Lot 72
Judith Coleman (American, b. 1944). "Crossed Hands" bromoil gelatin silver print, 1983. Signed and numbered 14/15 in pencil on the verso. Judy Coleman's "Crossed Hands" is from her "Gesture Series" in which she "explores the suggestive powers of a simple pose" (artist's statement). Coleman's interest in the human body and human movement stems from childhood ballet classes. In her work, Coleman uses her own body and incorporates various mediums - photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing - to create the final piece. After shooting with her studio view camera, Coleman uses oil paint, graphite, wax, grease pencil, and materials such as shards of glass to embellish the image. This "painted" image can take weeks to complete. She then photographs the final composition and enlarges it to a mural size gelatin silver print as we see in this example. Size: 39" L x 31.5" W (99.1 cm x 80 cm) Size including margins: 49.5" L x 41.75" W (125.7 cm x 106 cm)
Excerpt from the Artist's Statement: "Childhood ballet classes introduced me to the expressive possibilities of the human form, and years later my continuing interest in gesture and movement became the focus of most of my photographic work. I use myself as a model so I may intuit positions or gestures that feel emotionally or physically compelling.
Once I have a photographic print, I use art materials to create fictional environments for the figure which emphasize the expressive qualities of the pose. I use a studio view camera with a 4"x5" Polaroid "back". I use Polaroid prints because, when abraded, their surface becomes an ideal ground for the art materials I use. Oil paint, graphite, wax, grease pencil and dimensional materials such as shards of glass are standard in my work. Looking through a jeweler's loupe to magnify the mark-making gives me a way to project the look and scale of the final photograph. The painted image, which can take weeks to complete, is then photographed onto an 8"xl0" negative which is used to create the final, mural size gelatin silver print (3'x4' to 7'x12')."
Judith Coleman earned her BA at Cornell University and her MFA at UCLA under the mentorship of Robert Heinecken and was awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants in 1984 and 1988. Coleman's work is in the permanent collections of the Pompidou Centre Museum in Paris, the Chicago Art Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art in Japan, as well as other elite museum collections. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia for more than three decades. In addition, her work was published in a monograph entitled "Judith Coleman" by Twin Palms Publishers in 1989, and she has been the subject of many other publications.
This photograph was in the collection of pioneering patron of the arts, Ginny Williams. Sotheby's hosted a series of auctions featuring art and photography in the Ginny Williams Collection in June and July of 2020. Their press release began as follows, "Born in rural Virginia in 1927, Ginny moved to Denver, Colorado in the late 1950s with her husband, Carl Williams. An avid photographer herself, who studied with Austrian-American photojournalist and photographer Ernst Haas, her collecting journey began with classical figurative photography. Her passion and keen eye eventually prompted her to open her namesake gallery in Denver in the 1980s. While her passion for photography never waned, remaining a primary focus of both her gallery and private collection, her voracious curiosity quickly widened her curatorial focus. Over time, Ginny became increasingly courageous and experimental in her selections, venturing into Abstract Expressionism and Contemporary Art and following her artists themselves through gallery shows and museum exhibitions. As the years passed, Ginny became as much of a trailblazer as the artists she collected."
Provenance: private Idledale, Colorado, USA collection; ex-Ginny Williams collection of Denver, Colorado
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#171265
- Condition: Signed and numbered 14/15 in pencil by the artist on the verso. There is a small tear to the bottom edge and minor crease marks to the lower margin that do not impact the image. The piece comes in its original box with a Ginny Williams Collection label attached.
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