What Would Galerie Editors Take Home from New York Marquee Week?

Galerie editors love to window shop and dream just like everyone else, and we are graced with access to one of the world’s best places to do so: New York City. Marquee Week, when the auction houses break out their blockbusters in tandem with NYC Design Week, Frieze Week, TEFAF New York, and ICFF, is a case in point. The editors of Galerie asked ourselves: If I were to take any artwork or three home from Marquee Week to cherish and look at every day for the rest of my life, what would I choose?

Here’s our shopping list of the things that we most wanted to add to our homes from the Marquee Week auctions at Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s.

Kikuo Saito Cerise, (2009) | Phillips

Petra Kobayashi, Creative Director

I would be thrilled to find a place for Kikuo Saito’s 2009 painting Cerise in my apartment. His works of lyrical abstraction and expressive washes of color have fascinated me since I visited his former studio, the KinoSaito Arts Center, in a former school in Westchester, New York. The abstract Japanese American painter, a former assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poon, and Kenneth Noland, found his own language of abstraction that is poetic and playful.

Constantin Brancusi Danaïde, (1913) | Christie’s

Jacqueline Terrebonne, Editor In Chief

I was just in Rome, where I saw the most incredible Brancusi show at Mercati di Traiano Musei dei Fori Imperiali. Titled “The Origins of Infinity,” the exhibition left me with an even deeper appreciation of the artist’s work after seeing his sculptures situated in the ancient spaces. Danaïde (1913), from the collection of S.I. Newhouse, part of a sale on May 18 at Christie’s, encapsulates everything I love about the artist’s work—how he dives into what he called “the essence of things” and how the resulting work has a timeless quality of elegant refinement.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan The girls take their places, (2024) | Phillips

Jill Sieracki, Executive Managing Editor

I had the pleasure of meeting Michaela Yearwood-Dan several years ago when a select group of Sarabande Foundation artists introduced a collaboration with The Rug Company. Not only is she wonderful in person, I just absolutely loved her painterly rug and instantly started following her work. I could easily stare at her abstracts all day, finding something new in the swirling pools of color enhanced with beautiful multidimensional facets. I particularly like this work as it is part of a series that responds to Monet’s gardens, which were the artworks that really sparked my love of art. And the title of Yearwood-Dan’s painting speaks to me on a personal level—who doesn’t want a little extra girl power in their life?

Mark Rothko Brown and Black in Reds, (1957) | Christie’s

Ryan Waddoups, Deputy Editor, Design

I recall being utterly transfixed by a similar Rothko at the Centre Pompidou during an all-too-short Paris outing several years ago, right before the pandemic surged. The museum was presenting a major exhibition on Francis Bacon which I found to be emotionally ravaging yet revelatory, and he has been my favorite artist without question ever since. The Rothko felt like a palette cleanser—there’s a certain honest and clarity imbued in his abstractions that gives pause and brought my heart rate down after tripping over the triptychs. Rothko’s work can run the emotional gamut; this one is tinged with a dash of danger, a reminder to run into the fire.

Gerhard Richter Kerze (Candle) | Christie’s

Rena Gross, Web Editor

Confession: the first thing that drew me to Kerze was that it is from the same Gerhard Richter series of 27 Kerze paintings as the cover art for the masterpiece Sonic Youth album Daydream Nation, which introduced my enthusiastic younger self to Richter in conjunction with avant post-punk. But whatever I thought I knew about Gerhard Richter was blown out of the water by seeing the candle painting in real life. It is luminous. The color of the flame is beyond what pixels can easily convey, set off by a symphony in neutrals. The painting was an honored centerpiece in the home of legendary art dealer Marian Goodman for decades.

Lee Bontecou Untitled | Sotheby’s

Lee Bontecou was the first abstract artist who really spoke to me. My university art history studies leaned toward ancient and Renaissance art, and I went to her 2004 MoMA retrospective with no idea what I was walking into. I have loved her ever since. Bontecou exhibited with Leo Castelli in the same midcentury era as Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Untitled is from the same period as her monumental industrial canvas and steel framework sculptures, and is reminiscent of another Untitled by her that hangs in the lobby of New York City Ballet’s Lincoln Center Headquarters, where I lose myself in its depths every time I pass by. But there’s often a difference between a work that is amazing to visit in a museum, and a work that harmonizes in a domestic setting. This Untitled drawing is perfect for frequent personal contemplation within a city apartment while retaining some of the themes and moods that fascinate me in Bontecou’s large wall sculptures.—RG

Wassily Kandinsky Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) | Sotheby’s

Since my other two New York Marquee week choices are small, with a restrained palette, I would want something that contrasts them to hang opposite in my apartment. What could be better than a big red Kandinsky? Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) dates from Wassily Kandinsky’s prime years at the Bauhaus and is up for auction for the first time in 65 years.—RG

René Magritte Femme-bouteille, (1955) | Sotheby’s

Gogo Taubman, Editorial Assistant

I have always been obsessed with the bowler hats, apples, clouds, pipes, bottoms, and piples of René Magritte, depictions so jarringly hyper-surrealistic that I’m sure many of his paintings would today be accidentally labeled “AI-generated content” on social media. But my favorite category of his work is the femme-bouteilles, a handful of wine bottles he painted directly onto in the 1950s as gifts for friends. It’s the kind of Magritte I’d actually want to live with on a shelf in my apartment amongst a random assortment of trinkets to let people notice or not—no big white wall or museum lighting required.

Leonora Carrington La naguala, (1975) | Sotheby’s

“Naguala” is the feminine of “nagual,” the Mesoamerican shapeshifter who slips between human and animal. A shapeshifter of sorts herself, Leonora Carrington fled the Nazis at 22, got locked in an institution in Spain, washed up in Mexico City, and spent the rest of her life reconditioning female magicians, sorceresses, and witches into figures of dignity. By 1975, she’d lived several lives and built her own visual religion alongside Remedios Varo. I love a painting where everyone is on their way to being something else. And for the best part: there’s an unfinished painting on the reverse that one of her cats scratched up while it was wet, forcing her to flip the canvas and start over. A painting about animal-human transformation, co-authored by a cat.—GT

Leonor Fini La chambre d’écho, (1974) | Christie’s

This painting steps away from Fini’s earlier Mannerist elongations and overt Surrealist props for something stranger, a sealed echo chamber where figures’s hair lifts off shoulders and marigold and chartreuse glow against the dark like stage lights. Fini painted it in 1974, deep into her own private mythology, having long since turned down André Breton’s invitation to formally join the Surrealists because she had no interest in his rules. She lived openly with two men, kept a clowder of Persian cats, designed Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking bottle, and showed up to parties in men’s tailoring or a feathered cape and white boots. All this to say, I really want to know what the gossip here was all about.—GT

Jean-Michel Basquiat Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), (1983) | Sotheby’s

Alexandria Sillo, Digital Director

What a thrill it would be to live with a Jean-Michel Basquiat masterpiece that once belonged to a 12-piece series now partly featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s permanent collection. Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) has been on display all over the world, from Los Angeles to Seoul, and features Basquiat’s signature graffiti that confronts viewers with societal issues still relevant today. The work was completed a few years before Basquiat’s untimely death at just 27 years old, and was first debuted at his historic solo exhibition at Larry Gagosian Gallery. A bit of history that stands the test of time.