Elizabeth Taylor as CLEOPATRA 1962-1995

Wonderfuly streamlined Swedish Art Deco three-door sideboard/credenza designed by architect Carl Bergsten. Overall piuece is elm wood and Mahogany and inlaid with two widths of pewte...

Our Sphinx is Persephone, and she started as an old kingdom Egyptian relic. I then turned her musculature into mechanical appendages like she was an icon or idol off the set of the 1927 film, “Metropolis”. She was going to be an AI sphinx but I still wanted to incorporate Rhubarb within her adornment as she is a Nordic or Maritime sphinx. Big leafed rhubarb didn’t resonate with the mechanized look I had just executed beautifully. At the very least she is a North American sphinx with feather and wheat motifs. I included for symbolism and beauty (of course), ancient Egyptian and Greek floral references befitting a worldly creature. I took liberties and referenced eighteenth and nineteinth "Orientalism". The Sphinx is a mythological creature and not anything that moved across terrains anywhere that most of us have been. The AI sphinx was too fascist and severe for most gardens. I liked it deeply and may revisit that avenue once this sphinx’s’ plaster dust has settled. I love the Baroque, so I decided to go Baroque by giving the lions coat some seriously carved fur and curly cues. She looked like any one of the seventeenth century Louis’ characters crossed with a French poodle. That was a bad notion. I then created a sphinx that I like, a sphinx from my soul but seriously influenced by other artists. In the end she is uniquely elegant and powerfully poised, with distinct features. Compared to most sphinx throughout history her breasts are too high on her chest but seductive none the less (she is a contemporary sphinx). Her head is elongated, much like the busts of the Armana period in Egypt, but that’s just her hair and headdress, not her skull. Her rump and back are sensual. The Rhubarb Sphinx, embodies a history of sphinxes created by Europeans after the Napoleonic invasion and the extensive survey of Egypt which ignited a design frenzy of all things ancient Egypt. She is an esoteric garden folly...

French, late 1940’s Jacques Adnet stool in Cerused white oak purchased from Miguel Saco Inc. in New York City. Upholstered in Ashbury calf hide leather in a warm off white with sligh...

The most comfortable wooden framed small scale lounge chair I have ever sat in. Designed by Jack Van Der Molen for the Jamestown Lounge Furniture Company during the 1950’s. Construc...

Wonderful work of the Danish artist Finn Pedersen (1944-2014) , born in 1944 in Bornholm. In 1966, he exhibited with artists from the CoBrA group such as...

Contemporary abstract lithograph by Swedish artist Leif Knudsen (1928-1975). Signed and dated. Framed under glass.

Framed Size: 28 1/4"W ...

Abstract painting using acrylic on paper by contemporary British Artist John Taylor. Framed in a vintage frame. Signed by the artist. From a collection of four pieces. John Tay...

A framed C-print photography by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood (1967-). Entitled "Self-Portrait in a Single-Breasted Suit with Hare", the print was made in 2001 and its unique in this size at 9" h x 6" w. Presented in a wood frame. Provenance: Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC (label verso). Artist Biography (courtesy of Guggenheim Musuem Collection) Sam Taylor-Wood B. 1967, LONDON Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967. At the age of sixteen, she enrolled in an art school in Hastings, later moving back to London to attend Goldsmiths College. After graduating in 1990, she worked as a bartender and as a dresser at the Royal Opera House; the latter experience would influence her work’s unabashed theatricality. Originally a sculptor, she began working in photography, film, and video in the early 1990s. Her first film, 16mm (1993), consists of an isolated female figure gyrating to a steady beat. She explored similar intersections between video, dance, theater, music, film, and video in subsequent works, including Killing Time (1994), in which seemingly bored actors wait their turn to lip-synch the lines of different characters from Richard Strauss’s Electra. Her photographic work also finds points of intersection with other mediums. The title of Five Revolutionary Seconds (1995–98), for example, refers to her creation of a panoramic image by rotating her camera around a room over that period of time; the resulting image has a narrative quality despite being a static image. In recent years, Taylor-Wood has engaged ideas of celebrity culture in her work. Third Party (1999–2000), a seven-screen video installation at the Hayward Gallery in London, featured pop singer Marianne Faithful and actor Ray Winstone in different one- and two-person scenes of flirtation and ennui, creating a party-like environment in the gallery where the viewer is privy to these personal exchanges. Equal parts pathos and humor, the two-minute film Pietà (2001), in which the artist attempts to suspend the Hollywood actor and hard-living icon Robert Downey, Jr. in her arms, also evokes the well-known art historical subject. Her video David (2004) evokes similar connotations and intimately unveils the much-photographed dynamic soccer icon David Beckham in deep sleep. Time and speed are often centerpieces of her videos, whether the rapid acceleration of a bowl of fruit’s decay process in Still Life (2001) or the illusion of frozen time in The Last Century (2006), for which the actors are in fact filmed in real time but remain impossibly still. Taylor-Wood’s first narrative film, Love You More (2008), borrows its title from a song by the 70s punk band Buzzcocks and chronicles the story of two teenagers who hear the recently released song together in a record store. Since her first show, Killing Time at the Showroom in London in 1994, Taylor-Wood has had solo exhibitions at White Cube in London (1995, 2001, 2004, and 2008), Kunsthalle Zürich (1997), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1999), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2000), Centre National de la Photographie in Paris (2001), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2002), Russian Museum in St. Petersburg (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (2007), and Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston...