Featured Stories

Our art market is currently lacking a strong message. Typically, it rallies around a defining movement that ardent collectors and advisors clamor toward, sending prices jaw-dropping higher with each auction season. It’s not contemporary—indeed that sector has an eerily vacant feel—and it isn’t limited to Post War, even as that field remains vibrant yet lean in inventory.

What is emerging is a measured re approach to historic movements and quality, where content matters again and the workmanship reads as refreshingly enduring. Market analyses point to blue chip strength in top Contemporary, with selective Post War/Masterworks, but there’s a clear pivot toward craft, time intensive making, and narratives with historical resonance. In interiors today, pieces that reward close looking, provenance, and tangible presence are winning attention, reminding us that art as object continues to anchor conversations about culture and memory.

To navigate this evolving landscape, consider a balanced, story driven approach: a judicious mix of historic movement anchors and select contemporary pieces with messages that are well articulated. Embrace craft and time intensive making across painting, sculpture, and works on paper, where material quality and finish matter as much as subject. Photography and limited editions offer accessible entry points without sacrificing depth, while a globally diversified buyer base makes provenance and history more important than ever.

This is a moment to curate with intention: a dialogue between what is past and what is now. To get back to exploring interests and not art as a speculatory asset. History repeats and when the art market has had bubbles, similar to the dot.com bubble, it tends to be followed with a settling back to softer parts of the market and value.

Maureen Chatfield (b. 1948) is a contemporary American artist whose work fuses the energy of New York Abstract Expressionism with the lyricism of Bay Area Figurative painting. Her process is intuitive and spontaneous, allowing shapes, lines, and color harmonies to emerge organically rather than from preplanned compositions.

 

 

View our virtual catalogue here.

 

Each painting is a direct response to the emotional and experiential forces shaping her life, translating memories, feelings, and lived experiences into color and form.

Isle of Palm, circa 2025, mixed media on canvas, 40 x 40 inches

 

Her work evolves through layered experimentation, with traces of previous layers, pentimento, revealing depth and complexity. Chatfield’s non-objective works arise from introspection, while her abstracted landscapes draw inspiration from nature, filtered through her singular internal lens.

Influences such as Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Nicolas de Staël guided her evolution into abstraction.

Romeo and Juliet, circa 2022-25, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 30 inches

 

Chatfield studied at the Art Students League, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Fashion Institute of Technology, and Hunter College. Painting since childhood, she began with oils and now primarily works in acrylics on large canvases, enabling rapid layering and vibrant color effects.

In situ of Both Ways, mixed media on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

 

For Chatfield, painting is a dynamic process of discovery, unplanned, invigorating, and continually transforming. Her work demonstrates a dialogue between emotional resonance, formal experimentation, and the ongoing evolution of color and composition, positioning her within a lineage of American abstract and figurative innovation.

Cotton Club, circa 2022-25, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Robert Kelly’s work begins with paper. In his studio, carefully organized stacks hold letters, ledgers, posters, maps, and magazine pages—anything carrying handwriting, typography, or graphic design.

Often, Kelly is drawn not to the front of a sheet, but to its reverse: the side where ink has seeped through and the original meaning has been transformed.

These papers become the foundation of his paintings. Collaged onto panel or canvas, each piece is placed with remarkable deliberation.

Kelly has been compared to a stonemason, and the analogy is fitting: rather than simply adding one element to another, he considers how each layer will meet and interact with the next. He builds and refines these surfaces until the paper takes on a luminous patina, more reminiscent of polished ivory than of its original material, before sweeping pigment across the surface.

The result is a true palimpsest—a surface built over time, where traces of what came before remain visible beneath the new. Like our recently acquired Tantra XXV, Kelly’s works reward close looking, revealing fragments of text, texture, and history beneath their seemingly ordered surfaces.

His practice is rooted in a rich lineage of modernist abstraction, drawing from Malevich and Mondrian, the Bauhaus and De Stijl, Schwitters and Torres-García, as well as the Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who pushed geometric abstraction beyond the purely visual and toward something more tactile, intuitive, and embodied.

What happens when fragments become something entirely new? Collage has long offered artists a way to rethink the everyday; transforming scraps of paper, printed imagery, text, and found materials into works that are layered, unexpected, and wholly original.

In our latest video, we take a closer look at the enduring possibilities of collage, from its early relationship to Cubism and Dada to its continued role in contemporary abstraction.

Artists have used collage to challenge the boundaries between image and object, chance and intention, recognizable forms and pure abstraction.

For collectors, part of collage’s appeal lies in its intimacy. A torn edge, a fragment of typography, or a piece of printed ephemera can retain traces of another time while becoming part of an entirely new visual language.

The result is often immediate and tactile: works that reward close looking and reveal more with every layer.

Explore the history, experimentation, and creative energy behind collage—and discover how artists continue to make the familiar feel new.