Cary Leibowitz: Collecting Objects, Collecting Words
Public Sale’s Mid-century Strong auction features over 75 lots from the New York City and Hudson-based artist Cary Leibowitz, also known as “Candy Ass”—a moniker he once picked up in a casual conversation about childhood epithets.
Cary Leibowitz in his home, courtesy of the New York Times
To those familiar with Leibowitz’s oeuvre, the collection represented in this auction will make an odd kind of sense. There are folk art and naive paintings, pop art, branded trash cans and other kitschy decorative items, colorful vintage op-art wallpaper, flashes of Victorian ornamentation, fanboy art prints, and elements of gay culture. One can feel the items Leibowitz surrounds himself with bleeding into his artworks, and vice versa, in the reciprocal chicken-and-egg dynamic of an individual’s aesthetic strategies and influences. It’s one example of the canonical avant-garde tradition of blurring art and life.
A view of our front showroom
To celebrate the privilege of offering a glimpse into this process, Public Sale has devoted part of our preview display space to an installation featuring several of Leibowitz’s items over a backdrop of vintage wallpaper.
You can create your own installation and surround yourself with Leibowitz’s singular aesthetic, with a broad array of items including midcentury furniture, lighting, and decor, sets of vintage wallpaper, artist prints and multiples and other wall decor.
One element that is crucial to Leibowitz’s work but missing from this collection, however, is fragments of language and text that are collected from diverse examples of everyday speech. So in keeping with this practice, we’ve assembled a small collection of textual fragments from various exhibition reviews and edited them together in a cherry-picked way—à la Hollywood movie posters, with all context removed—to render a portrait of the artist as a series of descriptive words and clauses. Whether these snippets came from positive reviews or negative ones, it is a testament to the force of an artist’s work that it can provoke such linguistic machinations and adjectival strings like the ones included below. We hope that if this collection doesn’t make you want to learn more about Leibowitz’s work, then at least it is a faithful homage to an aesthetic, which Public Sale also shares, of not taking oneself too seriously.
Text pulled from Artforum, Studio International, Art Space, Hyperallergic review
