabriele Basilico (2), Miguel Rio Branco (1 group of 6 images)

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Goodman Gallery (here): Mikhael Subotzky (2), David Goldblatt (3), Kudzanai Chiurai (1)

Altman Siegel Gallery (here): Trevor Paglen (2)

Jenkins Johnson Gallery (here): Shelia Pree Bright (2), Julia Fullerton-Batten (2), Hiroshi Watanabe (2), Jeongmee Yoon (2)

COMA (here): Nicolas Guagnini (14)

Reception (here): Luigi Ghirri (9), Jens Ullrich (5). I very much enjoyed getting a chance to see some more vintage color work by the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri. These small prints were priced between $13200 and $17500 (the excellent one at right, with its connections to Siskind and Migliori was at the lower end of that range). Jens Ullrich is a Düsseldorf graduate; the works on view came from two different series, bringing together appropriated images, art historical references, animals, and African masks.

Buchmann Galerie (here): Bettina Pousttchi (3)

Kavi Gupta Gallery (here): Melanie Schiff (4 black and white works), Curtis Mann (1)

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery (here): Jessica Craig Martin (20)

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Continue to Part 4 here.

Luigi Ghirri: It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It... @Aperture and Bloomsbury

JTF (just the facts): 88 color prints (and one wall sized montage) with white frames, arrayed in the main gallery space at Aperture. An additional 16 images shown in the entry and near the reception desk at Bloomsbury. The combined exhibition is a mixture of vintage C-prints and Polaroids and modern pigment prints. All of the images are from the 1970s and 1980s. (Installation shot of Aperture show at right.)

Comments/Context: Even within the short history of photography, there seem to be plenty of high quality photographers who get lost for one reason or another. The Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri was one of these misplaced artists who, having been virtually unknown in the United States his entire career, has recently been "rediscovered". This pair of shows is the first major exhibition of Ghirri's work in America, and coincides with a new monograph being published by Aperture.

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Ghirri is now being positioned as a trail blazer in color photography, placing him in the same category and time period as 1970s Eggleston, Shore, Christenberry, and Sternfeld. And yet, his aesthetic, as evidenced by the works in these shows, was markedly different from these American photographers, and seems more clearly derived from European threads of photography.

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The first thing that struck me about these images was Ghirri's palette. All of the images have a washed out, sunny coloring, full of soft pastels and light colors; there are no crisp blacks or high contrasts in any of these pictures. The colors are far less saturated than any of his American contemporaries, softening any harshness and making the images somehow more friendly and welcoming.

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Beyond the color sensations, the works clearly extend many of the ideas of Surrealism, in a magical, playful, Italo Calvino-esque way. There is an "edge of reality" feeling throughout Ghirri's work, and experiments with collage and montage, as well as eclectic camera angles and conceptual stagings, are explored and delivered as simple and subtle surprises. There doesn't seem to be one dominant set of ideas here, but more a series of related explorations, and the works seem to alternate between a quiet, contemplative mood and one with a little more zest and humor. The fact that he was doing all of this within the new confines of color makes the pictures all the more intriguing.

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The exhibit itself needs some editing; there are a few too many pictures and the whole show feels a bit flabby as a result. 10-15 less pictures would have made the argument that much tighter and would have minimized the fatigue; by the end, all the faded colors were starting to blend for me. The overflow pictures shown at Bloomsbury didn't add anything to what I had already seen at Aperture, so these are likely a pass, unless you are a die hard Ghirri fan and want to see every last image on view.

Collector's POV: I particularly enjoyed Ghirri's series of images from Morandi's studio, and few of his more painterly topographic-style images of walls and doors. None of the images in either of these exhibitions is directly for sale, but when I inquired, I was eagerly told to make a list of images I was interested in and someone would get back to me, so perhaps some are potentially available (at what price I don't know). The Ghirri estate is represented by Julie Saul Gallery.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Luigi Ghirri: It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It...

Through January 29th (at Aperture)

Through January 8th (at Bloomsbury)

Aperture Gallery

547 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Bloomsbury Auctions

6 West 48th Street

New York, NY 10036