RAW Editions: The Edit

With great excitement RAW Editions announces the launch of the first installment of The Edit, an online auction exclusively on Artsy.

The eclectic curation of prints and multiples by celebrated contemporary artists is led by John Baldessari's Studio, 1988 (Lot 3). The edition was created for ART/LA 88, LA's third international contemporary art fair which took place 10-14 December 1988 and was featured on the cover of the fair catalogue and other promotional materials. In Studio, 1988 Baldessari superimposes lithographically reproduced found imagery with a screenprinted layer of brightly colored geometric shapes that mask the faces of the figures in the appropriated photograph. Obliterating the figures’ faces disrupts the expected visual hierarchy– looking at the face first- and forces the viewer to examine other often overlooked details. The enigmatic composition of layered fragmented parts articulates the artist’s lasting interest in semantics. By manipulating the manner in which the viewer reads and interprets visual information, Baldessari makes the onlooker an active participant in the production of meaning.

The auction also includes a group of four balsa wood multiples by Jenny Holzer (Lot 21) with texts from her Truisms series. Holzer first employed the "truism" format- statements confined to a length of one line- in 1977, when she was a student in the Whitney Independent Study Program. By the late 1970s, she had devised nearly 300 aphorisms or slogans, which play on commonly held truths and clichés. Initially printed inexpensively using commercial printing processes and wheat-pasted around New York city, Holzer’s "one-liners" were infiltrated into the public arena via stickers, T-shirts, postcards, billboards and later electronic displays. Deliberately challenging and often disquieting, Truisms employ a variety of voices to express a wide spectrum of conflicting biases and beliefs, reinforce that truth is relative and invite the onlooker to become an active participant in determining what is legitimate and what is not.

The Reticent Child, 2005 (Lot 11) by Louise Bourgeois was conceived as an illustration for the 17th century book Recueil des Secrets de Louyse Bourgeois, authored by a midwife that shared the same name. The small scale lithograph of a child who refused to be born references Bourgeois’s preoccupation with personal relationships that motivated much of her art. "Upon the births of her own children, Bourgeois felt a profound sense of gratitude but was overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy. She relived the birth experience in her art time and again- her own birth and that of her children- never more so than in the last decade of her life." (MoMA. Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books)

Our curated selection of striking editions is now available for bidding.

Explore The Edit and place your bids before the close of the auction on Tuesday June 26th at 12:00pm EST.