George Condo painting sells for $1.28 million as London auction season continues. https://ift.tt/oMPaVmi

As London’s summer auction season continues, Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening and day sale achieved a total of £13 million ($16.5 million), led by George Condo’s Green and Purple Head Composition (2018), which sold for £1 million ($1.28 million). Condo’s current record is HK$53.15 million ($6.85 million), set by Force Field (2010) in 2020 at Christie’s Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Christie’s post-war to present auction totaled £10.36 million ($13.1 million), with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 5am, Cadiz (2009) as the top lot, selling for £567,000 ($729,420). Yiadom-Boakye’s work was also among the top lots at Phillips, where her Minotaur to Matador (2022) sold for £952,500 ($1.2 million). The artist’s current record is £2.95 million ($3.6 million), set by Six Birds in the Bush (2015) in 2023 at Sotheby’s.

These totals reflect a continued trend of moderate results at London’s summer sales, most evident recently at Sotheby’s evening auction on Tuesday, which had a result that was 55.86% below the equivalent sale last year.

These latest sales at Phillips and Christie’s garnered underwhelming totals in a similar vein to 2023 summer sales. Both last year and this year, on the whole, the sales brought in results within estimates, with many of the top lots leaning toward the lower end. However, at Christie’s this year, several lots from new names far surpassed their estimates, adding a spark of excitement to the otherwise temperate sales.

Top lots at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening & day sale

• George Condo, Green and Purple Head Composition (2018), sold for £1 million ($1.28 million), above its estimate of £700,000– £900,000 ($885,000–$1.14 million).
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Minotaur to Matador (2022) sold for £952,500 ($1.2 million), within its estimate of £900,000 to £1.5 million ($1.14 million to $1.89 million).
• Andy Warhol, Campbell Soup (1986) sold for £850,900 ($1.07 million), nearly doubling its low estimate of £450,000 ($568,700).
• Damien Hirst, Creed (2006) sold for £685,800 ($866,800), within its estimate of £500,000– £700,000 ($643,500–$900,900).
• Andreas Gursky, Los Angeles (1998) sold £546,100 ($690,200), within its estimate of £400,000–£600,000 ($514,800–$772,200).

Top lots at Christie’s post-war to present sale

• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 5am, Cadiz (2009) sold for £567,000 ($729,420), below its estimate of £600,000–£800,000 ($758,000–$1.01 million).
• Alighiero Boetti, (i) Bleu Cannes 497 (ii) Grigio Dover 207 (1967) sold for £529,200 ($668,780), far exceeding its estimate of £250,000–£350,000 ($315,900–$442,300).
• Alighiero Boetti, Oggi ventesimo giorno dell'ottavo mese dell'anno millenovecento ottantotto (1988) sold for £453,600 ($573,000), within its estimate of £350,000–£550,000 ($442,300 to $695,000).
• Günther Förg, Untitled (2008) sold for £441,000 ($567,660), near the low end of its estimate of £400,000–£600,000 ($514,800 to $772,200).
• Isa Genzken, Wiese (1990) sold for £441,000 ($567,660), within its estimate of £300,000–£500,000 ($386,100 to $643,500).

Standout sales for ultra-contemporary artists

Phillips’s only new auction record set during this sale was for British artist Wolfe von Lenkiewicz’s Garden of Earthly Delights (2012) triptych, which sold for £88,900 ($112,361), exceeding its estimate of £40,000 to £60,000 ($50,400 to $75,600).

Though the top lots at Christie’s were relatively lackluster, several ultra-contemporary artists’ works, including some auction debuts, achieved notable success.

• Daniel Crews Chubb, Yasigi and Beast (2018) sold for £74,340 ($93,670), exceeding its estimate of £20,000–£30,000 ($25,200–$37,800). This set a new auction record, which was previously $88,200, set by Yasigi (2017) at Phillips in June 2021.
• Sophia Loeb, Eu Descanso Através Da Sua Paz (I Rest Through Your Peace) (2024) sold for £60,480 ($76,200), smashing its estimate of £4,000–£6,000 ($5,040–$7,560). This sale marks the artist’s auction debut.
• Alia Ahmad, Windflower (2021) sold for £46,620 ($58,660), surpassing its estimate of £10,000–£15,000 ($12,600 to $18,900). The artist’s current auction record of £101,600 ($124,000) was set by Malga, The Place in Which we Gather (2022) at Phillips London in March 2024.
• Daisy Parris, Pink at Night (2020) sold for £35,280 ($44,460), smashing its estimate of £6,000–£8,000 ($7,560–$10,080). This is the artist’s auction debut.
• Clementine Keith Roach, Icon (2019) sold for £28,980 ($36,600), well above its estimate of £8,000 to £12,000 ($10,000 to $15,100).

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CAN Art Fair Ibiza 2024 Brings Contemporary Art to the Luxury Balearic Crowd https://ift.tt/1uOKFGe

It’s a typical Ibiza scene: A DJ is playing pulsing lounge music as beautiful, blissed-out people dressed in boho chic dance and sip on cocktails served by ultra-cool bartenders. No, this isn’t a beach club; instead, we’re at an art fair.

At Contemporary Art Now Ibiza (CAN), the art fair that is now in its third year at the FECOEV events space, you can forget the usual art fair vibe of suits, handshakes, and a buttoned-up demeanor. Here, a part of the draw (for both visitors and galleries) is the chilled-out social scene. Open from 6 p.m.–10 p.m. each night (perfectly timed to follow a day on the beach), the event takes the typical elements of an art fair—booths and artwork, gallerists, and visitors—and puts an Ibiza spin on it. Case in point: The opening party took place at legendary nightclub Pacha, and ran until 6 a.m.

It’s obvious that Ibiza’s natural beauty, endless social opportunities, and luxurious charm hold major appeal for any visitor, yet the island is well off the beaten path of the typical art fair circuit. As CAN kicked off its third edition, with a focus on the local Balearic art scene, the fair showed how its desirable location and focused curation is building a thriving scene well beyond the traditional art world hubs.

In conversations during the VIP opening on Wednesday night, plenty of the fair’s returning gallerists made it clear how much the social elements influenced their decision to attend. Brussels gallery Ballon Rouge, which has participated in every edition of the fair so far, was well aware of the fair’s benefits. “First of all, the hours,” said Helene Dumenil and Nicole O’Rourke, founder and founding director of the gallery.

This “work-ation” atmosphere overflowed into the booths, where conversations seemed low-key. With prices up to €5,000 ($5,348), Ballon Rouge’s booth focused on figurative painting and textile works by solely queer artists (the gallery specializes in women and LGBTQ+ artists) in bright shades, a style that was prevalent across the fair: “We realized we can go brighter and a bit flashy here,” the pair added.

Indeed, there was a clear coherence among the 35 booths on show, and many of the works at the fair could fit in well in other galleries’ booths. Most of all, there was an emphasis on accessible figurative painting—which is why it comes as no surprise that the curated fair was all selected by one man: Saša Bogojev. “Contemporary figurative art is what I’m most passionate about, and am most familiar with,” the curator said, noting that the fair is intended to be a boutique experience. “The fair has the potential to be so niche, and quite focused on this one corner of the art world.”

Maia, 2024
José María Yturralde
Ruttkowski;68

Rome, Late Morning, 2018
Christopher Page
Gathering

Nevertheless, he noted several striking instances of abstraction at the fair—such as a new series of bright halos at Ruttkowski;68 by renowned Op Art painter José María Yturralde, a Spanish artist who has received considerable critical acclaim in his homeland. Almost all of the works at CAN were made in the last three years, he said. Prices across the fair are accessible, with most priced in the four- to low five–figure range.

Bogojev was invited to curate the fair by founding director Sergio Sancho, who also founded long-running Madrid fair UVNT (a satellite that runs alongside ARCOmadrid). Sancho explained that this focus on figurative painting was tailored to what he sees as the natural audience for CAN: the island’s growing number of new residents, relocated to their second homes here since COVID-19.

