Tag: America (United States)

A Brisk Start to the Armory Show Suggests Optimism as the Market Adapts to New Rhythms

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The Armory Show 2025 opened with a VIP preview on September 4 and runs through September 7. Casey Kelbaugh/CKA

American collectors seem to have taken the back-to-school spirit seriously this year, with several dealers reporting a brisk and buoyant first day at the Armory Show. The New York fair—one of the city’s most established and historic—opened yesterday, September 4, at the Javits Center and quickly surpassed expectations across price ranges, leaving dealers cautiously hopeful that this season might mark the start of a healthier moment, at least for the U.S. market.

“People are excited to be ‘back to school’—both dealers and collectors,” New York dealer David Nolan told Observer. By early afternoon, his booth had already sold well to existing clients and some new ones. “Many serious collectors are in from out of town to get in on the fun,” he noted. “Not to be hyperbolic, but things are flying off the wall.” Nolan’s booth was strategically conceived to offer something for everyone—one hundred works on paper spanning 1944 to the present, embracing a range of styles and narratives and, most importantly, different price points.

Reflecting on the market, Nolan added that in his experience, the art world operates in cyclical patterns. “I have seen several waves of change since I opened my gallery, and they are good and necessary.” On the fair floor yesterday, there was no room for gloom and doom—only optimism. “I’m not afraid to be a pessimist, but there’s just no place for it at the moment!”

David Nolan. Photo: Marc Selwyn

Some international professionals at the fair were more critical, lamenting that The Armory Show no longer attracts many of the major galleries that once participated. “The Armory is stuck in the middle,” art market expert and thought leader Magnus Resch told Observer. “It has a strong team and a prime venue, but it’s held back by unfortunate timing, the absence of top galleries and direct competition from Frieze Seoul.”

Optimism and early sales nonetheless offered immediate relief—and hope—to younger dealers, particularly those in the fair’s Present section, dedicated to galleries under ten years old and featuring the largest number of participants in Armory’s history. As director Kyla McMillan told Observer in an interview ahead of the fair, for her first edition, she wanted the event not only to appeal to seasoned collectors and institutional players but also to engage a broader, younger audience. The Armory Show is, after all, one of the longest-running fairs in the U.S. and a cornerstone of New York’s cultural scene—and often, for many New Yorkers, the first or only art fair they attend.

One standout this year in the Present section was the alchemical cosmologies translated into glazed ceramic vessels by Mexican artist Alejandro Garcia Contreras, presented by Swivel Gallery in its Armory debut. Following Contreras’s sold-out debut at NADA New York two years ago and a solo exhibition, his new works once again captivated visitors with their mysterious, symbolic, archetypal language, merging mythological visions with pop culture to grapple with the mysteries of the universe. Four vessels and a ceramic mirror sold within the first hours of the fair, priced between $11,000 and $20,000, with an additional $12,000 vessel placed by evening.

The gallery is also presenting in Platform, the section dedicated to large-scale installations, a new work by Jamaican-born artist Simon Benjamin, Tidalectic No. 1, 2025—a 700-pound iteration of his sand-barrel works, transmuting sediment and shoreline into vessels of memory. The piece exposes a geology and maritime history embedded in colonial pasts, engaged in the present and gesturing toward imagined futures.

Swivel Gallery presenting the work of Alejandro García Contreras. Photo: Cary D Whittier

The solo booth of British abstract artist Jo Dennis, presented by Mexico City- and New York-based gallery JO-HS, also attracted plenty of attention. On opening day, the gallery placed one of Dennis’s sculptures made from used military tent fabrics, where dense layers of intuitive marks and gestures accumulate as a psycho-emotional and poetic record of past memories and new bodily and identitarian awareness. By evening, several of her dynamic paintings were on hold with both existing and new collectors.

Returning to Armory this year, Mrs. Gallery is showing a solo presentation of Molly Bounds’s intimate and psychologically nuanced paintings that place undefined and often archetypal subjects in liminal, contemplative and suspended states that resonate emotionally beyond any individuality. By evening, the gallery had placed at least two works, priced at $7,000 and $4,000, respectively.

Also in Present, DINIM Gallery mounted a solo booth of evocative works by Emily Coan. By evening, the gallery had sold at least five pieces, captivating collectors with their imaginative, magical atmosphere inspired by fairy tales and myths. “There’s a tremendous amount of excitement and buzz,” Robert Dinim told Observer, noting the strong institutional presence with curators from museums across the U.S. and a large number of private collectors and advisors out with multiple clients. For him, the first-day atmosphere suggested the possible beginning of a market shift.

An Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka work presented by Patel Brown. Courtesy of Patel Brown

Toronto-based Patel Brown similarly reported a strong first day in the same section, selling six works from their solo presentation of Canadian-Japanese artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, all priced under the $25,000 threshold. Combining tradition and innovation, nature and human creation, Hatanaka works on traditional Japanese washi paper with printmaking and ink, shaping her practice as a way to reattune to the organic rhythms of nature. Her process embraces transformation and the alchemical power of materials to create seemingly abstract compositions that move beyond human-centered perception and expression, while reflecting the fragility of environments and the delicacy of entire ecosystems disrupted by human activity.

Meanwhile, for its inaugural participation in the Armory, Miami-based gallery Andrew Reed featured a solo presentation by Cornelius Tulloch, reporting sales of multiple works in the range of $4,000 to $6,000. Moving within a largely symbolic and allegorical realm, Tulloch explores themes of migration, masquerade and Afro-Indigenous rituals in paintings that evoke both the mystery and vitality of the tropical South Florida and Caribbean landscapes.

Also making its Armory debut, the dynamic Chicago-based Povos Gallery presented a solo booth of Mexican multidisciplinary artist Leopoldo Gout, following his sold-out show at the gallery last year. Gout’s ever-expanding creativity traverses mediums and themes, weaving stories about human nature in relation to the natural world and emphasizing the power of collective imagination. The gallery reported strong interest and promising conversations likely to lead to additional sales in the coming days.

In the Focus section, one of the most anticipated highlights was the solo booth of vibrantly colored ceramics by Miami artist Joel Gaitan, presented by The Pit, which went on to win the $10,000 SAUER Art Prize.

In the main section, Brazilian dealer Nara Roesler saw positive interest in both the Brazilian artists central to her program and international names. By evening, the gallery had placed a linen-and-wool work by Sheila Hicks for $87,000, a print edition by Vik Muniz for $50,000, and works by Marcelo Silveira ($18,000), Manoela Medeiros ($20,000) and Bruno Dunely ($8,000). “We are happy to be back at the Armory with such a strong group of galleries. The mood is still high,” senior director Patrícia Pericas told Observer. “We have been particularly pleased with the increased interest from advisors requesting works by Brazilian artists for their clients.”

Nara Rosler. CHARLES ROUSSEL

In the main section, Marc Straus featured a group presentation of leading names from his roster, with a clear emphasis on the handmade and on legacies of craftsmanship reimagined through contemporary material approaches. The booth included Jeffrey Gibson’s Like a Hammer—the title piece of his landmark touring museum survey that began in 2014—alongside works by Abdulnasser Gharem, Folkert de Jong, Hermann Nitsch, Ozioma Onuzulike, Anne Samat, Antonio Santín, Renée Stout and Marie Watt. “We had a tremendous first day, with five works sold within the first few hours and both new and returning collectors visiting our booth,” Straus told Observer. “I believe our strong sales came from bringing the very best works by each artist and, as always, keeping our prices fair.” First-day sales for the gallery included oils by Antonio Santín.

A range of abstract works dominated James Fuentes’s booth, including pieces by John McAllister and Pat Lipsky, anticipating their fall exhibitions at the gallery. Fuentes had already sold Lipsky’s Winter Landscape (1971) ahead of the fair for $180,000. The artist’s upcoming show and renewed market attention coincide with the release of her book Brightening Glance: Recollections of a New York Painter (University of Iowa Press).

Among the highest-priced sales on opening day, Galleria Lorcan O’Neill placed works by Tracey Emin, Kiki Smith and Rachel Whiteread in the range of $15,000 to $1,000,000, while Sean Kelly sold a painting by Kehinde Wiley for $265,000.

By day’s end, the other major-ticket work at the fair—a $1.2 million Alex Katz anchoring Peter Blum’s booth—remained available. Nonetheless, Blum reported several other sales, including works by Martha Tuttle and Nicholas Galanin, who continues to enjoy a strong institutional presence this year, both in the U.S. and in biennials and museums worldwide.

The fair’s opening day reinforced the resilience of the art market. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy of The Armory Show and CKA.

James Cohan Gallery placed a sculpture by Kennedy Yanko in the first hours for $150,000. Yanko only recently joined the gallery’s roster, following her solo presentation with Cohan at Frieze London and a nearly sold-out double exhibition staged jointly with Salon 94 last September. The gallery reported a number of first-day placements for other in-demand artists on its roster, including two paintings by Naudline Pierre at $25,000 and $12,000, a painting by Mernet Larsen ($12,000), two sculptures by Tuan Andrew Nguyen at $95,000 each (following his solo booth at Frieze New York in May) and two works by Trenton Doyle Hancock ($85,000 and $40,000). On the textile front, the gallery placed two appliqué works by Christopher Myers ($45,000 and $37,000) and a woven piece by Claudia Alarcón & Silät ($25,000).

Returning to the Armory this year—and participating in both the New York and Seoul fairs this week—White Cube sold several works from its solo presentation dedicated to the Croatian artist duo TARWUK, with paintings ranging from $65,000 to $100,000. Coming of age amid the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, the trauma of war and the collapse of familiar social structures, TARWUK’s work carries a bleak, decadent aesthetic that evokes the lost splendor of the region’s golden age while hauntingly resonating with the present—particularly Europe’s fraught role in global geopolitics. The gallery also sold a mixed-media work by Emmi Whitehorse for $150,000, following her first solo with White Cube last September at its Paris space and a surge of interest sparked by her inclusion in the recent Venice Biennale. Additional sales included a painting by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones for $85,000 and a bronze by the always fair-popular Tracey Emin for £60,000, among others.

White Cube presenting TARWUK. © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Monroe Dinos-Kaufman).

Also participating in the season’s restart on both sides of the globe—New York and Seoul—was Tang Contemporary, which reported multiple sales, including Ai Weiwei’s sculpture Toilet Paper for $150,000-180,000. Elsewhere, overlooked-talent-scouting gallery Berry Campbell saw strong interest, closing a 1952 painting by Perle Fine on the first day for $125,000, with additional conversations expected to unfold in the coming days.

It was a successful “back to school” for Nicodim as well. “The energy was high, outfits chic and sales brisk,” gallery partner and global director Ben Lee Ritchie Handler told Observer. On the first day, the gallery placed works by Isabelle Albuquerque, Angeles Agrela, Samantha Joy Groff, Rae Klein and Teresa Murta, with promising holds on major pieces by Devin B. Johnson, Agnieszka Nienartowicz and Moffat Takadiwa—all priced between $12,000 and $65,000.

The Armory Show brings together more than 230 galleries for its 2025 edition. Casey Kelbaugh/CKA

Proving that the under $50,000 price range may be the most dynamic and fast-moving in today’s environment, Uffner & Liu sold several works on the first day in the main section. Sales included a piece by Sheree Hovsepian for $28,000, two paintings by Sarah Martin-Nuss for $22,000 and $15,000 and a cabinet and two paintings by Anne Buckwalter for $11,000, $14,000 and $10,000, respectively. By evening, the gallery had crossed that “sweet” threshold, placing a sculpture by Hovsepian for $75,000. L.A. mainstay Vielmetter reported selling most of the works they brought to the fair—ranging from $8,000 to $50,000—by the end of the first day, while Anat Ebgi moved quickly to place works by some of their most promising young talents, many recently presented in their new Tribeca spaces. Sales included pieces by Marisa Adesman ($35,000), Tammi Campbell ($50,000), two paintings by Sigrid Sandström ($32,000 and $25,000), Janet Werner ($28,000), Jemima Murphy ($23,000), Ileana García Magoda ($22,000) and two glazed stoneware works by Olive Diamond ($7,500 each).

Meanwhile, another New York staple, Lyles & King, sold multiple works by Brazilian artist Fernanda Galvão, including a $36,000 diptych and a painting for $24,000. Drawing from science fiction and biology, literature and cinematography, Galvão reflects on the construction and manipulation of fictional landscapes, proposing alternative universes with new rules, spatial dynamics and temporal logic. Though already widely exhibited in Europe and South America, this well-received presentation marked something of a debut for the artist in the U.S.

In her first year as director, Kyla McMillan has focused on curatorial strength, U.S. market leadership and New York’s central role in the global art market. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy of The Armory Show and CKA.

Overall, the mood on Armory’s opening day was positive, offering hope for a stronger season ahead for both U.S. and international dealers and for a recovery of the American art market to a “new normal”—though still far from the pace and levels galleries had grown used to. Yet, as dealer and advisor Henri Neuendorf observed, galleries are simply tired of the steady drip of negative news about the state of the market. “We all know sales have been stronger in years past, but the negativity can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he commented. “My sense was that dealers and buyers seem cautiously optimistic and ready to turn the page.”

