Auction: Under the Influence, March 8, 2011 @Phillips

Phillips follows up the bustle of the New York art fairs with a lower end sale of Contemporary Art scheduled for tomorrow. Out of a total of 287 lots on offer, there are 55 lots of photography mixed in, with a total High estimate for photography of $532500.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

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Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 40
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $215500

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Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 15
Total Mid Estimate: $317000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

The top lot by High estimate is lot 143, Vik Muniz, After Mark Rothko (from Pictures of Colors), 2001, at $30000-40000.

The following is the list of the photographers represented by two or more lots in this sale (with the number of lots on offer in parentheses):

Katy Grannan (4)
Ryan McGinley (4)

Vanessa Beecroft (2)

Anna Gaskell (2)

Sarah Jones (2)

Barbara Kruger (2)

Elad Lassry (2)

Florian Maier-Aichen (2)

Vik Muniz (2)

Gabriel Orozco (2)

Richard Prince (2)

(Lot 88, Barbara Kruger, Ohne Titel -Evil, 2001, at $20000-30000, at right, top, lot 105, Matthias Hoch, Ravensburg #24, 2002, at $3000-4000, image at right, bottom, and lot 108, Walter Niedermayr, Dachstein 1, 1997, at $10000-15000, image at right, middle, all via Phillips.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Under the Influence
March 8th

Phillips De Pury & Company
450 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Walter Niedermayr @Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 works, made up of 2, 3 or 4 panels hung edge to edge, framed in blond wood and displayed throughout the entire gallery (entry, 2 small front rooms, and three larger back rooms). The prints are a mixture of C prints and digital ink prints, made in editions of 6. The negatives are from the period 2000 to 2008. All of the works are large, varying in size, but most are approximately 50x100. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr has made a career out of documenting scenes of immense natural scale. His most recognizable images are set on mountain tops or at alpine ski reports, where spindly lift machinery winds up the mountainside and people are reduced to tiny blips of bright color, often contrasted with vast open panoramic spaces of pure white. He uses this same formula with wide swaths of bleached out sand and dunes, or with expansive rolling green pastures where the miniature people have been replaced by sheep and hay bales.

While we had seen single works by Niedermayr previously, I very much enjoyed seeing a larger body of his images collected and hung together, as many more patterns in his artistic approach emerged. From afar, the works wash out to painterly expanses of color; up close, they are a potent reminder of the insignificance of life and its entertainments when placed against the backdrop of the timeless and indifferent natural world.

The artist's placeholder website is here.

Collector's POV: The works in this show range in price from $19000 to $32000, mostly based on size/the number of panels in the work. Niedermayr's work has started to become more available in the secondary markets in the past few years, finding buyers at auction at prices from $10000 to $25000. I find these images both visually stimulating from a variety of distances and thought provoking in terms of their environmental commentary. This combination will likely make them successful and enduring over the long run.

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

Walter Niedermayr

Through March 14

Robert Miller Gallery

524 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001