He estimates that this is a cohort of the Ibiza population is in the 35 to 50 age range, may have spent time on Ibiza previously, and is likely to stay on the island year-round—as the pandemic proved that being physically present in New York, Paris, or Münich was no longer necessary.

As they spend more time on the island, this audience has had a growing appetite for cultural events: “People who usually live in London and live the whole year here, they need something cultural—they want to go to openings and meet people,” Sancho said. Similarly, these collectors have more time and space here on the island: “When it’s your second residency, you might only have a few things,” he said.

FBX_479, 2023
Michael Staniak
LA BIBI Gallery

The Haircut, 2022
José Fiol
Galeria Fran Reus

It’s a similar dynamic that has contributed to the growth of the culture sector in Majorca, the largest Balearic island, which has seen a burgeoning art scene, particularly in the last few years. Many of Majorca’s newer galleries were present at CAN Ibiza, such as LA BIBI Gallery, which was showing fluorescent, shimmering paintings by Michael Staniak, among others.

Also from Palma in Majorca, Fran Reus, who founded his eponymous gallery in 2016, noted that while Majorca is “not a hub like London or Paris,” there were plenty of collectors who pass through the island on vacation. “At Untitled Miami, I see collectors who say ‘Oh, Majorca, I have a house there!’” he said. “Step by step, we are becoming known to people who have second residences, especially in the last two or three years,” he added.

La Vida y la muerte me estan desgastando, 2023
Giovanni Ozzola
GALLERIA CONTINUA

Fluck, 2023
Xénia Laffely
Ballon Rouge

While Majorca’s gallery scene is more mature (and Menorca, of course, has a Hauser & Wirth outpost), Ibiza has only a smattering of contemporary art galleries. Yet that is slowly changing. Just six weeks ago, London tastemaking gallery Gathering opened its new outpost in the north of the island. The gallery was present at the fair, too, with a strong booth of large-scale abstract paintings from artists such as Christopher Page. During the fair, Gathering was opening a big-name joint show of Stefan Brüggemann (who has a studio in Ibiza) and Bruce Nauman.

Of course, Ibiza is a tempting hotspot for visitors without second homes here, too, and the fair runs a program allowing each gallery to bring nominated collectors to the fair free of charge, making the most of the white island’s eternal appeal to spread the word about the fair.

But for some galleries, CAN Ibiza is about more than the people who actually attended. For New York gallery Hollis Taggart, which was showing a range of colorful abstract works by Osamu Kobayashi, Dana James, and Kathryn MacNaughton, the fair’s impact went far beyond visitors to the booth: “It is not so much ‘Ibiza collectors’ as it has brought in a broader exposure to collectors from Madrid, Barcelona, and surrounding areas,” said the gallery’s founder, Hollis Taggart. “More importantly, the social media outreach has brought inquiries and interest from a much broader audience globally. We sold a Dana James [work] to a collector in Omaha!…We have connected with artists and art advisors here that we would never meet in the U.S.”

As the fair expands to include more established international galleries (notably, major Italian dealers GALLERIA CONTINUA took part in the fair for the first time this year), it is also seeking to bolster the local arts scene to keep the island’s residents engaged in the contemporary art world year-round. CAN Ibiza organized an “off program” to highlight local artists and projects, especially those engaging with the recent history and current issues of local island life.

At windmill–turned–art space Sa Punta des Molí, for instance, Ibiza-born artist Irene de Andrés explores the consequences of the island’s reliance on clubbing tourism, in photographs and sculptures evoking the dusty glamour of Ibiza’s failed mega-clubs.

Elsewhere, on the side of the road surrounded by nothing but fig trees and dusty soil, an open-air disused water reservoir has been turned into a space for land art, taken over by Austrian artist Christian Eisenberger with wooden cutouts of snowmen alongside photography. The art spot is named SAFA, and run by Eva Fischer, who grew up on the island. In her youth, Fischer said she didn’t see any possibility of working in the creative industries on Ibiza, but now, as the island’s art scene is getting bigger, she is excited to bring international artists like Eisenberger to the island, bringing art to everyone from tourists driving by (she had just shown around a family with two kids) to local farmers. “It’s been a boom, now let’s latch onto it,” she said.

