Talk of the block: 12 artists dominating the conversation in spring 2024

Beginning 4 May, Christie’s New York galleries will play host to hundreds of exceptional works of art as part of the 20th/21st Century Art sales series. While visitors to the presale exhibitions at Rockefeller Center will highlight objects across genres and eras, many of the artists on display are also headlining exhibitions at eminent institutions around the globe. From Venice to Los Angeles, Baden-Baden to Hong Kong, read on to discover the artists we can’t stop talking about.

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is not just having a moment, she’s defining it. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024, Holzer was hailed by Kiki Smith for her ‘singularity as an artist’. An upcoming exhibition, Jenny Holzer: Light Line, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York will explore her work in depth. The show will revisit her 1989 site-specific installation in the museum’s rotunda and also feature a selection of paintings, drawings and sculpture by the artist.

A slice of the original 1989 Guggenheim exhibition will be on offer in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. The Living Series: You can watch people align themselves... (1989) showcases Holzer’s thought-provoking use of language. Here, a granite bench is inscribed: ‘You can watch people align themselves / when trouble is in the air / some prefer to be close to those / at the top and others want to be / close to those at the bottom / it’s a question of who frightens them / more and whom they want to be like.’

Another bench work by Holzer, Arno Pari (2010), set the auction record for the artist when it achieved $1,560,000 in 2022 at Christie’s in New York.

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu has brought her closest artist friends along to Venice as part of Ensemble, an exhibition at Palazzo Grassi. The largest European exhibition of Mehretu’s work to date also includes contributions from Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin. With 50 works spread across the 18th-century building, the retrospective places Mehretu’s 25 years of creative output in conversation with her contemporaries.

It’s not the first time Mehretu has exhibited in Venice. In 2019, Mumbaphilia (J.E.) (2018) was shown as part of the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale. That painting, interpreting a composition by the musician Julius Eastman through Mehretu’s signature abstracted layers, will be offered as part of Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale. Her Fever graph (algorithm for serendipity) (2013) also features in the sale. The work builds upon architectural drawings with colour, ink and acrylic, creating a rich visual ensemble that conveys the challenges of the contemporary experience.

Ewa Juszkiewicz

Also making waves along the canals of Venice is the Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz, who is the subject of a solo exhibition, Locks with Leaves and Swelling Buds, at Palazzo Cavanis. Coinciding with the 60th Biennale, the exhibition includes 15 paintings Juszkiewicz produced between 2019 and 2024.

Juszkiewicz is known for her reinterpretations of historical portraiture, in which the faces of women subjects are obscured by the surreal or the grotesque: wrapped in fabric, covered in hair or overgrown with plant life. Her trademark approach is on full display in Appropriation (2018), part of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. Here, Juszkiewicz paints a classical bust, enveloping it in leaves and flowers.

Robert Indiana

American Pop artist Robert Indiana gets re-examined on the art world’s biggest stage as part of a retrospective exhibition at Venice’s Procuratie Vecchie. Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery spans six decades of Indiana’s career and brings together both famous imagery and lesser-known early works. An official collateral event of the Biennale, the exhibition gives audiences a deeper understanding of an artist who used text and numerology to explore our deepest emotions.

Two of Indiana’s most iconic motifs are also coming to Rockefeller Center as part of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. Conceived in 1966 and executed in 1999, the monumental LOVE sculptures epitomise the artist’s graphic style. In 2011, a LOVE sculpture set a record for the artist when it sold at Christie’s in New York for $4,114,500.

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning, the subject of a solo exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, is also making a splash in the Floating City. Featuring 75 works by the artist, Willem de Kooning and Italy is the first show to focus on the artist’s time in the country in 1959 and 1969. These separate voyages had an enduring influence on his practice, inspiring his first forays into sculpture and reinvigorating an interest in the Old Masters. Across painting, drawing and sculpture, the exhibition highlights the visual resonance of Italy throughout his work.

De Kooning is also represented in several sales at Christie’s in New York this May. From paintings blending abstraction and figuration, such as Woman in a Rowboat (1965) and Man in Wainscott (1969), to the mixed media collage Woman on the Dune (1960–1961), the works on offer capture the experimental spirit of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists.

Bruce Nauman

The first retrospective in Asia devoted to the American artist Bruce Nauman, on display at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong in partnership with the Pinault Collection, surveys the artist’s influential and transgressive career. Featuring photography, performance, sculpture and video, the exhibition spotlights Nauman’s ongoing interrogation of what defines artistic practice and his refusal to adhere to the constraints of any one medium.

Hanged Man (1985), a striking example of his boundary-pushing work, will be offered in Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale. Made from neon tubing mounted on metal monolith, the sculpture is a continuation of Nauman’s experimentation with neon signage, a medium he pioneered in the mid-1960s.

Ellsworth Kelly

Paris will mark the centenary of Ellsworth Kelly’s birth with a retrospective exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation. Shapes and Colors, on view from 4 May through 9 September, presents over 100 of Kelly’s paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs and collages across two floors of the stunning Frank Gehry building.

Per the exhibition’s title, Kelly prized shape and colour above all else. This is evident in Blue Pale Gray, part of Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale. Made in 1960, the painting demonstrates his ability to turn free-floating shapes into dynamic masterworks. Using just two hues — blue and grey — the master of hard-edge abstraction revolutionises the way we see shapes in space.

Ana Mendieta

The Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta pioneered a practice of earth-body works that continues to feel groundbreaking today. From now until 19 May, more than 100 pieces from her oeuvre are on view as part of Ana Mendieta: Search for Origin at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain. The exhibition, which spans a fifteen-year period, brings together photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, drawings and paintings. A work from Mendieta’s Amategram series is also featured in the current exhibition Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Rosa de la Cruz Evening Sale at Christie’s presents items from the personal collection of one of Miami’s most prolific and singular collectors, including many by Mendieta. These span genres and price points, from Mendieta’s groundbreaking Siluetas series to one of her rare Sandwoman sculptures.

Ed Ruscha

After a blockbuster debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN has travelled to Ed Ruscha’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles. The comprehensive retrospective highlights the artist’s multifaceted oeuvre, from paintings, drawings and prints to photographs and his pioneering artist books. Spanning six decades of output, the exhibition also explores his signature interplay between text and image.

This theme is embodied in Ruscha’s Truth (1973), a highlight of Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale. The large-scale work is part of a series begun in 1972 that was inspired by the doctrines of his Catholic upbringing. In Truth, Ruscha renders the five letters across a blazing background of brown fading into orange, giving a sculptural quality to text while drawing parallels to landscape painting.

Roy Lichtenstein

This year also marks 100 years since the birth of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. On view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna until 14 July, a new comprehensive exhibition surveys over 90 paintings, sculptures and prints that encapsulate his unique and revolutionary style. Celebrations of the artist will continue into 2026 when a highly anticipated retrospective will take over the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Pulling from comic strips and advertising, Lichtenstein pioneered his own artistic vocabulary that elevated the everyday and became synonymous with Pop Art. This style is represented across works in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale and 20th Century Evening Sale. Modern Painting with Ionic Column (1967) is an example of his characteristic Ben-Day dots and crisscrossing geometric shapes, while Painting: Silver Frame (1984) merges comic strip imagery with painterly abstraction.

Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor has dominated the cultural conversation in the wake of his blockbuster retrospective Henry Taylor: B Side. Deemed ‘thrilling’ by the New York Times, the show was first displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles before coming to the Whitney in New York. Now, Taylor is the co-star of the exhibition YOU ME: Jill Mulleady and Henry Taylor at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. Bringing together two artists with contrasting visual languages, the exhibition explores the similar thematic considerations in their work as well as the bond between the long-time friends.

Taylor’s raw, immediate style of portraiture is evident in two paintings that are part of Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale and the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. Deanna Lawson – Artist (2012) and C&H (2006) showcase the artist’s ability to elevate the everyday through vibrant, authentic portraiture.

Nicolas Party

The Swiss painter Nicolas Party went globetrotting in early 2024 with museum exhibitions in New York and Baden-Baden. When Tomorrow Comes, which ran until February 18 at Germany’s Museum Frieder Burda, was a solo exhibition that presented painting, sculpture and site-specific installations. Stateside, Party debuted a large pastel mural at The Frick Collection in New York. The site-specific work responded to Rosalba Carriera’s eighteenth-century Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume, generating a cross-century conversation. Now, Party’s immediately recognisable style graces the cover of the spring 2024 issue of The Paris Review.

Party’s portraiture, as well as an excellent example of his landscapes, will be offered in multiple sales at Christie’s New York. Grotto, a 2019 painting in the 21st Century Evening Sale, exemplifies his surrealist spin on traditional genres.