On their way to the top: 10 artists to watch this fall

On 29 September, Christie’s Post-War to Present sale in New York will present established artists alongside up-and-coming talents. From the auction debuts of Rick Lowe and Emma McIntyre to the first major painting by Joe Overstreet to appear at auction, the sale encompasses trailblazing artists of the post-war period as well as fresh perspectives from today’s contemporary voices.

Noah Purifoy

Born in Alabama in 1917, Noah Purifoy is best known for his series of sculptures made with debris he collected from the Watts Rebellion of 1965, of which the present Totem is part.

Purifoy’s work explores the relationships between African sculptural traditions, assemblage, and Black folk art — the Totem being emblematic of this. At the intersection of the abstract and the everyday, through the lens of what he calls the ‘creativity of communication’, his works resonate with the history that underlies the found materials. The present Totem, a masterwork of his oeuvre, was included in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which traveled to various prestigious institutions and is widely considered one of the most important exhibitions of the last decade. The exhibition brought increased recognition for many of the artists involved, such as David Hammons and Barkley Hendricks, whose Stanley achieved a record $6.1 million at Christie’s New York this past Spring.Totem’s appearance at Christie’s marks the first time since the Soul of a Nation exhibition that a major sculpture by Purifoy has been offered at auction.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has been steadily rising in the art world since the 1970s, when she began her signature I See Red series, of which I See Red: I Feel Green is a part. In her work, the artist, who is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation in Montana, often addresses issues facing Indigenous peoples — such as colonial displacement and land relationships — and juxtaposes them against American exceptionalism.

Her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this summer was her largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date and received widespread acclaim. The artist’s top five highest prices at auction were all achieved within the past year, including the sale of I See Red: Talking to the Ancestors for a record $642,600 at Christie’s last November.

Rick Lowe

Rick Lowe’s painting practice has only realized in the last few years after a decades-long commitment to community action. Born in 1961, the 2014 MacArthur Fellowship recipient started Project Row Houses in 1993 as a way of revitalising a neglected area of his hometown of Houston’s Third Ward, creating studios for visiting artists whose practices focused on African-American narratives. In his paintings, Lowe deals with themes of urban renewal and decay, the changing nature of infrastructure and the process of covering and uncovering characteristic of development in urban regions. Having exhibited around the world as part of the Venice Architecture Biennale and Cittadellarte in Italy, as well as Documenta 14 in Athens, he has garnered international acclaim for his local efforts. The present Untitled, from 2021, is Lowe’s first appearance at auction.

Maysha Mohamedi

Birdie on the Back of a Sleeping Tiger is only Maysha Mohamedi’s third artwork to come to auction. Her first sale was at Christie’s this past spring, when her painting Too Young to Go Steady (2023) surpassed its high estimate, achieving $107,100. Both are strong representations of her work, which often features patchwork scenes of colourful abstraction drawn from the artist’s own life.

Her background in cognitive science — in which she earned a degree from UC San Diego in 2002 — informs the sense of connectivity between colour and form in her canvases, such as Birdie on the Back of a Sleeping Tiger. Like the Colour Field painters before her, Mohamedi delves into the possibilities of colour to tell stories. Her reputation in the art world is steadily growing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently acquired her painting Is that all there is? (2021).

Miriam Cahn

Miriam Cahn’s involvement in the wave of Feminist and anti-war movements in 1960s and 70s Berlin is significant to her body of work. The Swiss-born artist is known for her portrayal of figures, specifically the almost ambient way in which they are juxtaposed against her backgrounds. Driven to combat a male-dominated art history, the artist portrays her subjects, often female and looking directly at the viewer, with a physical presence that directly challenges the way women have been depicted in paintings throughout history.

Cahn’s market has recently reached new heights after her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, wherein much of the work exhibited was representative of this characteristic style of portraying her subjects. Seen clearly in Kinder, these ideas of corporeality and perception are central to her body of work, even as it continues to change with the times.

Joe Overstreet

Born in Mississippi in 1933, Joe Overstreet began his career in San Francisco, where he was an integral part of the Beat Scene. Combining elements of visual aesthetic movements like Abstract Expressionism with other media, such as Jazz and African-American history, his oeuvre is a poignant response to Civil Rights-era ideas and issues. He moved to New York in 1958 and quickly began to establish himself as a prominent artist and activist.

When Overstreet made the present Untitled in 1970, he demonstrated his ability to expertly blend direct and indirect approaches in a way that challenges the medium: in addition to the abstraction on the surface, Overstreet abstracted the material of the work, leaving it as an unstretched canvas that is pinned to the wall, rather than mounted by traditional means. Untitled is the first large-scale painting by the artist to be offered at auction.

Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1910 and grew up with a formal education in both music and languages. By her teenage years, she was making regular visits to Vienna to study ceramics, philosophy and painting. She became close friends with Dada and Surrealist artists like Marcel Janco and Victor Brauner, and some of her earliest art experiences came from Bucharest’s thriving avant-garde community in the 1920s and 30s.

She is best known, however, for her work in New York, where she moved in 1941 after the outbreak of World War II. Here, she befriended Peggy Guggenheim, as well as fellow European émigrés Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, before eventually falling in with the New York School and making her name within Abstract Expressionism.

Sterne’s paintings from the 1940s are extremely rare to the secondary market. The present Untitled was painted in 1946, the same year that the Betty Parsons Gallery opened in New York. Parsons represented Sterne, who was famously the only female artist in ‘The Irascibles’, a group which included Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Today, her influence and long-lasting significance is evident in the major collections throughout the United States where her work resides, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Deborah Remington

By the time she received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1955, Deborah Remington had already established herself within the Bay Area’s burgeoning Beat Scene. The year before, she was the only woman of six painters and poets who founded the legendary 6 Gallery in San Francisco. It was here that the Beat Generation would have its first public appearance and would go on to create the West Coast literary revolution in the following years. The present Untitled was painted in 1954, the same year that the gallery was established. Remington is known for her hard-edge abstractions that establish clear lines of separation between colours, giving an at once mechanistic and ethereal appearance.

Pat Passlof

Pat Passlof’s role in Abstract Expressionism has recently garnered a great deal of attention on the secondary market. A student of Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College, she continued to study with him after he moved to New York, and in her paintings one can see the biomorphic shapes characteristic of de Kooning, and his close friend Arshile Gorky as well as the consistently varied touch and palette of Abstract Expressionism. Her individualism consistently shined through, however, and just as her influences can be seen, so can her departure from the norms of the group.

Despite her significant role within Abstract Expressionism, her influence was often overshadowed by the work of her husband, Milton Resnick. The importance of her influence is suggested by the presence of her 1950 work Untitled in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection of Abstract Expressionist Art. The present Mint is characteristic of her oeuvre and demonstrates her mastery within the canon of post-war abstraction.

Emma McIntyre

The Auckland-born, Los Angeles-based Emma McIntyre’s experimental and instinctive compositions embody chaos and chance. They recall sensual materiality: the artist spontaneously applies and subtracts layers of paint with rags, stamps and her own limbs. The result is an ethereal combination of colour and distance, at once abstract and dreamlike, as demonstrated by the present Untitled from 2020. Her stature within the market is rising, as demonstrated through her first solo exhibition in New York having just opened on September 21st. The inclusion of Untitled in Post-War to Present at Christie’s marks her first appearance at auction.

Related artists: Miriam Cahn, Victor Brauner