ADDITIONAL SALE HIGHLIGHTS
Further highlights from the March auction include an entrancing example of Ed Ruscha’s Mountain Paintings, California Grape Skins (estimate $2.2/2.8 million). Widely celebrated for their singular hybrid of arch conceptualism and Pop Art aesthetics, Ruscha's text paintings are the quintessential visual signifiers of Postwar American culture. Of all of the artist's series, the Mountain Paintings most clearly articulate Ruscha's aims, bringing together idiomatic colloquialisms and palindromes with the rugged West's grandeur and mythos. Executed in 2009, California Grape Skins is a conceptual peak in this crucial body of work, quoting an excerpt from Jack Kerouac's seminal 1957 Beat epic, On the Road, and superimposing it onto a grand vista. Both sweeping in its epic proportions yet coolly detached in its appropriation of a definitive literary classic, the present work – which was exhibited at the Hammer Museum as a highlight of a suite of works that reference Kerouac's famed novel – juxtaposes familiar archetypes to mine shared cultural memory, capturing Ruscha's inimitable spirit of artistic inquiry in the process.

Dark Heart Cake is an exquisite example of Wayne Thiebaud's most enticing and iconic paintings of sweet treats (estimate $1.8/2.5 million). The 2014 work embodies both the artist’s singular mastery of still-life painting and career-long exploration of the American psyche. Typifying Thiebaud's distinctive technique, the luscious pinks of the isolated petit four dynamically stands out from its rich magenta background with a captivating luminosity. Since the mid-1950s, Thiebaud's confectionery treats, which have become some of the best-known images of American Pop, reinvented the traditional still-life genre to reflect a new era of mass production and consumption. The brilliance of the stark background with its luscious paint application and rich use of color of the delectable Dark Heart Cake, lend the work a kaleidoscopic nostalgia, as if Thiebaud's treats represent a timeless testament to a disappearing Americana.

George Condo’s Black Standing Figures from 2000 reveals the artist at the height of his career, utterly uninhibited and full of instinctive creative fervor (estimate $700,000/1 million). Part of the artist’s over forty-year practice dedicated to a unique and highly distinctive style of painting, the work renders white outlines of human-like figures against a dark background composed of a mix of black, red, and blue. By use of his distinct gestural flare, Condo successfully groups dynamic yet highly cohesive figures along the same plane that seemingly look out at the viewer. A testament to Condo’s ability to translate his conceptual influences into unique and fresh works of painting, Black Standing Figures is suggestive of its art historical past, making it not only an elegantly beautiful painting, but also a conceptually rich one.