Works of Art in the Auction

The IMA held a 125th Anniversary Gala live contemporary art auction on Saturday, October 11, 2008. View works of art in the auction below.

Item 1: Claes Oldenburg
Soft Rotating Capitol, 1995
Lithograph in six colors
22 x 17 inches (55.9 x 43.2 cm)
Edition of 100 with 20 AP’s and 5 PP’s
Framed
Courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein, New York

Estimated value: $4,000
Recommended minimum bid: $1,200

Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden) is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of Pop Art in the United States. After moving from Chicago to New York City in 1956, Oldenburg found inspiration in his environs in the Lower East Side, where he created a series of influential art works such as The Street (1960) and The Store (1961), which combined elements of both theatrical events and sculptural installation. Through such groundbreaking works, Oldenburg created some of the earliest examples of Performance Art, which he called Ray Gun Theater, while also challenging the divisions between popular culture and high art. For The Store, Oldenburg created plaster versions of everyday commodities, followed later by canvas sculptures that paved the way for Soft Sculpture. After developing his seminal Pop art works and performances in the sixties, Oldenburg began to expand his sculptures of ordinary household objects to a surprisingly large scale, in works such as Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969). During the seventies, he devoted himself to conceiving public commissions that exemplified his dedication to the “poetry of scale.” He developed his Proposed Colossal Monuments for urban settings all over the world, and the first of these works, a 45-foot-tall sculpture in the form of a clothespin, was realized in downtown Philadelphia in 1976. Beginning that year, Oldenburg began his series of well-known collaborations with Coosje van Bruggen, embracing a more populist aesthetic that would allow the public to playfully interact with their giant sculptures in the urban landscape. By drastically increasing the objects’ expected scale, these works become dreamlike, humorous anti-monuments, celebrations of common everyday objects. The artists research the unique history and subjects associated with the places they visit and subsequently produce powerful new urban symbols. In 2000, Oldenburg was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government.

Item 2: Tim Hawkinson
Doorstop, 2007
Bronze
1-1/4 x 4-3/4 x 2-1/4 inches (3.2 x 12.1 x 5.7 cm)
Edition 4 of 10
Edition of 10 + 1 AP
Courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein, New York

Estimated value: $8,500
Recommended minimum bid: $3,400

Tim Hawkinson
Tim Hawkinson (b. 1960, San Francisco) has created a wide-ranging body of work that investigates a complex crossroads between the body, human consciousness, machines and nature. Hawkinson graduated from San Jose University and received an MFA in 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles. In his work, Hawkinson uses an eclectic mix of found objects and household materials – such as plastic bags, cardboard, and twist ties – which he transforms almost alchemically into complex and awe-inspiring sculptures. Although he often employs a labor-intensive and repetitive working process, what emerges is often rife with humor and a sense of play. Hawkinson has worked in a wide range of scale, from a sculpture of a two-inch tall bird to a 300 ton granite bear, and often incorporates movement and sound into his sculptures. The IMA recently acquired a monumental sculpture executed by Hawkinson titled Mobius Ship, a fantastic 9-foot ship that is twisted in upon itself, a witty play on the epic novel Moby Dick as well as the mathematical concept of the Mobius Strip. In 2005 a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York featured Hawkinson, and he has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia as well as the Getty Museum and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hawkinson currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Item 3: Tara Donovan
Untitled, 2007
Relief print from a rubber band matrix
39 x 31 inches (99.1 x 78.7 cm)
Edition 4 of 58
Edition of 58
Framed
Courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein, New York

Estimated value: $6,500
Recommended minimum bid: $2,600

Tara Donovan
Tara Donovan (b. 1969, New York) is known for transforming vast proliferations of common manufactured materials such as Styrofoam cups, scotch tape, and pencils into powerful installations and sculptures. Donovan has been recognized for her commitment to process, and to exploring the subtle perceptual phenomenon and atmospheric effects that can be achieved through a multiplication of individual units. Donovan attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1987-88 before earning her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. in 1991. She received her MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1999. Since then, Donovan has been the subject of numerous shows at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, UCLA Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and participated in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. Donovan was the recipient of the first annual Calder Award from the Alexander Calder Foundation in 2005. For her upcoming exhibition at the IMA in 2010, Donovan will create three newly commissioned works.

Item 4: Ingrid Calame
#97 Working Drawing, 2001
Colored pencil drawing on trace mylar
Sheet size: 30 X 30 inches
Framed: 32 X 32 X 2 inches
Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

Estimated value: $7,500
Recommended minimum bid: $5,000

Ingrid Calame
Ingrid Calame (b. 1965, Bronx, NY) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is best known for her large-scale works inspired by tracings of the stains and graffiti found on the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York City. Calame received her BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1987, and in 1996 received an MFA in Art and Film from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In 2005 Calame was granted access to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to make tracings of marks on the track, creating a body of work that was featured in an exhibition at the IMA entitled Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Calame is the subject of a recent solo exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum that will travel to the Monterey Museum of Art in California and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the IMA, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Item 5: Amy Cutler
Weavers, 2008
Lithograph
34 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches
Edition 34
Framed
Courtesy of the artist and Larissa Goldston Gallery

Estimated value: $4,800
Recommended minimum bid: $1,920

Amy Cutler
Amy Cutler (b. 1974, Poughkeepsie, NY) is known for her inventive and exquisitely detailed drawings and paintings that incorporate a dreamlike mixture of subjects. Inspired by an eclectic array of sources including fairy tales, mass media, and her own personal experiences, Cutler creates enigmatic scenes depicting women, animals, and hybrid-beings engaged in fantastic and mysterious activities. Her work evokes multi-layered associations with fables and fairy tales, dreams and surrealism, as well as folk art. From 1994 to 1995, Cutler studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt, Germany, and in 1997 she received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. In addition to her recent exhibition at the IMA and the Bell Gallery at Brown University, Cutler has been the subject of exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Her paintings, drawings, and prints are included in the permanent collections of museums such as the IMA, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Item 6: Type A
Untitled (crush) from the Insertions series, 2007
Chromogenic print
31 x 40 inches
Framed
Courtesy of the artists and Goff + Rosenthal Gallery

Estimated value: $7,500
Recommended minimum bid: $3,500

Type A
Working together since 1998, New York-based Type A is the collaboration of Adam Ames (b. 1969, New York) and Andrew Bordwin (b. 1964, Framingham, MA). Through a variety of media, including video, installation, photography, sculpture and drawing, Type A’s work deals with issues of masculinity, competition and collaboration in contemporary society. In a special commission for the IMA, Type A is producing a real time conceptual performance in the form of a team-building initiative with the Museum's Art & Nature Park interdepartmental staff. Type A has been training in the Adventure and Experiential Learning industry in order to facilitate team-building exercises with the museum staff in Indianapolis. In addition to the performative aspects, the project will generate two and three-dimensional and time-based artwork, including a large sculpture inspired by the design of challenge course elements, and photographic and video documentation of staff training sessions. Type A has exhibited extensively at institutions including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Centrum Beeldende Kunst in Rotterdam, and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Ames and Bordwin teach at Parsons School of Design in New York.

Item 7: Orly Genger
Source, 2008.
Watercolor on paper
30 x 44 1/2 inches
Framed
Courtesy of the artist and Larissa Goldston Gallery

Estimated value: $5,000
Recommended minimum bid: $2,000

Orly Genger
Orly Genger (b. 1979, New York) received a BA from Brown University in 2001, and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She is currently developing a major temporary commission titled Whole for the IMA that will be on view from November 21, 2008 through May 17, 2009 in the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion. Known for transforming common nylon ropes into elaborate, monumental sculptures, Genger’s project for the IMA is her largest and most ambitious to date, incorporating thousands of feet of painted rope. Genger’s work challenges typical associations with craft and textile handiwork through its highly physical creation process—wrestling rope into knots and stacking the forms to create persistent and imposing sculptural objects. According to Genger, her sculptures are suggestive of “things that are beyond our control, they spill, flood and spread through space. Even as they stand still like steel monuments bolted to the ground, they threaten to envelop their surroundings like molten lava chasing anything in its path.” Genger’s work is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Item 8: Tony Feher
Black with Two Holes, 2008
Glitter and spray mount on unfolded French Fry box
10 X 8 inches
Framed
Courtesy of the artist, PaceWildenstein and D’Amelio Terras NY

