Kenny Scharf

Kenny Scharf, VRING! Screenprint with metallic accents, gloss signed/N, FRAMED

2021

HOWARD HODGKIN Blue Skies, Nothing but Blue Skies, 2002 Screenprint in Colors, Scrunched Up and Presented in a Box 5 3/25 × 6 3/10 x 2 inches Edition of 500 (unnumbered) Momart is a British company specialising in the storage, transportation, and installation of works of art. Today, the company is best known for two things: its annual artist Christmas Card, and a 2004 warehouse fire that destroyed irreplaceable art works including Tracey Emin's famous "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Momart's clients include the Royal Academy of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Buckingham Palace. The tradition of the MOMART "Christmas card" (which would later morph into actual artist-designed work) goes back to 1984 when the first object – a festive card – was designed for the company by Bruce McLean. Since then Momart collaborated on this project with many of the top British and international artists. The complete series of Momart Christmas cards is now part of the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate. The present item is the vintage 2002 MOMART Christmas card, designed by Howard Hodgkin. It is a rich blue screenprint, scrunched up in a box - with the printed text MOMART CHRISTMAS CARD 2002 inside the box, the artist's name and work title, "Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies" and a credit at the bottom "With thanks to Gagosian Gallery London and Peter B. Willberg." And that's the MOMART "gift". Very cool and collectible! Unnumbered, but known to have been issued in an edition of 500 About Howard Hodgkin For an artist, time can always be regained . . . because by an act of imagination you can always go back. —Howard Hodgkin One of England’s most celebrated contemporary painters, Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) was deeply attuned to the interplay of gesture, color, and ground. His brushstrokes, set against wooden supports, often continue beyond the picture plane and onto the frame, breaking from traditional confines. Embracing time as a compositional element, his work is testament to his immersion in the intangibility of thoughts, feelings, and fleeting private moments. Hodgkin was born in London and grew up in Hammersmith Terrace. During World War II he was evacuated to Long Island, New York, for three years. In the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he saw works by School of Paris artists such as Henri Matisse, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard, which he could not easily have seen then in London or Paris. Back in England in 1943, Hodgkin ran away from Eton College and Bryanston School, convinced that education would impede his progress as an artist, though he encountered inspiring teachers at both schools. He then attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1949–50) and Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (1950–54). Hodgkin never belonged to a school or group. While many of his contemporaries were drawn to Pop or the School of London, he remained independent, initially marking his outsider status with a series of portraits of contemporary artists and their families. His first solo exhibition was at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London in 1962. Two years later he first visited India, following his interest in Indian miniatures, which began during his time at Eton. Collecting Indian art would remain a lifelong passion, which he initially supported by dealing in picture frames. In 1984 Hodgkin represented Britain at the Biennale di Venezia. His exhibition Forty Paintings reopened the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1985, and he won the Turner Prize the same year. In 1998 Hodgkin joined Gagosian, and the gallery presented his first show in the United States since his critically acclaimed 1995–96 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which had traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and Hayward Gallery, London. His first full retrospective opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2006 and traveled to Tate Britain, London, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In the autumn of 2016 Hodgkin visited India for what was to be the last time, completing six new paintings before his return to London. These works were shown at England’s Hepworth Wakefield in 2017, in Painting India, a show that focused on the artist’s long-standing relationship with the Indian subcontinent. Starting in the 1950s, Hodgkin maintained a parallel printmaking practice, translating his visual language into works on paper. Exploring the interactions of color and space on a grander scale, he produced theatrical set designs for Ballet Rambert, the Royal Ballet, and the Mark Morris Dance Group...

Ronald B. (R.B.) Kitaj Nancy and Jim Dine, or O'Neill accuses Faulkner of lack of loyalty and support (Kinsman 40), 1970 16 Color Silkscreen with collage and coating on different wove papers Hand signed and numbered in pencil 29/70 on the front. The back (which is framed) bears the Kelpra Studio blindstamp Frame included: held in the original vintage metal frame Very rare stateside. Other editions of this work are in the permanent collections of major institutions like the British museum, which has the following explanation: "The artist Jim Dine and his wife Nancy were close to Kitaj and his family, especially after the death of Elsi, Kitaj's first wife in 1969. They sometimes stayed with the Dines at their farm in Vermont during Kitaj's second teaching sojourn in the United States. Dine and Kitaj held a joint show at the Cincinnati Museum of Art in 1973. In the catalogue both artists contributed an insightful 'essay' on each other with Dine stressing Kitaj's obsession with all things American and baseball-related...' The alternate title, "O'Neill accuses Faulkner of lack of loyalty and support" can be seen on the artwork itself, and clearly is some kind of inside joke among friends. By the way -- do you see the way the colored dots are placed over the figures? Kitaj was doing this well before Baldessari who made it famous; that's how pioneering he was at the time. Referenced in the catalogue raisonne of Kitaj's prints, Kinsman, 40 Published and printed by Chris Prater of Kelpra Studio, Kentish Town, United Kingdom Ronald Brooks (RB) Kitaj Biography R.B. (Ronald Brooks) Kitaj was born in 1932 in Cleveland Ohio. One of the most prominent painters of his time, particularly in England where he spent some four decades spanning the late 1950s through the late 1990s, Kitaj is considered a key figure in European and American contemporary painting. While his work has been considered controversial, he is regarded as a master draughtsman with a commitment to figurative art. His highly personal paintings and drawings reflect his deep interest in history; cultural, social and political ideologies; and issues of identity. Part of an extraordinary cohort who emerged from the Royal College of Art circa 1960, which included Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, and David Hockney, Kitaj was immediately pegged as one of its leading figures. The London Times greeted his first solo show in 1963 as a long-awaited and galvanizing event: “Mr. R.B. Kitaj’s first exhibition, now that it has at last taken place, puts the whole ‘new wave’ of figurative painting in this country during the last two or three years into perspective.” In 1976, KItaj curated the exhibition The Human Clay, and in the essay he wrote for it he proposed the existence of a “School of London”—a label which stuck to a group of painters that includes Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews...