Quietly included in Sotheby’s Contemporary art sale next week is some of the collection of Judith Neisser, a fixture in Chicago and Aspen where she was a pillar of the art and museum community. A trustee of both the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary art there, Neisser was a collector of minimalism and conceptual art. She was also an accomplished writer on art. Many of her works have been donated but Sotheby’s has 32 works with a combined low estimate of $10.8m on offer. A few other works will be sold next year.
Next week, a clutch of works by Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd and Lucio Fontana will be featured in the Evening sale of Contemporary art.
An additional 28 works from the collection will open the day sale (lots 101 – 128).
Across several decades, Chicago-based collector Judith Neisser amassed an extraordinary collection of Contemporary art that is widely acclaimed for its special emphasis on Minimalist and Conceptual Art. The thematically-cohesive collection is distinguished by its explorations of the monochrome, seriality, and minimalist abstraction, and stands as a testament to Judith Neisser’s remarkable taste, prodigious scholarship, and patronage of the arts.
Sotheby’s will offer works from Judith Neisser’s collection across our Evening and Day Auctions of Contemporary Art this November. The Evening Auction features: Robert Ryman’s 1961 Untitled, an important example of the artist’s early work that has remained in her collection since 1997 (pictured right, estimate $1.8/2.5 million); Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, executed in metallic gold and epitomizing the essence of the artist’s iconic career (estimate $1.5/2 million); Donald Judd’s Untitled, an exceptional work composed entirely of galvanized iron and executed during Judd’s most transformative period (estimate $1.5/2 million); and Cy Twombly’s Untitled, painted in 1970 during the apex of the artist’s celebrated Blackboard works (estimate $2.5/3.5 million).