Estimated value: $5,000
Recommended minimum bid: $2,500

Tony Feher
Tony Feher (b. 1956, Albuquerque, NM) creates work that explores the legacy of Minimalism and encourages viewers to observe and appreciate the beauty in even the most mundane objects that surround them. Feher received his BA from the University of Texas, Austin in 1978, and moved to New York in 1981, where he lives and works today. Over the past twenty-five years, Feher has been working with a variety of commonplace materials to create abstract sculptures and installations that dramatically and playfully engage the spaces they inhabit. Repetition, materiality, and the architecture of his surroundings are crucial elements in his work. In 2007, the Indianapolis Museum of Art commissioned Feher to create the inaugural installation in the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion entitled A Single Act of Carelessness Will Result in the Loss of Eternal Beauty. Feher has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, La Fundación “La Caixa” in Spain, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Feher also conceived a special project for the Istanbul Biennial in 2003 that was installed in the historic monument Hagia Sophia, which had a profound impact on his subsequent work.

Item 9: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Are those Pearls or Tears? My Beloved One, 2008
Etching
Artist proof 2 out of 5
Limited Edition of 15
Framed
Courtesy of Maria Magdalena Campos Pons @GASP

Estimated value: $10,000
Recommended minimum bid: $5,000

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Cuba) uses photography, painting, and mixed media installations to explore issues of memory and the fractured constructions of social, cultural, and gender identity. Campos-Pons studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte and the Instituto Superior de Arte, both in Havana, and studied painting and media arts at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. After spending a year in Canada, Campos-Pons moved to Boston permanently in 1991. Last year, the IMA organized her first mid-career retrospective titled Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything is Separated by Water, and published a major catalogue of her work with Yale University Press. She has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia in Brazil and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as group exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and El Museo del Barrio in New York. In 2004 Campos-Pons co-founded with her husband Gallery Artist Studio Projects (GASP), an organization that provides space for artists to exhibit and experiment. Campos-Pons currently lives in Massachusetts and teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Item 10: Kay Rosen
It's Time, 1989/1992
Carbon on paper
14 x 11 inches
Framed
Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York, and London

Estimated value: $10,000
Recommended minimum bid: $4,000

Kay Rosen
Kay Rosen (b. 1949, Corpus Christi, TX) is renowned for her language-based artworks that explore intricate tensions between the visual and verbal. Rosen subtly and playfully deconstructs the ambiguities of language to reveal both wit and beauty. A background in comparative linguistics and applied linguistics led Rosen to explore language in prints, paintings, and drawings through the use of typography and color. Her permanent installation Never Odd Or Even (2005) is on display in the IMA’s Lichtenauer Passageway Gallery. In addition to working as an artist, Rosen is also a writer and last year published KaySays: Essays and Interviews by Kay Rosen. Rosen has been the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Drawing Center in New York, the Aspen Art Museum, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rosen lives in Gary, Indiana, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Item 11: SaraBeth Vaughan Precious Jewelry
18K yellow gold signed and stamped rose cuff
Model made by hand
Rolls Royce of craftsmanship
Made in the U.S.A.
Courtesy of Saks Fifth Avenue
SaraBeth Vaughan Precious Jewelry available exclusively at Saks Fifth Avenue in Indiana.

Estimated value: $25,000
Recommended minimum bid: $18,000

Designer SaraBeth Vaughan, a native of Lafayette, Indiana, has always had a passion for fine jewelry and accessories. When she began designing her line of precious jewelry in September 2000, her vision was to create timeless, elegant pieces of heirloom quality that could be passed down from generation to generation.

SaraBeth Vaughan Precious Jewelry has a distinctive romantic sensibility. The timeless floral motif that runs throughout the collection derives from SaraBeth’s love of flowers. The intricate curved and filigree craftsmanship of many of the pieces again suggests the dreamy, lighthearted and romantic quality of life.

The collection features necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings and cufflinks created in 18-karat gold, platinum and diamonds. SaraBeth Vaughan Precious Jewelry made its debut into the retail market in April 2002 at Neiman Marcus and has since received much attention nationwide. SaraBeth continues to expand the collection, creating stylish new pieces to meet the increasing demand for her unique jewelry.