“The main goal of my book How To Collect Art," says art market expert Magnus Resch, is to inspire readers to buy their first piece. As research has shown, editions of prominent artists can be a good starting point."
For the Harvard and LSE PHD grad, who is a regular speaker at conferences about investing in art and the future of the art market, and who’s been profiled in the New York Times, WSJ, Vanity Fair and the Financial Times, "buying art means supporting a community, an artist, a gallery or a printer."
He also believes that "edition printing is a craft. That’s why so many artists praise their printmakers and have a strong connection with them," Resch says. "Artspace’s editions quality is superb; I own a couple.”
So what editions does Resch suggest readers take a closer look at? Here, he picks 5 recent editions that would look great on any wall (and one he would also snap up if it was still available).
FLORIAN KREWER - Flying Stride/Hot Love, 2023
My journey in the art world truly began at Kunstakademie Duesseldorf, Germany. This centuries-old institution has been the nurturing ground for superstar artists like Gerhard Richter, Andreas Gursky, Albert Oehlen, and many others. Growing up, my high school was located directly next to it, allowing me to forge friendships with some of the artists studying there, for example Chris Succo or Max Frintrop.
More than 20 years later, I still maintain close relationships with many of my early artist friends from those formative years. Florian Krewer, although not present during my time at the academy, graduated from it in 2017 as a master student under Peter Doig. Today the artist is widely cited as a contemporary, figurative painter with extraordinary potential, whose fantastical pictures - though often rooted in personal experience, and sometimes based on a photographic source - are refined to a point at which almost every viewer can recognise something of the universal experiences of sensuality and vulnerability.
This particular edition of 30 embellished pigment prints were commissioned in partnership with the Aspen Art Museum, which hosted Krewer’s acclaimed solo exhibition in 2023. Buy this edition and you’ll be able to relive some of the thrills of that show, while also benefiting a cause close to Krewer’s heart. Proceeds from this print benefit the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal aid organization in New York that serves low-income or people of color who are transgender, intersex and/or gender non-conforming.
JAMESON GREEN - Cain and Abel I, 2023
Another highly lauded, young, figurative artist, Green’s work was characterized by the New York Times as “nightmarishly cartoonish and filled with symbols of the nation’s violent past — such as nooses —[which] brings to mind the work of the cartoonist Robert Crumb and is also influenced by the German artist Max Beckmann.”
His 2023 print brings to mind the work of Goya and Picasso, but the source material is far older. "I think biblical stories are some of the best stories ever written,” says the artist. “And they go well past the bible, they’re repeated in various cultures. So I hope it makes people curious to just explore. With a great work of art, that conversation goes on long, long after an artist is gone. The art continues to change and evolve as time changes and evolves." Experience that evolution with this work, a pared-down interpretation of a violent, well-known, Old Testament tale.
MARILYN MINTER - Big Red, 2022
In 2019, I had the pleasure of meeting Marilyn Minter when she invited me to visit her studio in New York City. I've long admired her work, particularly as it was displayed at the renowned Rose Bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel during that period. What makes this piece especially noteworthy is that while it's attributed to the esteemed veteran New York feminist painter and photographer, it can also be viewed as a collaborative effort.
The model in Minter’s painting is the Kenyan-born artist, Wangechi Mutu. Marilyn’s source images for this print were produced in 2009 for issue two of Tar magazine. Marilyn had been invited to document Mutu’s pregnancy, though, in the end, many of the images majored on Mutu’s mouth, rather than her belly.
“I didn’t know that when she smiled that her teeth would be gold!” Minter told Artspace a couple of years ago, in an interview conducted to coincide with this print’s production. Nevertheless, the elder artist must have admired the younger one’s grill; returning to the images first in paint, then with this print, Minter celebrates the sometimes overwhelming power of fructive, feminine beauty, as well as a great meeting of minds. Reflecting on her time with Mutu, Minter said, “we got some great shots; we were both in the zone.”
CECILY BROWN - All the Nightmares Came Today, 2012/2019
My initial encounter with Cecily Brown's work was in 2009 during a research study examining the influence of press articles on an artist's financial success. As I delved into the dry study, I found myself captivated by Cecily's art, instantly drawn in by its allure - and its great market success.
Her 2013 painting, Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned), sold for $6.7 million, at Christie’ in New York – a hammer price just shy of her auction record of $6.8 million, set at Sotheby’s back in 2018. And her 2023 Metropolitan Museum exhibition, Death and the Maid, was widely praised. Writing in The New York Times, the paper’s critic (and erstwhile Brown naysayer) Roberta Smith, admitted she had been wrong about this British-born painter.
“The work in the Met show is beautiful and became more so on each of my three visits,” wrote Smith. “The more I looked at the paintings, the more they calmed down, opened up and differentiated themselves from one another in color and composition.” All the Nightmares Came Today uses a group nude photograph from a Jimi Hendrix album sleeve as its source material which, in Brown’s hands, morphs into something rich and strange. And this limited edition print comes with a signed and numbered archival label adhered to the back,
MICKALENE THOMAS - Jet Blue #11, 2021
MICKALENE THOMAS - Left Behind, 2021
Thomas’s prominence will only increase in 2024, with the opening of the first major international tour of her work. Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, greets its first visitors at The Broad in Los Angeles on May 25, before traveling to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia later in the year, then hopping the Atlantic to open at the Hayward Gallery in London early 2025.
It will be a landmark mid-career show for an artist already well-known to many, who creates art that both carries on many conventions while upsetting many others. Born in Camden, NJ in 1971, Thomas’s work focuses on black, female representation, pulling together both classical tropes and African American aesthetics.
Artspace’s limited-edition Mickalene Thomas collages, Jet Blue #11 and Left Behind (both 2021), exemplify this style perfectly. Composed of diverse materials including hand-cut inkjet prints, pigment-printed silk fragments, and hand-applied acrylic pochoir, these works trigger memories of mid-century erotica, as well as much earlier styles of intimately portraiture, to produce something entirely new.
RASHID JOHNSON - Anxious Print, 2023
Johnson’s harried rendering of a worried face is one of the most well-recognised motifs in American contemporary art. The Chicago-born artist has produced these in a number of different media and with every iteration their meaning changes slightly.
“In a lot of ways it feels like they are as prescient today as they were when I originally conceived the idea of an illustration of my own anxiety,” the artist, whose works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago among many others, told Artspace last October.
“Then I came to realize that the representation of that anxiety - or the amplification, or the willingness to express it - gave agency for reflection for a broader group of folks to see themselves mirrored in these works.” This edition widens that cultured, anxious group a little further.
Read our interview with Magnus Resch here and buy a copy of his new book How To Collect Art here.
Magnus Resch - photo courtesy Magnus Resch
