Emily Ludwig Shaffer - New Now New York Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | Phillips
  • Contemporary Surrreality

     

    Emily Ludwig Shaffer’s vibrant canvases superbly explore the realm of the uncanny, situating mundane objects in physically improbable arrangements. Painting with nearly imperceptible brushstrokes, Shaffer imbues a degree of naturalism into her decidedly surreal compositions. Using elements of weaving, such as lattices and braids, Shaffer draws influence from architecture and vegetation but pushes these forms to imaginative heights. Painted in 2018, the year after Shaffer graduated with her MFA from Columbia University, Bay Leaf Wrapped Night functions as a portal into a starry landscape in which moonlight softly illuminates verdant hills. Recalling the polished finish and visual puzzles of Rene Magritte and the dramatized flora and geologic formations of Georgia O’Keeffe, Bay Leaf Wrapped Night pulls from the lushness of the natural world with fantastical visual treatment. Shaffer sets her box within a devoid landscape, a liminal space in which the box serves as a secondary frame within the frame of the canvas. Gesturing towards science fiction, Shaffer invites us into the otherworldly, mystifying space in a playful imagining of all that looms within unexplored portals.

    • Provenance

      L'Inconnue, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, L'Inconnue, No Place, February 8–March 30, 2019

113

Bay Leaf Wrapped Night

signed and dated "EMILY LUDWIG SHAFFER 2018" on the overlap
oil on canvas
42 1/4 x 38 in. (107.3 x 96.5 cm)
Painted in 2018.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$5,000 - 7,000 

Sold for $40,320

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 28 September 2022