JULIE MEHRETU’S RISE OF THE NEW SUPREMATISTS
Julie Mehretu’s monumental masterpiece Rise of the New Suprematists from 2001 is a provocative synthesis of abstract hieroglyphic symbolism and architectural visual vocabulary (estimate $3.5/4.5 million). The subject of a major retrospective co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art that opens November 2019, Mehretu has garnered widespread acclaim as one of the most influential artists of her generation. Testifying to the caliber of the present work in particular, Rise of the New Suprematists was one of two paintings by the artist included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial – the other, Empirical Construction, Istanbul (2003), is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The gravitas of Mehretu’s conceptual ideology, coupled with the skill and dexterity of her mark-making, have established her as a modern master and uniquely articulate voice of a socially, culturally, and politically wary generation.

EARLY WORKS BY JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Two pivotal, early works executed by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1981 will highlight the auction, each estimated to achieve $2.5/3.5 million. Emerging from the collection of legendary art critic and style icon Glenn O’Brien, Famous Negro Athletes serves as a testament to the creative partnership between O’Brien and the artist. A key advocate for Basquiat in his early years, O’Brien was among the first to recognize the young graffiti artist’s virtuosic formal abilities, and would go on to become a close friend of the artist over the course of the 1980s. Executed on paper by Basquiat in 1981 as a gift for O’Brien and remaining in his collection ever since, the inscrutable faces of Famous Negro Athletes powerfully scrutinize a society which offers so few professions for marginalized groups to excel.

Brown Eggs is a definitive example of the artist’s most iconic motif, the fierce skull that dominates many of his best-known masterworks. Part self-portrait and part racial allegory, Basquiat’s heads fuse a new style of expressionistic portraiture with a charged, underlying current of socio-political symbolism. Despite his young age, the present work displays Basquiat’s mature aesthetic vocabulary, signature figuration, mastery of color and unparalleled intensity of mark-making that would come to define his output.