Quarantine-Made Works by George Condo, Cecily Brown, and More Go Under the Hammer at Christie’s

Organized with the help of Michael Nevin, cofounder of the Journal Gallery, nearly all of the lots being offered were created while artists were hunkered down in their homes during quarantine. Proceeds from the sale will benefit amfAR’s research efforts to quickly mobilize resources to fund the kind of cutting-edge research on COVID-19 that it has been doing for 35 years on HIV/AIDS.

“It means a lot to me that Christie’s is joining forces with amfAR to raise vital funds for COVID-19 research,” says François-Henri Pinault, chairman of Artémis, the parent company of Christie’s. “Christie’s has a long history of contributing to great causes through charitable auctions, while amfAR’s success in mobilizing celebrities and the fashion world in the fight against AIDS in recent decades speaks for itself.”

The young Los Angeles artist Austyn Weiner, who converted her garage in Los Angeles into a studio/exhibition space during the pandemic, has donated a vibrant oil and charcoal canvas titled Nothing I Can Do to Make You Stay but Spitting in Your Face May Help (2020). “This time in quarantine has been a reminder that solitude is my best friend, and when the ‘other,’ the ‘viewer,’ the ‘onlooker’ is removed from the scene, anything and everything is possible,” the artist tells Galerie. Her work is estimated between $10,000 and $15,000. 

American painter Eddie Martinez, meanwhile, has donated a striking piece titled Untitled (Sleeper for amfAR), which he created from his Brooklyn home studio. “For the first two months I barely left the house and worked on small stuff at home,” Martinez tells Galerie. “It was necessary for me to try and process what was going on. We are doing what we can to help when we can. New York remains resilient and willing to come together and work things out for the good of all. In retrospect I think I made some emotional and strong work during this time.” Along with the Christie’s sale, he also recently donated work to New York’s Coalition for the Homeless and other NYC-focused COVID-19 support initiatives.

Another poignant work in the sale is Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Red Drawing (Untitled), with an estimate of $20,000–$30,000. The work is part of a new series made since the onset of the pandemic. Using oil stick on cotton rag paper, Johnson has updated the visual language of his long-established “anxious men” series, in which crude archetypal faces reveal the deep-seated tensions and traumas that permeate through contemporary life, using a blood-red hue for the first time. 

“Salma and I are proud to support this exceptional event, and we hope that it will help combat the new and urgent global threat from COVID-19,” Pinault says. “And I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to the artists who have produced works for the occasion and to the leading collectors who have generously donated works of art.” 

Like businesses all over the world, auction houses find themselves in uncharted territory where the process of buying art has rapidly changed. This charity initiative takes place in New York as part of the Day Sale right after the highly anticipated “ONE: A Global Sale of the 20th Century” auction, which brings together for the first time Impressionist, modern, postwar, and contemporary art and takes place across the auction house’s New York, Paris, London, and Hong Kong salesrooms. (Phillips also condensed its Impressionist, modern, and contemporary New York art sales into one week, and on June 29, Sotheby’s hosted a revolutionary 74-lot sale presented as a dynamic, multicamera livestream event, featuring rare examples by Francis Bacon and Jean-Michel Basquiat.)  

On offer at Christie’s from July 10 are a selection of big-ticket items from the likes of Andy Warhol, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Donald Judd, Basquiat, and Yoshitomo Nara, as well as emerging artists such as Vienna-based painter Amoako Boafo. The centerpiece of the sale is Barnett Newman’s Onement V (1952), a stunning “Zip” painting featuring two contrasting blue lines. “It is particularly fitting that this work was created at such a dramatic crossroads in American history,” says Ana Maria Celis, head of the sale, noting that the work hails from “a time when artists were striving to free themselves from traditional notions of art that had been established by previous generations.” 

It is one of only two paintings in the series that remains privately owned, and valued with an estimate of $30 million–$40 million, it is sure to reveal the temperature of the market in this new world. 

Christie’s ONE: A Global Sale of the 20th Century in New York is on view from July 10. Explore the sale virtually here.