SPOTLIGHT: An Atlanta Collection: From our Private Collections Salon & Sale

August 19 - September 22, 2023
  • Included within our Private Collection Salon & Sale exhibition we are spotlighting an Atlanta collection. This southern woman’s trove reflects...
    Included within our Private Collection Salon & Sale exhibition we are spotlighting an Atlanta collection. This southern woman’s trove reflects her passion for life lived and compassion for the world around her. The collection includes a unique mix of work by Atlanta-based artists, 20th-century American icons, and cutting-edge international photographers. The entire collection was built over time in close collaboration and a trusted friendship with the gallery owner, Anna Skillman. After enriching the walls and spirit of the collector’s private home for many years the collection has now come full circle. We are honored to be entrusted with deaccessioning the work and equally thrilled to be able to share this offering with you.
  • Sheila Pree Bright, Plastic Bodies, Self Portrait, 2003

    Sheila Pree Bright

    Plastic Bodies, Self Portrait, 2003
    Sheila Pree Bright's 2003 series Plastic Bodies presciently explores themes that have resurfaced twenty years later with the release of the new film Barbie — though the photographic series and Greta Gerwig’s film are quite different in terms of their approach. Each photograph in the Plastic Bodies series is meticulously crafted, blurring the distinction between the photographer's "real" and plastic models for all but the most attentive observer. Bright focuses on the iconic and controversial doll as a representation of cultural capital — beauty, power, thinness, etc. — unattainable for many of us by capturing a variety of subjects from diverse backgrounds, underscoring the universal complexity of Barbie's hold on our imaginations. 
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  • Adam Fuss, From The Series "My Ghost", 2000

    Adam Fuss

    From The Series "My Ghost", 2000
    British-born photographer Adam Fuss (b. 1961), now based in New York, is best known for his experimentation with early photographic processes and cameraless techniques in pursuit of metaphoric, ephemeral images.
     
    Fuss’s series My Ghost embodies his poetic consideration of the ghostly nature of memory and themes of life, death, and transcendence. The series is comprised of daguerreotypes, photograms, photogravures, text, gelatin silver prints, and platinum prints, and includes recurrent motifs of smoke, christening dresses, birds, human bodies, and butterflies. Using light and chemistry to explore the outer reaches of vision, Fuss’s poetic and spiritual work aims not to reproduce the seen but to discover the unseen.
     
    In this work by Fuss, he has revived the laborious daguerreotype technique, one of the earliest photographic processes developed by Louis Daguerre in 1839.
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  • William Christenberry, Door of House at Christmastime, Greensboro, Alabama, 1971

    William Christenberry

    Door of House at Christmastime, Greensboro, Alabama, 1971

    WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY

    DOOR OF HOUSE AT CHRISTMASTIME, GREENSBORO, ALABAMA, 1971

    SOLD

     

     

    “I discovered this particular house at Christmastime in 1970. Sandy and I drove from our home in Washington, DC, to Alabama, with our first child, who was still a baby, to visit my parents in the small town of Greensboro. Late one afternoon, near dusk, I decided to look around a little bit. Just outside of town, on a rise in the landscape, was this house, a very simple rectangle, with two front doors. It was very crude, but it had aged just beautifully. The aging process, what I call the aesthetics of aging, has always impressed and intrigued me. I didn’t really notice, when I first approached the house, that it was painted only up to a certain height in white paint. Everything else was gray, weathered wood. I felt that I should ask permission to photograph it. I don’t always ask permission because oftentimes there’s no one around. It was dusk with that beautiful blue-gray, late-afternoon winter light. Smoke was coming out of the chimney of the little house. I knocked and in a moment this elderly lady came to the door. I said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, do you mind if I photograph your house?’ She replied, ‘Oh no, sir, I’d be very pleased. Just understand, we could paint only as high as we could reach.’ That statement still affects me to this day. In a moment she came back to the door, opened it and said, ‘Oh mister, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me turn on my Christmas lights for you.’ She went back in, plugged them in and the door lit up with a string of a few Christmas lights, a child’s drawing of Santa Claus, and some kind of simple mask. I’ll never forget that experience as long as I live… The next summer, in July, I went back and of course the Christmas lights were no longer there. The house was in full sun and you could see even more clearly how it was painted. I didn’t see the lady on that trip. I went back the next time, I think in 1976, and I photographed it again. Then I went back in 1977 and the house was gone. The dwelling was completely gone, like it never existed. There was no evidence of it having fallen down or anything like that. It was just gone, and there was only a field of grass in its place. I’ll always wonder what happened to that lady.”

     
    -William Christenberry
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  • Roger Ballen, Puppy on table, 2000

    Roger Ballen

    Puppy on table, 2000
    Puppy on table, 2000 is from Roger Ballen’s Shadow Chamber series. Ballen is one of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century. His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own. By blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and art forms such as painting, theatre, and sculpture, his work challenges the ways in which we perceive the ‘reality’ of photography. Since the beginning of Ballen’s artistic career, the animal has been an important symbol in his work. Ballen’s work can be found in almost every major museum including the High Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and MoMA.
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