The U-3 model is designed to present collectors with a selection of relevant artists, showcasing their oeuvres through drawings, prints, and other artistic media which share peculiarly accessible estimates. The past auction gathered notorious figures of twentieth-century art, such as the Surrealist painter René Magritte, the English Pop artist Joe Tilson, and Edward Ruscha, who collaborated in the 1970s with the New-York independent magazine from which Art-Rite inherited its name and identity. In today’s post, we are presenting the three top lots from this session.
The first top lot of this auction is certainly Yes (1984), a lithography on paper by Edward Ruscha. The piece, starting from a relatively modest estimate of 2800 – 3200 €, reached an hammer price of 7500 €. This result was probably supported by the insertion of the work in the catalogue raisonné of Ruscha’s prints. This sale is even more interesting when considering that the artist collaborated with Art-Rite Magazine in New York, producing some of the covers for their issues, thus determining a special connection between Ruscha’s oeuvre and the contemporary auction house.
In Yes, the image is defined through the super-imposition of bi-dimensional planes. The contrast between the black and the orange tones refers to the dusk light penetrating into a dark room. It is a simple figurative device, which is complemented by the text “Yes”, added through large white letters, whose dimensions decrease from left to right. In this way, the artist creates the illusion of space, as if the word was penetrating into the image. The use of text, a recurrent feature in Ruscha’s oeuvre, reveals the influence of Conceptual Art and its experimentations with language, which revolutionised American art from the 1960s onwards.