Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
Mimmo Paladino
linoleum block print,
74.25 x 23 in.
1987
Trick or treat! We’ve conjured a batch of ghostly art from our collection. Beware Mimmo Paladino’s sinister skeletons, Jim Dine’s rogue raven, and James Drake’s malevolent monsters!
Jim Dine
Sun’s Night Glow
lithograph
35.5 x 51.5 in.
2000
James Drake
Salon of a Thousand Souls
lithograph
57 x 43 in.
1996
“I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception,” said James Turrell (b. 1943). “I want you to sense yourself sensing —to see yourself seeing.” Turrell’s exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2013 was his first solo display in New York City since the 1980’s, and he was ready to catch Manhattan’s eye. In his skyscape titled Aten Reign, the Light and Space artist transformed the museum’s iconic rotunda into an enormous oculus that could only be viewed from the ground floor. The installation emanated the full spectrum of color, hypnotically shifting from hue to hue.
“Aten Reign, a series of suspended oval armatures and sheer scrims that span the entire cavity of the building, is so overwhelming, meditative, beautiful and suited to the space that you actually forget you’re in the Guggenheim, where it’s almost architecturally impossible to do so,” wrote Times Quotidian of the work. Turrell joked that Frank Lloyd Wright might not have approved of this radical alteration of the structure’s design. His revolutionary but ephemeral artistic statement is captured in this large-scale archival pigment print. Like the masterwork it depicts, this 44-by-65-inch piece has its own gravitational pull.
Above: James Turrell.
James Turrell
Aten Reign
archival pigment print
44 x 65 in.
2015
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
Can you find Zane Bennett Contemporary Art? Using aerial photos sourced from Google Earth, Lu Xinjian (b. 1977) meticulously depicted the streets of Santa Fe in acrylic on linen. City DNA Santa Fe is part of a larger series by the Chinese artist, where he reduces far-flung metropolises into densely patterned abstractions. Lu Xinjian hasn’t visited many of the places that appear in the expansive City DNA series. He completes each immense painting in his studio in China, traveling the globe through his brush and imagination. From Beijing to New York City to Amsterdam, Lu Xinjian precisely and energetically captures each city’s visual rhythm.
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
“Shape and color are my two strong things,” said Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015). The New York artist’s position on his own work was as simple as that, but his influence on 20th century art was considerably more complex. Kelly was a key player in the evolution of hard-edge painting, Color Field painting, minimalism, and Pop Art, though he never willingly assumed the mantle of a particular movement. Quietly and diligently, he observed the built environment around him and captured his shifting perceptions on canvas and paper.
Kelly’s lithograph Blue and Orange and Green is poetic in its simplicity, a visual haiku consisting of three echoed forms in bright hues. “I wanted to give people joy,” Kelly said. His print, which is new to the Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Collection, is sure to brighten your day—and perhaps your living room.
Above: Ellsworth Kelly, Phaidon.
Ellsworth Kelly
Blue and Orange and Green
lithograph
25 x 13.75 in.
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“Being Latin American, you are made up of so many fragments from different cultures,” Arturo Herrera (b. 1959) told Art21 in a documentary called Play. The sequence shows the Venezuela-born, New York and Berlin-based artist sifting through an enormous pile of clippings from paintings, drawings, and printed materials. These are the puzzle pieces for his abstract collages, which incorporate undulating forms and dazzling colors into compositions that almost seem to emit an exuberant hum.
Herrera’s editioned, mixed-media collage Johannes is one such visual chorus. Created over two years in collaboration with the printers at Pace Editions, Johannes is a tour de force of printmaking experimentation. This mixed-media collage is composed of more than 100 separately printed elements in various printmaking techniques, including etching, aquatint, linocut, letterpress, collagraph, silkscreen and digital pigment print. Watch this video from Pace that details the fascinating process, and learn more about the print below.
Arturo Herrera, Johannes,
mixed-media collage with various printmaking techniques and felt,
62.5 x 39.5 in., 2012
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As an avid environmentalist, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) designed the first Earth Day poster to benefit the American Environment Foundation in Washington, D.C. in 1970. Twenty years later, Rauschenberg created this color silkscreen and color pochoir on wove paper to celebrate the success of the 1990 Earth Day, which had 200 million participants.
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
“Believe it or not, I can actually draw,” said Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988). After establishing himself as a musician, poet, and graffiti artist by the time he was 20, Basquiat debuted his paintings to critical acclaim in a group exhibition sponsored by Colab and Fashion Moda. He would have his first solo show a year later, which launched a prolific but tragically short career.
The artist’s signature, scrawling painting style often commented on systematic racism, class struggle, and power structures. Basquiat’s neo-expressionist paintings have been exhibited internationally since his death, often selling in the millions. In fact, the image from his 24-color screen print Flexible also appears in a 1984 painting that sold for $45.3 million at Phillips earlier this year. Look below to learn more about the print, which is new to our collection.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flexible,
24-color screenprint, 60.25 x 45.5 in, 2016
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
“Everything has an opposite pole,” said Jeff Koons (b. 1955) of his Luxury and Degradation sculptures. “If you just present optimism without a darker side… there’s no definition of optimism.” The 1986 series appropriates imagery from advertisements and memorabilia for alcoholic beverages—fertile ground to stir up ideas about class, commerce and nostalgia. These highly polished objects have an aura of opulence, but are in fact made from stainless steel. “To me, the stainless steel is the material of the proletarian, it’s what pots and pans are made of. It’s very hard material and it’s fake luxury,” Koons explained.
The artist’s crowning achievement from the body of work is Jim Beam J.B. Turner Engine, a 9.5-foot-long model of a steam engine that’s loaded with bottles of whiskey. “I find it a very powerful image,” Koons said. “An image about progress, about future, about strength.” As always, Koons hovers on the edge of sincerity: his inspiration for the artwork was not an actual locomotive, but rather a kitschy decanter in the shape of one. He included an image of the Jim Beam sculpture in a set of three photolithographs named for the series. The Luxury & Degradation portfolio (1986) depicts the artist’s renditions of the steam engine, a Baccarat crystal set and a fisherman golfer figurine. Scroll down to see the works and learn more.
Above: Jeff Koons, by Andrew Burton AFP.
Jeff Koons
Luxury and Degradation
photolithograph (portfolio of three prints)
32 x 24 in. each
1986
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You could win a work of art by Manuel Amorim (b. 1950)! Enter our free raffle for a chance to add his woodcut Nuit Mauve to your collection. Fragmented and existential, the Lisbon-born artist’s work centers on shadowy silhouettes moving solo through the universe.
To enter, simply subscribe to our email newsletter between today and Friday, May 11th. We’ll announce the winner next week.
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary collection.
Lovers of beautiful books, rejoice! Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is now an official seller of TASCHEN Books, the revolutionary German imprint that deserves its own art museum. TASCHEN has collaborated with the likes of David Hockney, Christo & Jeanne-Claude and Beatriz Milhazes to produce limited edition books that are true works of art. We’re particularly excited about their new title Murals of Tibet, an epic chronicle of some of the greatest treasures of Buddhist culture and Tibetan heritage.
For more than a decade, photographer Thomas Laird traveled the length, breadth, and far-flung corners of Tibet’s plateau to capture the land’s spectacular Buddhist murals. Deploying new multi-image digital photography, Laird compiled the world’s first archive of these artworks, some walls as wide as 10 meters, in life-size resolution. In recognition of this World Heritage landmark and preservation of Tibetan culture, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has signed all copies of this Collector’s Edition. As pictured, Murals of Tibetcomes with a stand designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect and humanitarian pioneer Shigeru Ban.
Click the images below to view more books from TASCHEN, now available from Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. Browse all of our TASCHEN titles and other books in our online shop.
Judy Chicago is having a moment. In the past few months, she’s been featured in an Artsy podcast, profiled in an article for W Magazine, and hailed as “The Godmother” in a recent piece by New York Times Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Once your eye is trained to see Chicago’s imprint, it is everywhere, and unmistakable. It’s in Petra Collins’s menstruation-positive T-shirts; in the forthcoming installation on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. by Zoe Buckman of a huge uterus drawn in neon tubing crowned with boxing gloves; in the pink “pussy hats” that are worn in opposition to Trump’s election. Images like these — symbolically overt, politically and anatomically in-your-face, forcing a public confrontation with sexism — are all descended from Chicago’s imagination.
Another article that appeared in the New York Times a few days ago analyzed the tumultuous legacy of critical perspectives on Chicago’s most iconic work, The Dinner Party:
[Chicago] said that despite the art media’s early disparagement of her work, her way of overcoming the disappointment was to go into her studio and continue making art. She found a supportive community in Southern California’s Ferus boys, notably the American artist and sculptor Billy Al Bengston, from whom she said she learned quite a bit. “Early on, he told me: ‘Never read reviews. Just count the column inches and the number of pictures,’ advice I heeded for many years. And given the vicissitudes of my career, it was really good advice.”
Chicago’s fiery feminist statement on the rebirth of humanity, Birth Tear / Tear, appeared at our sister gallery form & concept when Chicago visited last February. Watch our Q&A with her here, and inquire about the piece below.
Image: Photograph by Collier Schorr. Styled by Suzanne Koller. New York Times Magazine.
Judy Chicago
Birth Tear / Tear
serigraph
24 x 34 in
year: 1985
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary collection.
Donald Sultan (b. 1951) emerged as a master of the New Image movement in the 1970’s, producing elegant, minimalist imagery using industrial materials that were decidedly postminimal. Abstracted blooms are an iconic motif in his work. The new screen print in our collection offers a prime example of Sultan’s style, characterized by stark, black forms amid vibrant fields of color. In the print, tar and flocking enhance the dark fields, transforming them into infinite chasms with powerful visual gravity.
Scroll down to view our new Sultan screen print—along with a full bouquet of the artist’s flower compositions—in the Zane Bennett Contemporary collection, and click here to browse all available works.
Image: David A. Land, Hamptons Magazine.
Donald Sultan
Red Poppies, July 24, 2012
screen print with tar and flocking
year: 2012
Donald Sultan
Trumpet (Green, Red, Black & Blue)
aquatint, 31.50 x 27.87 in (each print)
Donald Sultan
Black Flowers September 12
lithograph, 29.87 x 22 in.
Click here to view the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
Starting Black Friday (Nov. 24) and extending through Cyber Monday (Nov. 26), enjoy a 10% discount on any acquisition from Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. Scroll down to see our latest offerings, and browse the complete collection on our website.
Robert Motherwell
America — La France Variations VI
lithograph and collage
46.5 x 32.125 in.
year: 1983-4
Helen Frankenthaler
Solar Imp.
color screenprint
39.375 x 29.875 in.
year: 2001
Ellsworth Kelly
Untitled (Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary)
color lithograph
29 x 41 in.
year: 1983
Christo
Wrapped Telephone, Project for L.M. Ericsson Model
color lithograph with mixed-media collage
28 x 22 in.
year: 1985
Christo
Wrapped Motorcycle/Sidecar (Project for Harley-Davidson 1933 VL Model)
color lithograph with mixed-media collage
19.626 x 21.875 in.
year: 1997
Francis Bacon
Lithograph for the Metropolitan Museum of Art
color lithograph poster
44.875 x 33.625 in.
year: 1975
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Despite being credited with a Pop sensibility, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) defies categorization with his diverse output of photographic books and tongue-in-cheek photo-collages, paintings, and drawings. Ruscha’s work is inspired by the ironies and idiosyncrasies of life in Los Angeles, which he often conveys by placing glib words and colloquial phrases atop photographic images or fields of color. Known for painting and drawing with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood, and Pepto Bismol, Ruscha draws attention to the deterioration of language and pervasive clichés in pop culture.
Ruscha’s lithograph Relos Arena is new to the Zane Bennett Contemporary collection. The artist’s bold style and idiosyncratic splatter effects are on dynamic display in the piece, but it also possesses an elegance and subtlety that echoes its subject matter. Scroll down to view detail images of this work, and click here to inquire now.