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Ilana Savdie’s Fluorescent Paintings Conjure a Carnival Chaos https://ift.tt/2f5Qq76

Ilana Savdie is an archivist. Everywhere she goes, whether she’s traveling for work or on vacation, she is compelled to document the world. Horror movies, Italian basilicas, wrestling stills, Baroque sculpture, and the iconography of digital culture are among the varied inspirations cataloged in her notebooks and thousands of screenshots on her camera roll. To create her paintings in her Brooklyn studio, Savdie distills this cadre of influences into fluorescent, chaotic canvases, where distinctions between low and high art dissolve.

“An important way that I relate to the world is through image,” the artist said in an interview with Artsy. “There’s this democratization that happens—a non-hierarchical way of approaching both the high and low, a flattening [of] their level of importance to me.” Once these references are “flattened” in her mind, she envisions them “colliding” as she draws in her sketchpads or paints her canvases. She brings these mangled elements together to create compelling, unified paintings. The resulting expressive works—unsettling, mesmerizing, and evoking the uncertainty of the world we live in—are on view in “Ectopia” at White Cube in Paris until July 27th.

After completing her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2018, Savdie quickly rose to acclaim. Her first breakthrough came with a solo exhibition at ltd los angeles in 2019, followed by 2021 solo exhibitions with Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Deli Gallery in New York. Building on that momentum, Savdie presented her work for the first time with White Cube in London in 2022. And in July 2023, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a solo exhibition, “Radical Contradiction,” a sign that the wider art world was taking notice.

Having grown up in Barranquilla, Colombia, Savdie credits much of her early influence to the city’s renowned carnaval, the second-largest celebration of its kind in the world. As a child, she watched the streets come alive with riots of color for the parades. Participants wore extravagant, often absurd costumes, such as the popular phallic marimonda mask, an elephant-monkey character meant to mock the oppressive elite. These early experiences ended up having an outsize influence on her work, evident in the bold, expressive use of color in her large-scale paintings.

Her work has continued to focus on how identity is performed and understood culturally. As well as the carnival masks, she has been inspired by everything from images of wrestling personalities to historical prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and the choreography of war scenes in films. These references are somewhat recognizable but distorted in her paintings, such as Spinal Sheds of a Desperate Glory, evocative of clashing wrestlers, or In your vast and ancient sorrow that was my home (all works 2024), a painting that distills abstract forms into a mask-like head. For Savdie, this interest in masking is related to her own queerness and the community’s connection to secrecy and performance. Queer people have, for centuries, been expected to conform publicly and therefore perform a homogenous identity for a supposedly straight society.

“I think often of the uniquely queer experience of being both encoded and exposed at the same time,” she said. “Performativity as both a masking and a shedding of that armor/skin/shell that can be as much protective as it is oppressive.”

In “Ectopia,” Savdie is fixated on two critical dichotomies. The first is between vulnerability and strength, which she discussed with Moran Sheleg, who wrote an essay, “Ilana Savdie’s Shadow Body,” to accompany the exhibition. “We were talking about the hero and the emergence of the hero in the spectacle of war. What does protection mean, real or diluted? A lot of these works make reference to the protective shell of crustaceans alongside references to the decadent armor of a warrior,” Savdie explained.

The second is between chaos and order. In paintings like Scattered Signals of the Upright, chaotic elements—such as swirling colors and fragmented shapes—are arranged to create a sense of underlying order. This oscillation between form and frenzy is representative of how we see ourselves, perceptions that are always shifting.

As well as the massive paintings, “Ectopia” features six pen drawings. After years of planning her work directly on the canvas, in 2020, the artist reintroduced drawing to her process as a way to develop a relationship with ideas parallel to her image archive. “Drawing was a way to step away from a reference image and sit with a feeling first—to just indulge my own relationship to something from memory alone,” Savdie said.

