Highlights from Contemporary New York this October, according to Christie’s specialists

‘In the early 1980s, Stella’s relationship with printmaking changed decisively. During the fabrication of Stella’s Circuits relief paintings at Swan Laser Die in Connecticut, sheets of plywood served as backing boards while shapes were cut from honeycomb aluminum. The cutting tools scored the wood beneath, leaving accidental networks of overlapping lines. Stella saw one of the marked boards and recognized something compelling in the tracery. He began to use materials that had acquired their marks incidentally during the fabrication of other works. Inked and printed, those traces could become the basis of a new image.

‘For the Circuits prints like Estoril Five II (1982), routed plywood and other industrial by-products were commandeered for the printing process. The significance lay less in the materials themselves than in the shift they represented: printmaking had ceased to be downstream of painting. Stella could now develop paintings, reliefs and prints concurrently, with materials and discoveries moving between them. As he later put it, he had stopped making prints after paintings and begun making prints about printing.’

‘Sam Gilliam’s Region and Mind is an iconic example of the artist’s celebrated beveled-edge paintings. This six-foot-wide canvas embodies his experimental style that upended traditional conventions while showcasing his mastery of colour.

‘Gilliam began these experiments in the late 1960s, pouring pigment onto unstretched, unprimed canvas before folding it to create sweeping patterns. By stretching the canvas over wide angled edges, Gilliam achieves something that is at once a painting and a three-dimensional object in space. In Region and Mind, the folds are accentuated by swathes of rhythmic paint in jewel-toned shades of yellow, marigold, maroon, fuchsia and teal. For me, the nuanced palette, ever-changing with the light, makes it especially compelling. Approaching it, you can almost feel the warmth of the sun on your cheeks.

‘The consignor, who was close with Gilliam until his passing, purchased the work directly from his studio right after it was made. It has remained the centrepiece of the collection ever since.’

‘Josef Albers’ Study to Homage to the Square: Double Call is an exceptional example of one of the artist’s most consequential series. The painting radiates with impossibly rich, jewel-like tones, built from four distinct bands of colour, each selected for its precise nuance. These are neither obvious colours nor obvious pairings, and yet together they achieve an unexpected harmony — exactly the kind of perceptual tension at the heart of Albers’ lifelong investigation into colour.

‘The work is one of only four paintings Albers made in closely related palettes, and the only one in an 18-inch square format. Its provenance is equally remarkable: painted in 1960, the work was acquired that same year by Los Angeles collectors Suzanne Solov and Gerald W. Labiner and has remained in their collection ever since.’

‘This 2018 work on paper is representative of Gerhard Richter’s later practice. While Richter is often associated with hyper-realist paintings and large-scale abstractions, this work offers a more intimate view of his process. In contrast to the squeegees and broad gestures of his larger works, here we see the artist’s hand directly on the paper, capturing the essence of his practice on a more intimate scale.

‘What also makes this drawing notable is that it’s coming from the personal collection of Marian Goodman. Marian was instrumental in championing Richter as one of the foremost contemporary artists of our era. They had a very close connection and the fact that this was something she acquired directly from the artist and kept until her death is a strong testament to the power of this piece.’

‘I Was Told Once is a stunning example of acclaimed artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ large-scale Polaroid compositions, a thread throughout her decades-long career. Born in Cuba of Nigerian descent, Campos-Pons first encountered the 20 by 24 Polaroid camera as an MFA student at Massachusetts College of Art and was attracted to this medium for its immediacy, experimental and improvisational potential, as well as its rich tones and glossy surfaces.

‘Along with other artists of the 1990s and early 2000s, Campos-Pons’ use of large-scale Polaroids became a hallmark of a generation of Black and Latino artists exploring ideas around identity and portraiture. A self-portrait across five images, I Was Told Once presents the artist flanked on either side by a carved wooden bird. A string of blue and white beads draped across the artist’s face extends to the small bird perched on her hand, a subtle and poetic reference to Campos-Pons’ individual and familial history of migration and displacement across oceans and territories.’

‘This early work by Lisa Yuskavage offers everything you hope to see in a painting by her. There’s a vivid otherworldliness, a figure in a gentle repose, a confidence that is electric. These elements are coupled with the vivid green that washes over her body, her hair and the background.

‘This work was included in an exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, a show she has since described as containing some of the most technically accomplished works of her early career. Looking back, she has expressed a sense of awe at the technical prowess and compositional strength she achieved at such an early stage. That same power carries through her practice today, in the distinct universe she has created, where her figures feel at once recognisable and distinctly Yuskavage. It’s rare to hear an artist reflect on their early work, and exciting to see a master reflecting on her own mastery.’

‘Warhol’s Flowers are among the most iconic images of the twentieth century — immediately recognisable and immense in their cultural impact. Encountered in a 5-inch square format, however, this larger-than-life image takes on an unusually intimate quality, transformed into an object that can be held in one hand. There is something almost uncanny in that shift of scale: an image embedded in our collective visual memory becomes suddenly personal, close and tactile. Its power, however, is undiminished.

‘The composition remains extraordinarily graphic, and the brilliant marigold yellow gives this tiny work remarkable presence, proving how completely Warhol’s image transcends physical scale. Its exceptional provenance adds another layer of intimacy: Warhol gifted the work directly to Jon Gould, one of the artist’s closest companions and a central figure in his life in the early 1980s.’

‘Coastal Farms is a seminal example of Wayne Thiebaud’s River Delta landscapes, a group of paintings depicting California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Thiebaud began developing this body of work in the 1990s and returned to the motif throughout the latter part of his career. He lived, worked and taught in the Sacramento region for decades and was deeply inspired by the surrounding natural landscape. Here, the aerial view of the delta synthesises many defining strengths of Thiebaud’s practice: a highly saturated use of colour, a refined approach to multi-point perspective and distinctively thick impasto.

‘Thiebaud captures the expansiveness of the landscape through the flattened aerial perspective and dynamic composition. I love the way he’s parcelled the agricultural fields and the winding river into individual segments, creating a sense of compositional harmony, both paying homage to and reinventing the tradition of landscape painting.’

‘Object with Flaw is in three parts, yet if you looked at each element individually, none would seem to go together. For me, that is part of the fun with Baldessari. This mixed media work is a great example of how Baldessari and Multiples Inc. worked together to create interesting and dynamic prints and editions.

‘I love Baldessari’s work because, whether a painting or a print, it’s never as simple as just looking and moving on. His work has this great relationship between word and image, and although he stopped using words directly in his work by the early 1970s, you can still feel that connection here in the title. It forces you to look closer and guess what he is trying to say. You have to spend time with it, and yet he doesn’t force your hand; he leaves it open to interpretation.’