Brook Hsu, Pale Green (detail), 2022. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
Artists to Discover
Frank Walter
Frank Walter, Untitled (Blue Sky, Grey Land, Three Trees), n.d. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
As the broader culture reconsiders creators who have been unjustly left out of historical conversations, Frank Walter (1926-2009) has emerged as a fascinating figure deserving recognition as one of the greatest Caribbean painters. Born in Antigua and tracing his lineage to both enslaved people and European aristocracy, Walter has been compared by Nina Khrushcheva to a da Vincian humanist ideal of man as a visual artist, musician, writer, philosopher, and agrarian scientist. He achieved notable success as an agricultural systems manager, traveled widely throughout Europe and the Caribbean, and briefly engaged in politics, before settling into a rural home in Antigua to focus on his painting practice in relative isolation until his death in 2009. The 2017 Venice Biennale exhibition Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man at the Antigua and Barbuda National Pavilion catapulted the artist onto the global artworld stage and received notable praise, with rave reviews from Thelma Golden and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, among others.
Susan Walp
Susan Walp, Cut Open Grapefruit in Green Dish with Bricks, Shell, Knife, and Photocopy, 2022. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
Vermont-based still life painter Susan Walp (b. 1949) makes her auction debut in this sale with her 2022 work Cut Open Grapefruit in Green Dish with Bricks, Shell, Knife, and Photocopy. The work is emblematic of Walp’s studied approach to still life, capturing commonplace interior scenes with an attentive and skilled hand. The inviting composition showcases a subtle play of light and shadow in muted earth tones that ground the canvas against the brightness of fresh fruit. Walp’s works are in the National Academy Museum of New York and the Hood Museum at Darmouth College, and her numerous awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship and recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Mose Tolliver
Mose Tolliver, Antique Chair with a Lamp in Front, late 1980s. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
The works of Mose Tolliver are characterized by a flat graphic quality and muted color palette, seen clearly in this painting, which represents Tolliver’s debut at Phillips. Born to sharecropper parents near Montgomery, Alabama, and one of eleven siblings, Tolliver left school for work at an early age to support his family. Initially inspired by artists he saw painting advertising imagery, Tolliver turned to painting to combat isolation and pain after a work-related injury. Now, his remarkable and prolific painting practice is receiving posthumous and long overdue recognition from collectors and institutions worldwide. His works are part of several permanent institutional collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Centre Pompidou.
Designers to Rediscover
Dominique Zimbacca
Dominique Zimbacca, Side chair, 1950s. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
Dominique Zimbacca is representative of a selection of designers offered in FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design who were working at the same time and place as makers such as Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, and Le Corbusier, and who are now poised for greater recognition. As makers of this time period confronted the necessities of the postwar cultural landscape, Zimbacca imbued this elm side chair with bold geometry, clean lines, a strong form and creative invention. The chair also boasts exceptional provenance, having been originally acquired directly from the artist.
Juliette Derel
Juliette Derel, Large wall light, circa 1975. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
After studying painting, drawing, art history, and ceramics at the School of Fine Arts in Tours in 1949, Juliette Derel settled in Vallauris, a region with a long history of ceramic production, which Pablo Picasso helped reignite in the 1950s. Her large wall light is emblematic of the artist’s skill in producing functional objects including lighting designs and mirrors. She went on to exhibit in France throughout her career, notably at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, as well as abroad, including in Montreal, Caracas, and Prague.
Gilbert Valentin and Les Archanges
Gilbert Valentin, Pitcher, circa 1955. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
Born in Nancy, France in 1928, Gilbert Valentin became a master of ceramics, apprenticing at the National School of Vierzon and then working as a ceramic engineer at Lunéville-Saint-Clément. The artist settled in Vallauris in 1950, just a year after Juliette Derel. There, he founded Les Archanges, where he hosted many creatives, including Pablo Picasso, Jacques Prévert, George Braque, and Jean Cocteau. His robust works are known for revitalizing certain earlier ceramic forms within a Modern context. The bold form and color of the pitcher offered here is a striking example.
Auction Debuts: Contemporary Artists
Brook Hsu
Brook Hsu, Pale Green, 2022. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
Brook Hsu’s compelling imagery draws on autobiographical and mythological sources from her own observations, and study of art history, film, and literature. In Pale Green from 2022 — executed at a miniature scale of 2 x 1 inches (5.08 x 2.54 cm) — an otherworldly figure plays the flute. At once reminiscent of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the fictional character Jack Skellington, the figure’s ghostly coloration blurs the boundary between foreground and background. Now based in New York, the Taiwanese-American artist grew up in Oklahoma, receiving her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale in 2016.
Seth Becker
Seth Becker, Coconut Crab, 2022. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
A librarian by day, Seth Becker’s captivating and intimate paintings often visually represent narratives drawn from his extensive reading of fiction and poetry. Quickly gaining the attention of collectors, his work has been presented widely in solo exhibitions, including at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York, and Castle Gallery in Los Angeles. Raised in Queens, Becker earned his MFA from the New York Studio School and now lives and works in Wappingers Falls, New York.
Heidi Lau
Heidi Lau, Container of Worlds I, 2023. FREESTYLE: Living with Art & Design.
Heidi Lau’s creative practice isn’t too concerned with making something new from nothing. Rather, it considers the permanence inherent in objects and matter through a non-linear viewpoint of the materiality of history. “My ceramic works are hand built into the form of various objects of remembrance — towers, funeral monuments and fossilized creatures that are simultaneously being infested, disintegrating, and reforming on a cellular level,” the artist has explained. Currently living and working in Brooklyn, Lau grew up in Macao and earned her BFA from New York University in 2008. Her works have been exhibited at the Macao Museum of Art, Boston Center for the Arts, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, among many others.
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