Art advisor Angelica Semmelbauer echoed Neuendorf’s take, noting the fair featured strong presentations from both galleries and artists—even if some leaned toward the safe side. “What felt especially uplifting was seeing sales happening despite all the uncertainty in the art market, which has been a current topic, and the larger world right now that’s weighing on clients,” Semmelbauer said. “I’m still a big believer that artists will keep creating meaningful work and clients will be there to support their practice and acquire the work, to keep the art ecosystem moving forward in a purposeful way!”

Ultimately, it’s a matter of readjusting expectations, refining strategy and adapting to a new rhythm. As yesterday’s Armory opening showed, the important thing is that American collectors—the fair’s core audience this year—are still buying and supporting the ecosystem as this next cycle begins.

More in art fairs, biennials and triennials

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Elisa Carollo

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September 5, 2025
Olafur Eliasson Tests the Complexities of Our Visual and Psychoacoustic Perception at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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Installation view, “Your psychoacoustic light ensemble” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

From colors and qualities of light we cannot perceive accurately to frequencies of sound inaudible to our ears, a significant portion of the phenomena in the cosmos remains out of reach to us. Moving between aesthetics and physics and working at the intersection of art and science, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is known for exploring ephemeral phenomena in his work with dynamic materials like light, color and frequency, which shape our experience of reality even though their complexity often surpasses the limits of our senses.

In his newly opened show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, “Your psychoacoustic light ensemble,” Eliasson delves even deeper into the fringes of perception, playing with light frequencies and exploring sounds and vibrations—an often underrated medium in art—as an essential part of human experience and the universe’s composition. Observer enjoyed an exclusive walkthrough of the show with the artist, who shared insights into the processes and themes his new works examine, challenge and deconstruct to create awareness of how we orient ourselves in this world.

The exhibition’s central installation is an immersive spatial soundscape, an engaging synesthetic experience that harmoniously blends visual and sensory elements. This work is the result of a complex orchestration that translates light into sound through shared frequencies that align with the universe. In this way, circles of light move, expand and interlace in the dark room, tracing the wavelength of sound itself.

“This is a piece of music that is made from the light to the sound, not from the sound to the light,” Olafur explained to us. To achieve this effect, he first crafted and adjusted the exact light composition with mirrors, refining the colors and gradients until they created the desired “painting” of this synthetic environment, which he then completed with sound. Once again, Eliasson demonstrates his ability to use waves and frequencies—whether light or sound—as the primary medium for his compositions.

SEE ALSO: KAWS On Mao, Death, Monsters and His Nobu Tequila Collab

While light and sound operate in distinct ranges of the electromagnetic and acoustic spectra, the invisible factors of wave frequency and length determine whether we hear a particular sound or see a specific color. Sound is a mechanical wave that travels through a medium (such as air, water, or solids), with the frequency determining if it will produce a low-pitched sound (e.g., bass) or a high-pitched one (e.g., treble). For light, however, it is the frequency or wavelength of the electromagnetic wave that determines color, as Eliasson explains during our walkthrough. He elaborated that every “surface and material has its vibrancy, which regulates the relation with the space.” This synesthetic experimentation creates a meditative, harmonious sequence that transports visitors to another realm, allowing them to sense a hidden harmony within the universe. “It is eventually harmonious; it has this beautiful sense of harmony, like an inhaling and exhaling.”

This installation, which engages both the psyche and the senses through frequencies, lends itself to the show’s title, focused on the concept of “psychoacoustics.” This theme addresses Eliasson’s interest in the inherent relativity of perception and how our senses and their psychological processing shape our experience and understanding of the world—despite the inherent limits that keep many phenomena beyond our full comprehension.

At the gallery entrance, one of his suspended sculptures, Fierce Tenderness Sphere, expands into the space, decomposing light into its spectrum across innumerable quadrangles. With every viewer’s movement, the sculpture shifts, creating an interplay of light, color and form that offers a multifaceted and layered experience, revealing new perspectives and meanings within the same shape.