These works on paper, such as the frenetic pen drawing Hobby Horses, are always left unfinished and stand out amid her colossal paintings in the show. Exhibited together in “Ectopia,” she intends for viewers to independently find connections between her smaller drawings and the larger works. For instance, the painting Paper Planes, marked by colliding iridescent greens, pinks, purples, and oranges, seems to relate to the mangled faces and limbs that appear in Hobby Horses.

When she actually begins her paintings, she first pours paint and melted beeswax onto the canvas, watching it “glacially travel” across its surface. Then, she cross-references her drawings and her archive of images. “It becomes about being responsive both to the decisions that I made in the sketch and the decisions that the material made on canvas. In that interplay, I find the final form,” she said. From there, the painting is a process of balancing her various influences, references, and sketches.

The term “ectopia” itself, a medical term describing an organ or body part being in the wrong place, gives a clue to how Savdie sees her work—images that might not usually be placed together are manipulated to make the familiar unrecognizable. A hand, for instance, glimmers amid the abstract forms in A Divine Grin.

“The work sits in the delicate space between the seductive and the repulsive,” said Savdie. “Sometimes, it’s through the subject matter, and sometimes it’s through the materiality and that uncanny thing where something is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.” For Savdie, it’s this in-between feeling that is her chief motivation, a sign that she’s on the right track: “It’s teetering between two things, never quite resolving itself as anything. This feeling is the inertia that drives a lot of the work for me.”

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Frieze London and Frieze Masters announce participating galleries for its 2024 fairs. https://ift.tt/12dvm8Q

Frieze has announced the exhibitor list of Frieze London 2024, featuring 165 galleries from 43 countries, and Frieze Masters 2024, featuring 130 galleries from 26 countries. Both Frieze London and Frieze Masters are slightly smaller than last year, which featured 166 and 136 galleries, respectively, in 2023. The London fairs will run concurrently from October 9th to 13th in London’s Regent’s Park.

This year, Frieze London promises a new entrance and layout designed by A Studio Between intended to enhance the visibility of the fair’s curated sections. That includes the return of the celebrated Artist-to-Artist initiative, where established artists select emerging talents to showcase; and the new “Smoke” section, curated by Pablo José Ramírez, which will display ceramic works contemplating diasporic and Indigenous histories. The fair is also emphasizing “solo presentations and emerging artists front and center, in a demonstration of Frieze’s commitment to the most exciting art being made today,” said Eva Langret, director of Frieze London.

Frieze London will host 56 London-based galleries, including preeminent galleries like Lisson Gallery, Victoria Miro, and White Cube, as well as emerging galleries featured in the Focus section, like Rose Easton and Harlesden High Street. The Artist-to-Artist initiative will include works by Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom and Peter Uka, among others.

Meanwhile, Frieze Masters, in collaboration with designer Annabelle Selldorf, will refine its architectural layout to encourage guests to draw connections between artworks spanning eras.

Frieze Masters will also expand its Studio section, curated by Sheena Wagstaff, now in its second year, with historically driven solo presentations of artists like Kim Yun Shin, presented by Lehmann Maupin, Beatrice Caracciolo, presented by Paula Cooper Gallery, and Thaddeus Mosley, presented by Karmas.

“Our new curatorial direction acknowledges how, each year, many artists visit Frieze Masters to satisfy their curiosity, rejuvenate their thinking, and see how the work of their artist peers reflects the creative values of the past,” said Sheena Wagstaff, creative advisor of Frieze Masters.

Find the full list of 2024 exhibitors at Frieze London here, and for Frieze Masters here.

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Pace Gallery now represents Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. https://ift.tt/fjhHUo0

Pace Gallery now represents Miami-based artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. The gallery will present the artist’s solo show “Entre El Día Y La Noche” (“Between Day and Night”) in London from September 3rd to 28th. This will be the artist’s most substantial show to date and his first major exhibition in the U.K. Pace will co-represent the artist in collaboration with KDR in Miami.

Born in 1990 in Havana, Piñeiro Bello studied painting at The National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro from 2006 to 2010. There, the artist developed his signature style, marked by his use of oil paint on raw linen or burlap. His bright, gestural work draws on vibrant Caribbean culture and its diaspora, inspired by his experience living between Havana and Miami, and occasionally includes surrealistic imagery. According to Pace, his work is likened to Cuban artists Wifredo Lam and Manuel Mendive, as well as Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin.

“I remember being in the library of the San Alejandro Academy in Havana almost 20 years ago. With much luck, one could sometimes obtain an art book or catalog from outside the island, [and] there I was exposed for the first time to the magnificent, cutting-edge exhibitions of the galleries and institutions that shaped the contemporary art world,” said Piñeiro Bello. “I observed those scenarios as when one discovers a wonder from another world. From that moment, I dreamt of being able to show my work in a place like that; dreams come true.

“I am very, very happy for this representation and, most of all, to be able to work with such a beautiful and special team where human connection is essential and enriching,” Piñeiro Bello added.

At Pace, “Entre El Día Y La Noche” will feature a series of new paintings, works on paper, and a sculpture, each embodying the transition between day and night in Cuba. To explore this subject matter, Piñeiro Bello uses an iridescent palette and vast canvases, the largest of which stretches over 20 feet wide. The works will juxtapose classical Western painting techniques with non-linear narratives typical of Latin American storytelling.

Piñeiro Bello’s first presentation with Pace, “Viaje en Espiral,” took place in Seoul last June. In recent years, the artist has exhibited with the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and the NSU Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, FL. His works are featured in several prominent public and private collections, including the Rubell Museum in Miami and The Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.

“Alejandro Piñeiro Bello fuses his personal memories of Cuba—the sea, a sunset, an indigo night sky—with the country’s rich cultural history and traditions of dance, music, and the Marvellous Real,” said Pace president Samanthe Rubell. “We are thrilled to welcome his boundless creativity and fresh perspective to Pace’s program.”

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$20 million Basquiat painting leads Sotheby’s modern and contemporary sale. https://ift.tt/AwHyPjb

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict (1982) sold for £16 million ($20 million) in Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening auction in London last night. The auction totaled £84 million ($106 million), surpassing its pre-sale estimate of £69.6 million–£98.9 million ($88 million–$125.1 million).

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict was last intended to go to auction at a Christie’s sale in New York in May 2022. However, it was withdrawn at the last minute, after the auction house reportedly gave the work an unpublished estimate of $30 million (£23.6 million).

This total sales figure from this auction marks a notable drop compared to last year’s equivalent summer sale at Sotheby’s, which achieved a sum of £190.3 million ($241.9 million). Notably, that 2023 auction was largely driven by Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (1917–18), which sold for £85.3 million ($108 million), smashing the artist’s record. This year’s summer auction did not set any artist records.

Despite the overall lower total this year, the auction still commanded seven- and eight-figure prices for key works. For instance, Pablo Picasso’s Guitare sur un tapis rouge (1922), which had not hit the auction block for 20 years, sold for £10.7 million ($13.5 million). Meanwhile, Picasso’s Nu assis (1960) sold for £5.7 million ($7.3 million) after being held in a private collection for over 50 years. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bouquet de lilas (1878) incited a 10-minute bidding war before eventually selling for £6.8 million ($8.7 million).

Meanwhile, there were notable contemporary sales, too. Seven bidders vied for Lucy Bull’s 10:00 (2021), which sold for £900,000 ($1.13 million), blowing past its presale estimate of £350,000–£550,000 ($442,000–$695,000). This sale signifies continued enthusiasm for Bull’s work, following the record-setting $1.81 million sale of 16:10 (2020) at Sotheby’s in New York this May.

Three lots from three notable women artists—Loie Hollowell, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and Tamara de Lempicka—were all withdrawn.

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How 5 LGBTQ+ Art World Couples Inspire Each Other https://ift.tt/TnhVPj6

Artists have always depended on love. Like water in an unforgiving desert, romantic relationships can be a bountiful source of inspiration, and an exploration of one’s own self through a new pair of eyes. For queer artists, this bond between an artist and their beloved has yielded some of the most definitive works of art. From Sleep (1964), Andy Warhol’s five-hour-long video of his lover John Giorno, to Isaac Julien’s dreamy sequences of Langston Hughes’s life and loves in Looking for Langston (1991), queer artists have long seen these connections as a space for artistic experimentation.

And yet, queer love has been among the most politicized and stigmatized forms of self-expression, and is still highly scrutinized, or even met with violence. Many LGBTQ+ artists, in a spirit of resilience, have brought their physical and emotional yearnings into the core of their practices. From disarming portraits to silently penetrating sculptures, many works of art, both joyous and devastating, have resulted from queer artists’ relationships.

Artsy spoke to five queer couples about the power of capturing their romance, the ties that hold them together against the challenges of the industry, and the inspiration they find in each other.

Gray Wielebinski and Asa Seresin

When Gray Wielebinski booked the ICA London as his wedding venue to marry his partner Asa Seresin, he wasn’t expecting another email from the institution’s curators soon after: an invitation for his first institutional exhibition, “The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low.” The ceremony ended up taking place at the venue concurrently with the show, and the couple got to take their wedding photos in front of his multimedia artworks.

Wielebinski and Seresin initially connected on a dating app three years ago. The first date turned into a days-long romance, which led Seresin, a PhD candidate at Penn University who studies gender, particularly heteronormativity, to postpone his flight twice. The moment was critical for Wielebinski, who, at the time, had just turned 30, gone through top surgery, and opened his first gallery solo at London’s Hales Gallery. “We fell in love really quickly,” Wielebinski remembered.

The couple’s romantic and professional lives overlapped early on, when Seresin penned an essay for the group show “Motherboy,” which Wielebinski co-organized in 2023 with curator Stella Bottai at Milan gallery Gió Marconi. Though they have separate practices—Wielebinski focuses on the performance of masculinity in his multimedia artworks, while Seresin studies our complex relationship with desire—their ideas often converge around language, they explained. “Our mutual interest in self-expression has helped me solidify my vision and help translate my focus into a language,” said Wielebinski. “I do appreciate that we both have a child-like love, maybe in an obsessive way, about an idea.”

Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Elle Stanford

The pandemic was the starting point for London-based painter and sculptor Michala Yearwood-Dan and Elle Stanford’s relationship. The couple first chatted on an app in December 2019, two months after Stanford, a culture editor at the New York Times, had moved to London from New York. Their first in-person meeting the following month quickly evolved into meetings zigzagging London’s emptied-out streets.

“We immediately witnessed each other’s most vulnerable moments and raw feelings, and this made us move faster than usual in the relationship,” said Stanford. As a journalist who had “almost” studied art history in college, she was immediately impressed by Yearwood-Dan’s studio practice. The painter had just opened her first solo gallery show at Tiwani Contemporary when they met and, for the first time, she was able to make a living through her absorbing paintings of distorted flora. “Seeing works in progress and visiting museums together has shown me the layers of creating abstraction,” Stanford said of her partner’s work.

For Yearwood-Dan, this relationship provides the support in what has been a formative time in her career. The painter was contacted by Marianne Boesky Gallery on Instagram in October 2020 with an interest in a Zoom studio visit, leading to a small presentation at the Chelsea gallery’s project room in 2021. In 2023, she presented a larger show at the main space. “I have been fortunate to grow my practice in a loving space where late-night studio time and sometimes prioritizing our careers are understood,” added Yearwood-Dan, who thinks their relationship has made her more “feisty about what needs to be achieved.”

Anthony Cudahy and Ian Lewandowski

Anthony Cudahy and Ian Lewandowski first met 11 years ago in a typical fashion for the 2010s New York art scene: They collaborated on a zine. Cudahy invited Lewandowski to publish his photos in the biweekly publication he worked on, which evolved into a date, and, eventually, a marriage with a dog. The painter and the photographer now work from neighboring studios, a walking distance from their Brooklyn apartment. “Our practices have always been adjacent, not only physically but also thematically,” says Lewandowski, whose photographic portraits depict queer elders, friends, or himself—currently on view in the solo shows “Reflector” at No Place in Columbus, Ohio, and “Again, again” at Aurora Photo Center in Indianapolis.

