?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
WILLIE WAYNE YOUNG (1942 - ) Untitled.
Pencil on wove paper, 1981, 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Initialed "W.W.Y." and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; property from the Willie Young Collection LP, a partnership managed by the Louis-Dreyfus Family.
Exhibited: Gallery Ricco/Maresca, New York; Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago, with the gallery labels on the frame back.
"Like a shaman or a medicine man, he finds his answers and inspiration 'in the bones.' Riffing off of natural forms, his subtle yet fantastical work calls to mind the inventions of Lee Bontecou, Salvador Dali and Hieronymous Bosch." -- Trenton Doyle Hancock, Inside the Outside: Five Self-Taught Artists from the William-Louis Dreyfus Foundation.
The following four lots present a brief introduction to the fascinating artwork of contemporary artist Willie Wayne Young. Over a remarkable six-decade career, working exclusively in graphite on paper, Young has created an impressive body of work centered around his love of drawing. He has investigated the infinite possibilities found in the abstraction of organic forms and imaginary landscapes. One can immediately see how deliberately and delicately considered these artworks are; Young draws with a pocketknife sharpened pencil and often a magnifying glass. While inspired by nature, from everyday objects like acorns and chicken bones to the cracks in the sidewalk, each are drawn from memory. His singular focus and sensitivity transform his subjects into the realm of the imagination, taking us into his world of wonder and delight.
Largely a self-taught artist, the Dallas native's talent was first noticed as a teenager when Young participated in local artist Chapman Kelley's studio group from 1959 until 1963. Living and working in Dallas his entire life, Young did not receive national attention until his first solo exhibition in 1993 at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery of New York, followed by another solo show in 1994 at the Goldie Paley Gallery at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Young's drawings soon were included by curators in several institutional exhibitions; including the 1995 A World of Their Own: Twentieth Century American Folk Art at the Newark Museum, and the 1996 A Labor of Love curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In 2009, the African American Museum of Dallas gave Young his first retrospective, curated by Edleeca Thompson, The Visionary Art of Willie Young. Then most recently, in 2015 Young's work was included in Inside the Outside: Five Self-Taught Artists from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York, a nationally traveling exhibition.
