First View
Please click here to download the newspaper (only available in German). For the English translation, please read on.
Dear friends and fellow art lovers,
We hope you will enjoy this compilation of some of the superb works of art we have selected for our upcoming Autumn Auctions.
Perhaps you also are familiar with it – this extraordinary experience of encountering a painting, a drawing, an object that is immediately and absolutely attractive, that sets thoughts and feelings in motion. One of those moments in which we know: this is the beginning of something.
We would like to share it with you and look forward to welcoming you!
Yours very truly,
Diandra Donecker, Micaela Kapitzky, and Markus Krause
Georg Tappert
Seven girls in a vaudeville show, attired and made up to look like Japanese geishas, dance across a small stage. Reddish light warms the scene, bouncing off robes, faces, and interior decor. The women have been made to look anonymous, they are nothing but glamourous illusions moving to a beat. Expressionism, as the echo of big-city nightlife, as the intoxicating mix of colors and lights, as the ostentation of ecstatic revelry – it is in this masterwork that all of these aspects are condensed. The oil painting was created in 1913, a fateful year in German Modernism. The demimonde of the cabarets and vaudeville revues, of bars and circuses, of female dancers and chanson divas filled Tappert’s mind. Nowhere else in the German Avant-garde does one find such unabashed eroticism and overpowering femininity, such a frank celebration of sexuality; the young Georg Tappert has it all.
Marlene Dumas and Bert Boogard
Blake Byrne – combining two lives as art aficionado and pioneering American television entrepreneur – assembled an impressive international collection of contemporary art in his later years. We are proud to be able to offer at auction several highlights. We particularly look forward to presenting the two very political works “Victoria” and “Catsuit,” created by South African artist Marlene Dumas in collaboration with Bert Boogaard. They are a synergy of two independent artistic worlds: Dumas’ figures have been painted over by Boogaards and thereby expanded. This turns the watercolor’s delicate monochromatic elements into something colorful – and very much alive.
Flötenkasten
It is only seldom that objects come to light which so clearly epitomize a historical personage and make their personality palpable. A rediscovered treasure of first-rate quality and one of the most charming creations of European porcelain craftsmanship will be part of our auction: A flute box that was fabricated in Meissen, Saxony, most probably for the private use of King Frederick the Great. This little jewel is intimately connected, both in form and in spirit, to the decorative interiors of Sanssouci in Potsdam.
Calábria Collection
On December 4th, 2020, we will be offering at auction the collection of Mário Calábria, the former Brazilian ambassador, who built and fostered a broad network of personal friendships among the artists of East Berlin. The focus of his passion as a collector was on abstract and concrete art, with significant works by the likes of Hermann Glöckner and Almir da Silva Mavignier forming part of his collection. Mário Calábria was born in 1923 in Corumba, Brazil. After studying law, he entered the diplomatic service and was posted to Damascus, Ottawa, and Amsterdam, among other cities. From 1961 until 1978, he served in Munich as Consul and later as Consul General. He then moved to East Berlin, where he was his country’s ambassador until 1985. He had already formed friendships with numerous artists during his postings in Munich, and these ties grew deeper when he lived in East Berlin. Calábria built up a collection not just out of a passion for art, but also to give the artists the maximum possible material and moral support out of a sense of social responsibility. This makes the collection an impressive testament to the close rapport and appreciation that formed the bond between Calábria and his artist friends.
Mitch Epstein
“And so the flag waiting to be picked up becomes an allegory of the tragic event.”
Mitch Epstein is among the most important contemporary photographers. He never intended his works to serve as a documentation of reality. Instead, he is seeking to develop a vision of another reality by his photographs, one that embodies his individual artistic style. His masterpiece Flag from the year 2000, part of his ”Family Business” series, portrays the sort of everyday scenario typical for Epstein: The American flag, folded and protected in plastic covering – presumably dry-cleaned “free of charge” – seems to be waiting to be seen by its beholders.
Peter Halley
The Constructivist Peter Halley works with an abstract formal language, but he differs from his Constructivist colleagues in that his works depict the geometry of the real world. Neon colors, forms, and industrial materials like sand particles and Roll-A-Tex, a plaster-like building material, are used to create surfaces that look like bas reliefs. The universes of Halley’s imagery are not devoid of real objects, as the viewer might assume at first glance, and instead represent systems of code, circuit diagrams, and urban planning matrices – the “Firewall” structures that turn our society into a sort of prison.
Arnulf Rainer
Arnulf Rainer’s “Ohne Titel(Rotes Bild)” originates in what was probably the artist’s most fruitful creative period. Influenced at first by Surrealism, the painter developed his famous “overpaintings” (Übermalungen) in the 1950s. This work from 1959 is an example of this transitional phase, in which Rainer progressively eradicated all representational elements from his work, replacing them with a strictly conceived painting style in which brushwork evoking the artist’s physical movements reigned absolute.
This dominance of the abstract-expressive gesture also applies to the color scheme used in the paintings from this period. Black and – as in this case – red were the colors he preferred. The signaling effect of both these colors acquires a metaphorical power in works like ours: Something hitherto unknown is coming into being, boundaries are being crossed, and new conceptual lines drawn – and there can be no going back.
Thomas and Raffaela von Salis Collection
The eclectic collection of Thomas and Raffaela von Salis, which grew over the course of more than three decades, bears witness to the art dealer’s trained eye and unique taste. We are very excited to have the opportunity to offer individual works from his collection in our fall auctions from December 2nd until December 4th, 2020. The works are from various epochs, by international artists, and include paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs. The exceptional intuition and lifelong passion of the collector couple is reflected by juxtapositions of different artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Franz West, Robert Mangold, Clement Meadmore, Lucio Fontana, and Mario Giacomelli.
Carl Gustav Carus
His strolls along the River Elbe, often in the evening, played an exceptionally important role for Carus. This is where he sharpened his perception of images and atmospheric settings – sometimes walking together with his friend and mentor Caspar David Friedrich, who would give him pointers on painting techniques and on a clearly thought-out visual language. For both of them, the struggle to gain a direct understanding of “Nature in keeping with her own logic” was a key pre-requisite for their own progress as artists. Carus created several drawings of the boat mills that used to lie at anchor on the right-hand side of the Elbe River (Dresden, Kupferstichkabinett). Only occasionally would he create paintings based on his observations of the natural world, which makes our painting an early gem of Dresden Romanticism.
Lyonel Feininger
It’s a radical image: Broken up into geometric forms and layers of color with prismatic effect, we see Cammin, a quaint hamlet on the Pomeranian Baltic Coast, which Lyonel Feininger discovered in the 1920s. To the right and left of an alleyway, high buildings loom almost threateningly into the sky. Brown and orange tones bathe what resembles a theater backdrop in the fading light of evening. The streets are empty of strollers; not a single resident can be seen behind the windows. But far off in the distance, just below the horizon, we can make out a small blue sailboat! It’s the only sign of human life. The sea is flat as a mirror, the sky is cloudless with nary a breeze. In this familiar yet alien world, everything seems frozen in time.