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Holly's Picks
Holly Sherratt | Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art, West Coast
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Art Within Reach is my favorite auction of the year. Living in the Bay Area, I’m especially drawn to iconic California artists like Ed Moses, Tom Holland, and Nathan Oliveira. Each brings something unique—Moses’s layered energy, Holland’s vibrant sculptural surfaces, and Oliveira’s powerful figures. With estimates often close to the cost of framing, it’s an accessible way to collect serious art. I keep a painting rack at home and rotate works every few months, sometimes by theme, sometimes just by color. This auction invites you to collect with intention and curate a space that reflects your passion.
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These striking drawings from Anna Gaskell’s Ornithology Club series—offered with no reserve—mark a shift from her staged photographs of adolescent girls in psychologically charged, ambiguous scenes. Emerging in the 1990s, Gaskell drew on fairy tales, especially Alice in Wonderland, to explore secrecy, restraint, and unease. Here, she turns to large, minimal works, figureless yet rich with suggestion. A bird in motion, a drifting balloon, a streak of blood: each hint at repressed desire, ritual, and latent violence. The restraint deepens their emotional impact, inviting quiet reflection. Individually powerful, the drawings together suggest an elusive narrative—evocative, haunting, and unresolved.
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During a recent visit to Magnolia Editions, I spoke with Donald Farnsworth about his innovative tapestry process. Beginning with a high-resolution scan, Magnolia applies a proprietary color-matching system to preserve Liu’s brushwork, washes, and signature drips. The file is then translated into weave instructions and brought to life, thread by thread, on a Jacquard loom at a family-run mill in Belgium. In FU (Happiness)
, Liu reimagines a young Chinese woman from a 1920s photograph, her gaze steady beneath translucent layers and trailing drips. She is framed by hand-drawn peonies—symbols of beauty and feminine honor—and overlaid with the character "Fu," invoking luck and domestic happiness. Her faint smile conveys quiet strength, tempered by the hardships faced by women of her time. The woven surface preserves the intimacy of the original while lending it a new, tactile presence.
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Taylor's Pick
Taylor Gattinella | Consignment Director, Modern & Contemporary Art
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's (Anti) Product Postcards, created in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were part of his early efforts to subvert traditional art distribution and critique commercialism. These handmade, often photocopied collages were sold on the streets of New York and featured layered imagery, text, and iconography that challenged mainstream narratives about race, power, and identity. Rejecting the glossy idealism of typical postcards, Basquiat’s versions were raw and confrontational, echoing the gritty energy of the city and his roots in graffiti and street culture. These works helped establish his voice as a radical, self-taught artist disrupting the boundaries between high and low art.
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Ezriel's Picks
Ezriel Wilson | Cataloguer, Fine Art
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Coday Brown’s Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas made me gasp while cataloging it. Brown captivated me with her abilities in setting the overall tone within a work through her handling of space and light. Her figures, often set within tightly framed, intimate spaces, also explore the vulnerability of our connections and relationships. Though the space is tight and small, it is dominated by beautifully rendered abstract stained-glass window. While the space feels as though it could be religious, any iconography has been removed and only shapes remain. Two figures appear to be interacting, their anonymity preserved, allowing the viewer to project their own personal feelings onto the scene.
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Jon Young’s Untitled (Armadillo Waymark)
—composed of iridescent fabric, sand, and wood—is absolutely captivating. It’s almost otherworldly impression speaks, of course, to the Texan in me, but it also feels as if it could have been unearthed from an archaeological site of the future. Young’s work explores the concept of archaic imagery and symbolic time, drawing on inspiration of symbols in ancient traditions, like the Nazca Lines of Peru or the Hall of the Bulls in France. He creates these zoomorphic symbols through a newly hand-constructed medium, blending tactile craftsmanship with conceptual depth. By creating these futuristic, fossil-like forms in varying sizes and exhibiting them under shifting light conditions, Young invites viewers to experience the work differently—allowing its
meaning to evolve depending on one’s personal perspective and lived experience.
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Frank's Picks
Frank Hettig | Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art
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Michael Ray Charles’ The Race (1993), from his Forever Free Post series, lingers in the mind long after you’ve seen it. Styled like a vintage advertisement, its weathered surface and embedded copper penny lure you in—only to reveal a sharp critique of how racial stereotypes have been packaged and circulated in American culture. Charles doesn’t reproduce these images to offend, but to confront their persistence and the ways they continue to shape public perception. The work leaves you unsettled—not with answers, but with a quiet insistence that the images we inherit deserve to be questioned.
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Aside from artists' political engagement, which is minimal and conceptual, I also admire artists who are interested in new materials and techniques. By 1970, polymers (especially synthetic resins and acrylics) were becoming widely used in fine art, providing intense, saturated color, translucency, and durability. The series reflects Jonson’s experimentation with these new materials, which offered greater control over surface and luminosity. The Transcendental Painting Group, founded in 1938 in New Mexico by Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, was a collective of artists dedicated to exploring abstraction as a means to express spiritual and metaphysical ideas.
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Walter's Picks
Walter Ramirez | Consignment Director, Urban Art
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Marilyn Minter’s Hands Washing (1989) is a lush, almost hypnotic image—hands caught mid-lather, gleaming and intimate. Printed in enamel on aluminum and part of a limited edition from Landfall Press in Chicago, the piece shimmers with Minter's signature blend of hyperrealism and sensual grit. It toes the line between beauty and imagery and fine art, turning a mundane act into something ritualistic, even erotic. The glossy surface intensifies this feeling, making every bubble and droplet seem exaggerated and charged. Part of a trio from that year—alongside Hands Folding and Hands Dumping—Hands Washing zooms in on the language of touch, using the simple motions of the hand to explore deeper ideas of care, cleanliness, and indulgence.
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Joe Andoe has carved out a quiet but powerful space in contemporary painting with his haunting images of horses. Working with a stripped-down, almost ghostly technique, he builds up layers of oil paint only to wipe much of it away—leaving behind faint, spectral outlines that seem to drift in and out of view. In works like Two Horses, the animals appear not fully formed but remembered, as if pulled from the haze of a dream or a distant past. There's a raw intimacy to the way he renders them—never overly detailed, yet fully alive. Andoe’s horses feel less like portraits and more like echoes, reminders of a rural America that's slowly slipping away. His art captures that in-between space, where presence feels like absence, and memory becomes its own kind of
landscape.
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Ed's Picks
Ed Beardsley | Vice President and Managing Director, Fine & Decorative Arts
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I’m drawn to these works by Scott Daniel Ellison, an American painter who is known for often haunting, surreal imagery that blends elements of folklore, horror, and nature. Ellison's paintings often depict anthropomorphic animals, spectral figures, and eerie landscapes. His color palette is dominated by blacks and muted tones, creating a moody, atmospheric effect, for me evoking a sense of both unease and curiosity. I’m enjoying pondering two works in our auction, an oil and acrylic on canvas, Crocodilian, and a letterpress print on paper, Monster Masks.
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From the Estate of Marlene Meyerson, Dallas, we are presenting three wonderful works from Robert Kelly’s "Road to Nice" series. Kelly is an American artist celebrated for his collaged geometric abstractions that intertwine historical references, formalist aesthetics, and a tactile use of materials. I am drawn to his meticulous layering, mark-making, and compositional precision, which for me give his works a harmonious balance and meditative quality. Kelly's work is rooted in the traditions of modernist abstraction, but the language is uniquely his own. I always enjoy seeing his works in various exhibitions and in private and public collections, such as that of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the McNay Art Museum. These 14" x 11 ¼" gouache
on paper works are delightful.
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Holly Sherratt
Vice President, Modern &
Contemporary Art, West Coast
HollyS@HA.com
(415) 548-5921
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Taylor Gattinella
Consignment Director,
Modern & Contemporary Art
TaylorG@HA.com
(212) 486-3681
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Frank Hettig
Vice President, Modern & Contemporary Art
FrankH@HA.com
(214) 409-1157
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Walter Ramirez
Consignment Director,
Urban Art
WalterR@HA.com
(212) 486-3521
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Taylor Curry
Director, Modern &
Contemporary Art
TaylorC@HA.com
(212) 486-3503
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Ed Beardsley
Vice President and Managing Director, Fine & Decorative Arts
EdB@HA.com
(214) 409-1137
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