The works on the second floor continue Eliasson’s investigation of color phenomena, a central concern for much of his work across all media. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los AngelesPhoto by Pierre Le Hors

Upstairs, Olafur continues his exploration of color phenomena and how they are perceived and accessible to us, depending on the wavelengths of light that objects reflect, transmit, or emit. As in many of the artist’s works, and much as with sound, humans can only perceive a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum due to our eyes’ receptors (cones) that respond to only specific wavelengths, allowing us to perceive only specific colors. However, this does not mean that this is the only way vision might work in the universe—especially when viewed from a different perspective or with advanced tools.

The concept of color as reflection, emanation or transmission is central to the processes from which the artist’s works originate. “Color does not exist in itself, only when looked at,” he said. “The unique fact that color only materializes when light bounces off a surface onto our retinas shows us that the analysis of colors is, in fact, about the ability to analyze ourselves.”

In the first gallery, the artist is presenting a new body of work: a vibrant watercolor piece in which shades of green and yellow expand circularly and fluidly, as though something has collided at its nucleus and spread outward. Olafur explains that this piece results from a partially intuitive process: allowing an ice cube, along with bleach, to melt on a surface treated with watercolor and ink. Over time, the melting ice activates a transformation of pigments, which expand across the canvas in different gradations, transforming black into green and, eventually, yellow. Here, black—the absence of light and wavelength—is symbolically interrupted by the bleach’s aggressive chemical reaction, allowing color to reemerge as the ice melts and alters the composition.

In a nearby dark room, the artist has installed a band of light containing all colors in the visible spectrum, appearing as a reflection—similar to sunlight hitting glass or the rainbow formed by raindrops. By using bright white light on a colorful arc, he creates a flat reflection resembling a horizon or boreal line that shines out of the darkness. “It’s in darkness that you understand the need for some light,” Olafur enigmatically noted. By staging this light reflection, the artist essentially “paints” within the space with a single, precise stroke that captures all the colors contained in any natural light ray, achieving with scientific precision the “illusion of light” long pursued by painters throughout art history.

Large watercolor works conjure the evanescent luminosity of a rainbow on paper. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

In Tanya Bonakdar’s main sky-lit gallery, the artist has hung large watercolor works that evoke the fleeting luminosity of a rainbow on paper. Here, the interplay between light, color and paint becomes even more nuanced: ethereal watercolors suggest the hues in the visible light spectrum, akin to sunlight reflecting off a white surface. Bathed in the full range of colors, these works attempt to capture something our senses often struggle to fully perceive. As the artist explained, here he is painting “the impossibility of what we can see, painting something that is beyond vision, or saying something that we almost can’t see.”

The works begin with grey paint underneath; when multiple colors accumulate densely, they blend and return to grey. These watercolors are painted on wet surfaces, applied in delicate, repetitive layers in an almost ritualistic manner, allowing colors to emerge only to fade back to grey. “It’s like white paper bouncing through the middle of the color,” Olafur said. The result is works that have a special glow, as if the colors have absorbed the light spectrum that bathed them and now transmit it to the viewer’s eye. This vaporous, diaphanous effect surrounds the viewer, filling the room with color—like sunlight bathing the paper and translating wavelengths into hues and tones that expand through the space.

By challenging and testing viewers’ perceptions of color and light, and this time incorporating sound, Eliasson has crafted an immersive exploration that allows us to understand how perception of these elements shapes our environments. Highlighting the complex relationship between the senses and psyche, Olafur reveals how we navigate them, consciously or otherwise, within an interplay of frequencies and wavelengths that silently and invisibly surround us. This work links all these experiences to a perpetual cycle of energy and particles governed by the cosmos’s largely impenetrable rules. Acknowledging the limitations of sensory perception, Eliasson offers a glimpse into the vast realm beyond our immediate awareness, emphasizing that our understanding of the world is inherently relative.

Olafur Eliasson’s Midnight Moment

Lifeworld by Olafur Eliasson, presented in Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment series. Courtesy of the artist and Times Square Arts.

In addition to the exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar, Olafur Eliasson will present a work in New York City’s Times Square throughout November as part of the Midnight Moment program. Every night from 11:57 pm to midnight, his piece Lifeworld will transform the iconic billboards with a mesmerizing sequence of floating light forms that mimic the cityscape’s vibrant energy. In this work, Eliasson seeks to capture and abstract the essence of the iconic spot by filming its screens from various perspectives, creating an intentional blur that suspends these light stimuli in time and space. Removed from their usual meanings and messages, these stimuli become pure atmosphere, with shimmering abstract shapes and dancing colors inviting viewers to slow down and creatively reimagine the urban landscape.

