PIASA has the honor to present, at an exceptional sale divided into four vacations, the collection of the great gallerist of modern and contemporary art, Daniel Varenne, who died in March 2018. This sale is a vibrant testimony of the an openminded visionary who has been living in Geneva since 1978.
EVENING SALE
Collection Daniel Varenne, l’inventaire irrationnel
Tuesday, October, 22 at 7 PM.
The first sale will bring together the most significant artists in the collection, including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Ben, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Daniel Spoerri, Saul Steinberg and Jean Dubuffet with five works on paper dated from the 1960s to 1980s.
The iconoclastic production of Jean Dubuffet is a trigger of the passion of Daniel Varenne for art.
In this work, the silhouette of a man emerges with difficulty from a landscape made by energetic strokes of Indian ink. Visual translation of the artist's commitment to a culture that he later defines as asphyxiant, the schematic character is a point of passage to the still intact imagination of childhood. Overloaded and even saturated, the surface of this drawing is not unlike those of the series Materialologies and Texturologies realized during the previous decade.
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
Personnage dans un paysage, mai-juin 1960
Estimate : 40 000 / 60 000 €
Immersed for nearly 15 years in an American scene where the Dadaist heritage was a breeding ground for a generation, Daniel Varenne is the privileged witness of the rise of the Fluxus movement.
The transgressive conception of art and the questioning of the status of the artist, both conveyed by the work of the artist Benjamin Vautier (known as Ben), seduce the gallery owner. He is notably represented in this session by Duchamp's box, which was exhibited in 2010 during the "Ben" retrospective devoted to him by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon.
This heteroclite work, composed of 43 elements created from 1979 to 1992, is a tribute to the one that the artist considers as a spiritual father.
Curator of his own work, Marcel Duchamp, who died in 1969, had made - from 1941 - boxes in suitcase in which miniaturized reproductions and photographic prints of his works coexisted.
In Duchamp's Box, we find the white writing on black background associated with the taste for the derision that continues to make Ben's success.
Ben (Benjamin Vautier dit) (né en 1935)
Boîte de Duchamp, (Petit musée Ben), 1979-1992
Estimate : 70 000 / 90 000 €
The name of Daniel Varenne is also associated to the couple Christo and JeanneClaude of which he prepared the catalog raisonné. A friendship that began when the collector met Christo just after his exile from his native Bulgaria in 1958.
Christo et Jeanne-Claude (né en 1935 et 1935-2009)
Green store front (project) n. 138“ x 98“ x 12“, 1964
Estimate : 40 000 / 60 000 €
Jean-Pierre Raynaud (né en 1939)
La réalité au mètre, n°20, 1968
Estimate : 35 000 / 45 000 €
The gallerist's curiosity was not limited to painting or sculpture. From Irving Penn's silver prints from the 1940s to Valérie Belin's stamped paper prints and shots by German artist Dieter Appelt, photography is an integral part of the collection that PIASA is putting on sale.
Irving Penn (1917-2009)
Saul Steinberg, 29 janvier 1947-58, New York
Estimate : 10 000 / 15 000 €
Dieter Appelt (né en 1935)
Autoportrait-The mark of the Mirror Breathing Makes, 1978
Estimate : 2 000 / 3 000 €
After photographic series devoted to objects and clothing during the 90s, the human figure is gradually appearing in the work of Valérie Belin. A disturbing strangeness emerges from this portrait deliberately playing with the codes of feminine beauty of the 50s.
Valérie Belin (née en 1964)
Chrysanthemum (Tokyo) - Série Black-Eyed Susan, 01/07/ 2010
Estimate : 12 000 / 18 000 €
DAY SALES
Collection Daniel Varenne, l’inventaire irrationnel
October, 2019, 23 at 4 PM.
Alongside the great names in the history of 20th century art, which he continued to exhibit and collect, Daniel Varenne - through his Geneva gallerysupported young artists that he was able to emerge.
Among them: David Bowes. Born in Boston in 1957, this artist combines a naive style and a colourful palette with symbolic and historical references, sources of a mythological reinvented, eminently personal. Minions of the Moon Maid, the work offered for sale during this vacation, dates from 1992.
Exhibited on the stand of the gallery at the FIAC in 1997, Daniele Akmen (born in 1945) was the subject of an exhibition in 2012 at the Daniel Varenne gallery.
