New York now: 8 contemporary artists taking over the Big Apple this fall

Beginning 28 October, art enthusiasts and collectors can visit Christie’s New York galleries, where more than 500 exceptional artworks will be on view as part of the 20th/21st Century Art November sales week. While the presale exhibitions offer an encyclopedic look at titans of 20th-century art to those working today, many world-class institutions in town are staging shows that allow visitors to examine works by artists in depth. Below, discover eight artists with significant works in Christie’s sales who also star in exhibitions at the Frick Madison, Brant Foundation, and more.

Ed Ruscha

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art November sales present works by Ed Ruscha, one of the most in-demand American post-war artists, at nearly every price point — from his iconic Norm's La Cienega Sinking into the Petrochemical Swamp to his more accessible drawings and photographs. In 1956, the Oklahoma-born artist moved to Los Angeles, a city that would prove enormously influential on his practice, as illustrated by lyrical canvases, landscapes, and sculpture across Christie’s auctions.

One of the highlights of Christie’s sale series is Ruscha’s Chain and Cable (1987), which has been exhibited around the world and extensively cited in the literature on the artist. Here, Ruscha engages in his characteristic wordplay: ‘chain’ and ‘cable’ are terms for parts of a ship’s anchoring apparatus, but they also could refer to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. While our focus with Ruscha tends to be on these evocative puns, Chain and Cable also evinces his skill and subtlety as a painter. More of Ruscha’s bold text works can be seen in the Museum of Modern Art sweeping retrospective, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, one of the year’s most anticipated exhibitions.

Henry Taylor

LA-based artist Henry Taylor’s portraits uniquely capture the essence of a particular person as much as they do the essence of a place. In addition to two works in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale — Sometimes we get deep (Haiti) (2009) and Gucci Cucci (2018), Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale will feature “Batman” Part Alien (2018), a monumental painting by Taylor that illustrates how his LA has shaped him. This portrait depicts Greg “Batman” Davis, a founding member of the LA-based gang the Crips. Despite his reputation, Taylor depicts him as an everyday person out and about, simply dressed and unassuming. Even though he meets our gaze, he is not confrontational; instead, it is like his snapshot is being taken by a friend or confidante.

More works combining the artist’s personal experience as a Black American and shared history comprise Henry Taylor: B Side, which travelled from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Paintings, rare early drawings, assemblage sculptures, found objects, and installations make this show a must-see.

Ilana Savdie

Also on view at the Whitney Museum is Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions, open through 5 November 2023. The show brings together the Brooklyn-based artist’s expansive, vibrant canvases and drawings, in which fragmented forms are made fluid. Offered in Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale, A High-pitched Complicity (2020) is one of the Colombia- and Miami-raised artist’s most intoxicating canvases. It is a masterclass in texture that also draws from art history, social media, and other references such as the Colombian tradition of Carnaval.

Following Jasper Johns’s use of encaustic, Savdie uses oil paint alongside beeswax, which lends an immediacy to her brushstrokes, while the vibrant rigor of the work evokes Helen Frankenthaler’s Color Field paintings. A High-pitched Complicity’s anti-narrative imagery also connects Savdie to the Surrealists, especially the women associated with the movement like Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, and Meret Oppenheim. Savdie suggests that, in the twenty-first century, the real has become increasingly surreal.

Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown’s love of painting—its history, methods, and sociopolitical implications—comes through vividly in her œuvre. Christie’s 21st Century Evening sale will feature the sumptuous Figures in Garden (2003), a cornucopia of color that transports us into a fantastical grove outside time and space. This verdant painting evokes Henri Matisse’s Fauvist masterpiece Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), depicting quasi-abstract figures lounging near the water, as well as the fête galante, a Rococo style pioneered by Jean-Antoine Watteau.

Brown’s landscapes are always obscured by abstract brushstrokes, which create a dreamlike, ethereal, and sensual atmosphere. In this way, she has much in common with the Impressionists, who took the fête galante from the mythical into the modern. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, the first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home, further explores the art historical themes that the artist has made her own.

Barkley L. Hendricks

Another artist deeply enthralled by works from centuries past is Barkley L. Hendricks, best known for his strikingly modern and stylish portraits of primarily Black figures. In 1966 when he was still a student, Hendricks travelled around Europe where he was exposed to masters, such as Rembrandt, Bronzino, and Van Dyck. While in many instances, Hendricks opted for monochrome acrylic paint backgrounds to make his sitters, painted in oil, seemingly glow from the canvas, he occasionally employed metallic backgrounds that recall gold-ground Medieval works.

Such is the case in Triple Portrait: World Conqueror (2011), featured in Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale. In this portrait, combining oil paint with gold and aluminum leaf, the artist produces a canvas that is both sensual and tactile, yet his subject’s defiant stance exudes a powerful presence that eclipses its highly decorative surface. Discussing Triple Portrait: World Conqueror in a 2013 WWD interview, Hendricks revealed his interest in contemporary style, together with the enduring legacy of Marilyn Monroe: ‘You know that Marilyn Monroe quote right?’ Hendricks says, ‘Give a woman the right pair of shoes and she can conquer the world.’ Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick is a rare opportunity to view many of Hendricks’ most renowned paintings together and discover fascinating insights into his practice.

Nicolas Party

Also on view at the Frick Madison, Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera is a site-specific installation by the Swiss-born artist that combines Carriera’s Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume with Party’s pastel works. With a mural homage to Carriera’s equisitely rendered drapery, the exhibition is a perfect companion to the Hendricks’ show, especially for sartorially minded viewers.

Demonstrating the breadth of Party’s œuvre and subject matter is Still Life (2015), offered in Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale. Nearly five feet by six feet, this work exemplifies Party’s unparalleled sensitivity to colour and his mastery of pastel with its alluring, textured pigments and sensual forms comprising the fruit. Highly sculptural, it stands in stark contrast to the static still lifes with which we are most familiar. While there are clear associations with Cezanne, Party’s evocative palette also brings to mind the essence of surrealism and the uncanny—a realm between life and death.

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol

This November Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition, Basquiat x Warhol will travel stateside to the Brant Foundation’s East Village outpost, which previously staged the landmark Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition in 2019. The show will reunite a selection of masterpieces from the artists’ early 1980s collaboration, unseen together in New York for more than two decades.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art November sales include numerous works by each artist. Among the Basquiat highlights are 1981 Untitled canvas — a monumental 50x199-inch canvas encapsulating New York during the 1980s; 1983 Reclining Nude, illustrating the artist’s embrace of art historical tropes; and the 1981 Untitled life-sized, skeletal portrait on wood.

Many of Warhol’s most iconic motifs, from Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to soup cans and flowers are also featured. Sixteen Jackies, a highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale, is a monumental painting, made up of 16 joined canvases, that represents the pinnacle of Warhol’s examination into the soul of America. Painted in 1964, the painting captures Jackie’s personal grief, together with the shock of the entire world upon her husband’s assassination.