“It’s a thrill, but the environment also determines my actions—driving me mostly to spend or to consume,” the artist said in a statement. “Lifeworld shows the immediate site anew, and its hazy qualities may prompt questions. If you are suddenly confronted with the reality of having a choice, you might ask what cities, lives and environments we want to inhabit? And how do I want to take part in them?”

This Midnight Moment marks Eliasson’s first project as guest curator for WeTransfer, which has partnered with CIRCA as an exclusive Digital Screen Partner. “By abstracting the energy of Times Square itself, Eliasson’s Lifeworld offers a rare moment of meditation—a poetic gesture on a monumental scale that holds the potential to ground us in a place designed to economize our attention perpetually and in a political climate that offers little psychic reprieve,” said Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts. “We’re excited to present this timely and distinctive Midnight Moment and join this global collaboration.” Coinciding with the Times Square display, Lifeworld also appears every evening at 8:24 p.m. local time through December 31 on Piccadilly Lights in London, K-Pop Square in Seoul, Limes Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and online 24/7 on WeTransfer.com.

Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Psychoacustic Light Ensemble” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through December 19. The show is timed with the November presentation of his work “Lifeworld in Times Square, part of the “Midnight Moment” initiative.

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Elisa Carollo

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November 1, 2024
Consignor Revealed: Rare Keith Haring Subway Drawings Come to Sotheby’s from Larry Warsh

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Keith Haring, Untitled (Breakdancers and Barking Dog), 1985. Courtesy of Sotheby’s

As the November marquee auction season approaches and the major auction houses start to build momentum by revealing their top lots, the search for who has consigned what and why begins. Provenance, as we know, can play a big part in establishing and validating an artwork’s value, whether by sparking renewed interest, providing reassurance to buyers or adding art historical context. Sotheby’s, for its part, just announced that a group of thirty-one rare Keith Haring subway drawings will star in the Contemporary Day Sale on November 21 with a combined estimate of between $6.3 and $9 million. This is a very exciting moment for Haring’s collectors as none of these works have ever been offered at auction before, and it’s very difficult to find the originals in such well-preserved condition.

Haring came from a family of modest means in Pennsylvania. His father was an amateur cartoonist who, from his early years, encouraged Keith to invent his own characters. Haring’s talent for drawing led to his receiving a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he studied semiotics, but it was his contact with the copious street art that was everywhere in 1980s New York that inspired him most.

Haring started drawing in the subway just as a hobby while en route to work: noticing that the MTA covered unpaid advertisements with black matte paper, he began scrawling his inventive visual language on them in white chalk. In short order, his unique and highly recognizable style attracted his first fans. Nonetheless, Haring continued his drawings in front of the crowds and the NYPD, who ticketed and even arrested him for vandalism over the next five years. Describing them in an essay published for Art in Transit: Subway Drawings, published in 1984, he said felt that his work was “more of a responsibility than a hobby,” a way to leave a critical trace as an individual presence in a cannibalizing metropolis dominated by corporate interests and unstoppable real estate speculation and gentrification. Even when Haring’s career skyrocketed and he established himself as a leading figure in the downtown art scene, he said the subway was still his “favorite place to draw.”

SEE ALSO: ‘Party of Life’ Is a Celebration of Warhol, Haring and 1980s New York City in Munich

During his subway project, he appropriated thousands of black panels for energetic mark-making to build an inventory of iconic images, such as his nuclear dogs, angels, flying saucers, babies, smiley faces, etc.—the motifs mostly engineered at his seminal creative haunt, Club 57. “I think the origin of the subway drawings was part of how they came about in a sense, where it was part of Keith’s DNA,” Gil Vazquez, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said in a statement. “There’s a significant component of generosity. When I think of the subway drawings, I think of them as one of Keith’s first acts of activism.”

Given the nature of urban guerrilla art, most of the subway drawings have been lost or destroyed, making the ones coming to auction a true rarity for fans and institutions looking to add to their collections. Because of their importance and rarity, the works have also been included in prominent exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum’s 2012 critically acclaimed exhibition of Haring’s career titled “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” which marked the last occasion the group exhibited together. Most of the works coming to auction have a long exhibition history, like Untitled (Still Alive in ’85), which is one of the final subway drawings and has been featured in many prominent exhibitions at MoMA, the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville in Paris, de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Rotterdam.

Tseng Kwong Chi, Keith Haring, drawing in the subway, New York, 1984. Photo © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Art © Keith Haring Foundation

Behind their extraordinary survival is a passionate art collector, Larry Warsh, who has taken on stewardship of these thirty-one works for nearly 40 years, building the most exceptional and extensive assemblage of Haring’s subway drawings in private hands. Observer spoke with Wash to understand how those gems came into his collection, the importance of preserving these drawings and, more generally, what’s in his art collection today.

“I’ve been collecting Keith Haring since the mid-’80s, and collecting all kinds of artwork all along, drawings, subway drawings, even a car, anything to do with Keith that was very compulsive at the time,” Warsh told Observer. Arguably, the collector was one of the first supporters of Keith Haring, despite the fact that he doesn’t see himself as a patron in traditional terms. “I was a patron for him in supporting his creative self, what he stood for and what he did. I was not a traditional patron; I just gave money or attended all the gallery functions. I was more pure in the sense of seeing his creativity and what he was doing then. It was a different time.”

Warsh is also an art historian, having published three books about Keith Haring. When asked how he spotted Haring’s talent so early and realized that his work would have historical relevance, he demures. “First of all, it was him, as a creative being and a person. Wherever he drew as artwork, his energy and translation of symbols and signs were unique, and most people would feel comfortable looking at his art. It was art for everyone. He made art for everybody, and he was a generous person and cared about people; he cared about causes; he cared about kids.”

Those subway drawings were part of his tridimensional works—Warsh is currently writing a book on this—and link him to the notion of the Duchampian ready-made, bringing it to a more democratic and public level by appropriating elements in urban spaces. “He was a student of the immediate art act in drawing and painting on objects like Duchamp, so these are considered like found objects.”

While he sometimes tried to get them directly from the subway, Warsh admitted that peeling them out proved difficult, so he just started to find and buy them compulsively. “I basically hunted them down and tried to accumulate them as a body of work,” he said. “It was not about commerciality. It’s about historical importance. My feeling was that these were historically important.” For the same reason, he also started buying Basquiat’s notebooks, being one of the first to acknowledge the historical importance of those texts. Today, he also has the most extensive collection of them. “It’s not the commercial goal that propelled me into collecting. It was the manic, compulsive accumulation personality that I had for many, many years.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warsh started collecting very early in his life, having been introduced to art by an uncle who was a collector of German art. However, he really got into it when he moved to downtown New York City, immersing himself fully in the art scene and the collective energy that shaped an entire community, creating the fertile ground for this entire moment of art history to happen. “I was interested in the energy of the time,” Warsh explained. “My good friend Renee Ricard used to visit me at all night hours with all kinds of things. So I learned with my eyes, and I felt with my emotions, and I had to look into the future and feel what I was collecting in the present would have value. Not just commercial value, but historical value.”

Keith Haring, Untitled (Boombox Head); est. $400,000-600,000. Courtesy of Sotheby’s

When asked why he wanted to part with them, Warsh said that he wanted to let them circulate and be seen again by giving the opportunity of ownership to another collector or, even better, an institution that will show them. “I think I did my job to accumulate them as the body of works,” he said. “They were shown in museums; we did a book, with one version in Mandarin. I don’t want to own much art anymore in the same way I wanted to. I’m thrilled with what I did, but at this point, it’s time for institutions to have a chance to add these drawings to their collections because they are the most important works by this artist, I believe.”

To further promote the value of this group of works, Sotheby’s is hosting an immersive exhibition of the subway drawings that will help visitors envision these works where they were initially conceived by turning the galleries into a vintage subway station with turnstiles, benches and archival footage. Warsh is excited to see what the auction house and exhibition partner Samsung (SSNLF) are cooking up, as it aligns with his desire to share Haring’s art with as many people as possible, particularly in the city. “I think New Yorkers will want to come and see this because everybody has always heard about them or seen pictures, but very few have had the chance to see these drawings in person,” he said. “Seeing them in person, seeing how fragile they are and how sensitive they are, will leave everyone amazed.” Wash concluded that he hopes the exhibition will further enhance the value of Keith Haring’s work and revive interest in it by showing its relevance as an essential part of a pivotal moment in New York’s cultural history.

“Art in Transit: 31 Keith Haring Subway Drawings from the Collection of Larry Warsh” will go on view at Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries from November 8-20 before going on the block on November 21 in the Contemporary Day Sale.

