Ileanna Sonnabend’s Son Has Curated a Blockbuster Show in Canada From the Legendary Dealer’s $1 Billion Collection

The two-year-old Remai Modern museum on the banks of the South
Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon, Canada, has landed a spectacular
show of works from the collection of the late dealer Ileanna
Sonnabend. The sweeping survey, which is open through March
22, 2020, includes more than 100 works by 68 artists ranging from
Pop art, Minimalism, Nouveau Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Arte
Povera, and more.

When the museum, which is armed with an $81 million pledge
from namesake patron Ellen Remai and a $1 million-per-year
acquisition budget for the next 25 years, reached out to Antonio
Homem, Sonnabend’s adopted son and director of the Sonnabend
Collection Foundation, he immediately seized the opportunity.

Homem curated the show according to loose groupings of
movements, though he doesn’t hesitate to put works side by side
when he sees connections, regardless of when they were created.
“There is always something that works if each piece has a strength
of its own,” he said, pointing out unexpected links like the
day-glo colors of a Peter Halley painting and Andy Warhol’s
neon-hued “Flowers.”

The show opens with works by Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg, the first two artists Sonnabend showed at her Paris
gallery as part of a broader effort to introduce American artists
in Europe as well as European artists in New York. The first two
rooms “show an evolution of Pop art, from works still linked to
Abstract Expressionism, to works that have more in common with
Minimalism,” Homem says.

There are quite a few works by Jeff Koons on view, an artist who
Sonnebend championed early on and helped catapult to global fame,
starting in the 1980s. Along with a metal
sculpture, Snorkel (1985), there is a Mermaid
Troll (1986), the famous wood sculpture of Buster
Keaton (1998), and a more recent sculpture Gazing
Ball (2014). In the same room, 1980s art stars Ashley
Bickerton and Haim Steinbach also get a nod.

Koons’s Gazing Ball is one of the few works Homem added
to the collection after Sonnabend’s death in 2007. Another more
recent addition is by artist Ryan Roa, whose torqued
metal Expanded Steel Knot 3 (2015) fits nicely in a
room alongside a neon sculpture by Bruce Nauman, Raw War
(1972) and a painting by Jörg Immendorf, Ewiges
Braunhemd (1983).

The second half of the show reflects a heavy focus on
photography—including works by Gilbert and George, Hiroshi
Sugimoto, Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Baldessari, and Candida
Höfer, among others—and a sprinkling of works that Homem broadly
terms “weird.” The latter includes a Rona Pondick sculpture of a
sphinx-like figure with a dog body and a human head and Richard
Artschwager’s Double Diner (1988), a restaurant booth
coated in green rubberized hair. When it comes to strange, uncanny,
or just plain “weird” works, Homem says “I don’t think we looked
for it necessarily but clearly it is a quality that interested
us.”

Homem has organized earlier shows of the late dealer’s holdings,
including a two-part exhibition at the Serralves Museum of
Contemporary Art in 2016. The Remai Modern show marks the first
time the collection has been shown on this scale in North
America.

Sonnabend was famous for staging groundbreaking shows such as
Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, in which the artist laid under
wooden planks in the gallery floor and masturbated throughout the
exhibition opening, and Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series, which
featured graphic depictions of the artist and his then-wife Ilona
Staller in various sexual positions.

When Sonnabend died in 2007, Homem and Sonnabend’s daughter Nina
Sundell inherited an estate in which the artwork alone was
valued at over $1 billion. In order to pay the estate
taxes—the federal portion of which was $331 million, largely for
the art—the heirs sold off some $600 million worth of art in two
major private sales to dealers. The first batch, worth about $400
million, was reportedly sold to GPS Partners, based in New York and
Paris, which is headed by private dealers Franck Giraud, Lionel
Pissarro, and Philippe Ségalot. The second, said to consist
entirely of works by Warhol, was sold to Gagosian Gallery for $200
million.

“Through these two sales, the collection lost a few very
important works, but it was still the same collection,” Homem said
in an interview in the catalogue that accompanies the show. “I
never had any doubt that the works would be preserved in one way or
another, being recognized and important pieces.”

The post Ileanna Sonnabend’s Son Has Curated a Blockbuster
Show in Canada From the Legendary Dealer’s $1 Billion
Collection appeared first on artnet News.