Freud, Frida Kahlo, Carol Lewis or Henri Matisse, as on this work dated 1990, the tutelary figures that inhabit the imagination of Daniele Akmenser were in his compositions. Inspired by the clichés that show him in front of his model, this work takes up the formal vocabulary of the Nicoise period where the master multiplies the odalisques. Here, the vivacity of the colours borders the exuberance.
Danièle Akmen (né en 1945)
Matisse ou, le modèle et son peintre, 1990
Estimate : 2 000 / 3 000 €
David Bowes (né en 1957)
Minions of the Moon Maid, mars 1992
Estimation : 4 000 / 6 000 €
Daniel Varenne and Switzerland
The forty years spent in the heart of Geneva gave him privileged access to a Swiss scene strongly influenced by the Fluxus movement. It is composed in particular of artists such as John Armleder (born in 1958) who represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1986, Iseult Labote (born in 1959) or Sylvie Fleury (born in 1961).
Through sculptures and installations, Sylvie Fleury, marked by the Duchampian revolution, poses the question of the superficiality of our society by staging products from the luxury and fashion industry
Sylvie Fleury (née en 1961)
Aura Portrait (6), (Chloé Sévigny), 2002
Estimation : 2500 / 3500 €
THEMATIC SALE
Collection Daniel Varenne, Alain Jacquet
October, 2019, 23 at 7 PM.
Composed of a selection of fifty-two works among the most emblematic of the artist's plastic itinerary, the third session will be exclusively devoted to the works of Alain Jacquet.
It was in the late 1960s that he began working with the gallery owner Daniel Varenne. At that time, influenced by American pop art after his stay in New York (1964-1965), Alain Jacquet explored new aesthetic territories that led him to conceptual art.
The richness and the diversity - both plastic and conceptual - of his work are particularly well represented in this sale, notably with his Camouflages et Images d'Épinal series.
Presented in the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1976, this sculptureinstallation entitled "La Baratte" is made up of 64 superimposed discs each bearing the 64 characters of the Braille alphabet, Iching and the binary system, creating thus almost infinite combinations.
Alain Jacquet (1939-2008)
La Baratte, 1971-1975
Estimation : 60 000 / 80 000 €
« With his series of images of Epinal begun in 1962, the artist continues his questioning on the border between figuration and abstraction, disrupting the reading of these popular old images to give birth to very beautiful and enigmatic colorful tracery, which graze nonfiguration without, however, engaging in it fully ».
Alain Jacquet (1939-2008)
Image d’Épinal : L’Union entre la France et l’Autriche, Février 1962
Estimation : 15 000 / 25 000 €
Begun by Alain Jacquet in 1963, the series "Camouflages" use the masterpieces of the history of art (from the Renaissance to Modern Art) by associating them with the characteristic objects of a society consumption then under the fire of his first detractors.
Full of humour, these complex montages have their first exhibition in Paris in 1962 and the following year in London at the Robert Fraser Gallery.
Alain Jacquet (1939-2008)
Camouflage Walt Disney, 1963
Estimation : 60 000 / 80 000 €
In addition, PIASA will offer a selection of modern and contemporary illustrated books and documentation from the Varenne Gallery archives.
With exhibition catalogs of the famous Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and the Daniel Cordier Gallery in Paris, artistic relations between the United States and France will be highlighted.
From Pop Art to Arte Povera and Free Figuration, this session dedicated to the documentation of the Daniel Varenne gallery will present exhibition catalogs from the 50s to the beginning of the 2010s. Jean Dubuffet's works, including “The Wall”, composed of original plates, as well as “En Voyage”, published in 1956 and on which we can read the dedication "Au voyageur Henri Michaux".
Jean Dubuffet et Max Loreau, Cerceaux ‘sorcellent, Paris et Bâle, Editions Jeanne Bucher et Beyeler, 1967
Jean Dubuffet, Les Murs (12 poèmes d’Eugène Guillevic), Paris, Les Editions du Livre, 1950. Suite de 17 bifolia comportant chacun une lithographie originale.
Jean Tinguely et Pontus Hulten, Méta, Paris, Pierre Horay, 1973. Livre-objet édité sous forme de cartable conçu par Tinguely, complet de son dessin original signé par Tinguely exécuté avec Méta-matic n°6, et d’un disque 33 tours.