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Elisa Carollo

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October 31, 2024
Nicole Eisenman Unveils ‘Fixed Crane’ in Madison Square Park

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Nicole Eisenman, Fixed Crane, 2024; Crane, bronze, plaster, wire, and various additional materials, approximately 12 feet x 12 feet x 102 feet. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York; Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein

Nicole Eisenman is arguably one of the most respected American artists today. With her always-evolving practice, she has been able to deconstruct and reinvent her own style, opening up her process to its endless possibilities beyond any rule of market recognition and trends. Eisenman is known to be crude, uncanny, critical, sometimes inappropriate and deeply insightful, depending on how you want to contextualize her practice within the art historical canon—or just within an ever-evolving societal landscape similarly full of paradoxes.

Her recently unveiled installation Fixed Crane, commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, is the latest significant statement of her irreverence when it comes to interacting with traditional canons and genre and destabilizing, in this case, the canonic celebratory notion of sculpture in public spaces being akin to monuments. What the artist brought to Madison Square Park is, in fact, an actual decommissioned 1969 Link-Belt industrial crane, merely embellished with handmade sculptural elements. If a monument, this installation refers to human development and ambition for dominance on this planet through the continuous accumulation of new construction and can be seen as a critical element in addressing the inherent hubris and the consequences of this on the planet. As already explored in some of her previous monumental sculptures, the artist conceived this public commission in the context of interaction; people can walk around its 90-foot length or sit atop its counterweight, which Eisenman turned into a bench. The interactive element further challenges the traditional notion of monumentality, getting public sculptures closer to the ordinary lives of those who will encounter them in public spaces.

Nicole Eisenman working on Fixed Crane at UAP. Photo credit: Chris Roque / Courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy and UA

Although Eisenman was primarily recognized for her paintings for many years, it has now been almost a decade since she ventured into sculpture, and her three-dimensional works and installations have since become some of the most discussed in the art world. Her practice started to expand into tridimensionality during a 2012 residency at Studio Voltaire in London, which resulted in human-scaled plasterworks that then became the undisputed stars of the 2013 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh before evolving into Procession, which landed on the terrace at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In recent years, Eisenman has worked on several public installations, like her bronze bathers, Sketch for a Fountain, which found a home in Boston’s 401 Park complex in the Fenway neighborhood after being presented at Skulptur Projekte Münster. Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas acquired another version of the sculptural ensemble.

SEE ALSO: Curator Greg Pierce On How the Museum of Sex’s Warhol Show Came to Be

This is also not the first time Eisenman has engaged with industrial cranes: a yellow, more sizable one was part of her recent survey at the MCA in Chicago, where her idea of “monumental sculpture” was a crane with a bronze cat head substituted for the wrecking ball. Notably, these works represent a further expansion and personal revisitation of her exploration of the notion of Readymades, reflected in the continuous process of appropriation of styles, themes and motifs that animate her practice as she freely predates from the entirety of art history.

In New York, Eisenman added a series of sculptural elements to the crane, including a flag-waving figure at the apex of the crane’s overturned cab, a bronze Birkenstock–wearing foot caught under the crane’s treads and bandages appended to the crane—all elements that emphasize how obsolete the apparatus is and how decadent a symbol of modern civilization it is now that the consequences of the uncontrolled urban development it allowed have been unveiled. At the same time, it still seems to suggest a desire to preserve this tool as a relic, or cultural memory, to which we are still attached.

“Our public art commissions often inspire new and sometimes provocative perspectives on the world around us,” Madison Square Park Conservancy executive director Holly Leicht said in a statement.“With this work, Eisenman creates a pointed dialogue and visual contrast with the skyscrapers rising near the park. It is a fitting conclusion to our public art program’s anniversary season, setting the tone for ambitious commissions in the years to come.”

Nicole Eisenman, Fixed Crane, 2024; Crane, bronze, plaster, wire, and various additional materials, approximately 12 feet x 12 feet x 102 feet. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York – Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

Fixed Crane (which was realized with VIA Art Fund’s support, as noted in a recent Observer interview with art advisor Molly Epstein) marks the fourth and final artist commission in the twentieth anniversary year of the Conservancy’s art program, following a vibrant tulle-based installation by Ana María Hernando that opened in the park in January, the towering sculptural sentinels across two New York City parks by Rose B. Simpson unveiled in April and the two-part processional performance by María Magdalena Campos-Pons held last month.

Nicole Eisenman’s Fixed Crane will be on view at Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn through March 9.

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Elisa Carollo

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October 28, 2024