With their ambiguous emotional subjects, both artists capture forms of queer intimacy, and the artists appear in each others’ work, occasionally in direct likeness. Cudahy’s moody paintings portray distorted interiors in hazy tones, in which bodies—anonymous or attributed—inhabit these malleable places. The artist will have concurrent solo shows this fall at the New York spaces of Hales and GRIMM, following the galleries’ joint Cudahy shows at their London spaces last year.

It was a challenge, a decade ago, for the couple to venture together into unpredictable careers as queer artists. “We didn’t know what our careers would look like,” said Lewandowski. “When there is a lack of foundation for what the future might be, having someone else going through a similar phase by your side, also crazily wanting the same thing, was encouraging.”

Hilary Harkness and Ara Tucker

Painter Hilary Harkness and writer Ara Tucker began their relationship on April Fools’ Day in 2013, but their bond became serious soon after. Brought together by a mutual love of racquet sports, they have since been intertwined in each other’s work lives, as much as their romantic lives. For example, Harkness created the cover art for Tucker’s 2022 book of surreal comical short stories, How to Raise an Art Star. Conversely, Harkness has also integrated the figure of Tucker—who has been shown in battle scenes or as a model for Josephine Baker—into her paintings that rewrite stories of mistreated historical female figures with a titillating edge. Agency and curiosity inhabit her heroines’ effortlessly determined ambitions. Warriors, aristocrats, rebellions, and sexual beings, they claim their real estates in tales of yore, painted in Harkness’s brisk gestures.

When Harkness came back home from her first day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Copyist Program in 2018, she decided to make a new version of Winslow Homer’s 1866 Prisoners from the Front, but paint the soldiers as Black. This became the “Arabella Freeman” series, named after a historical, fictional free Black woman, shown in Harkness’s recent solo exhibition “Prisoners from the Front” at P.P.O.W, her first in a decade.

Between Tucker occasionally taking over the painter’s Instagram account and Harkness snatching objects—such as a skull—from her partner’s writing studio to implement into her paintings, the couple has cultivated an organic form of creative exchange. “As a queer couple, we are trying to demystify things and bring others along with us instead of slamming any doors behind us,” said Tucker.

Jessica Silverman and Sarah Thornton

Art fairs are hardly the most rosy backdrops for love at first sight. However, stars aligned for art dealer Jessica Silverman and critic Sarah Thornton during Frieze London in 2011. Silverman’s booth, a solo presentation by queer German artist Susanne M. Winterling, was “one of only two good stands at the fair,” according to Thornton. Their tastes continued to coincide: After the critic stepped into the mixed-media installation, she realized that the then-emerging Jessica Silverman Gallery also represented Tammy Rae Carland, whose photography series “Lesbian Bed” had been one of her highlights from that year’s Istanbul Biennial.

Fast-forward 13 years, and the couple lives in San Francisco, where Silverman has grown her eponymous enterprise into a Bay Area powerhouse. Thornton, whose 2008 book Seven Days in the Art World is a classic on the contemporary art market, recently released her newest title, Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts. Included in the book is Silverman’s journey with breastfeeding their baby, Echo. “The experience of watching Jessica give birth and breastfeed was highly influential in the book’s structure,” Thornton said. A screenprint from the “Milk Fountain” series by Loie Hollowell (whom Silverman represents) illustrates the chapter with an abstracted hallucinatory rendition of an overflowing fountain of the white liquid.

While they might seem worlds apart, the influential critic and tastemaker dealer lend each other new perspectives. “I am the sounding board—I hear about everything, but now I much better understand how artists live and sales are done,” explained Thornton. When Silverman signed Judy Chicago into the gallery a few years ago, Thornton was her biggest champion. “Jessica has a more adventurous side than most dealers,” she added. “We are feminists and diversity is a driving force for programming.”

A decade on from that initial Frieze meeting, the couple’s taste has become harmonized. “We come to an agreement on the best painting in the room fairly quickly,” said Thornton. “Jessica’s eye is more adventurous than my conservative take—I need to see the next body of work to come around.”

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