In its September issue, Art+Auction compiled a list of the 25 most collectible midcareer artists working today. This month, ARTINFO will publish one installment from the feature per day. Click here to read Art+Auction editor-in-chief Eric Bryant’s introduction to the list. To see all the installments published so far, click here.
Kay Rosen | b. 1944 | United States
Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, is a place rife with conflict. It is also the inspiration behind Rosen’s 2012 text work Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which spells out the name of the city in big, gray block letters bookended by the letters C and D in white paint. It is the absence of half of the phrase that catches the viewer’s attention. Purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago for $75,000 from a 2012 show in New York at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the piece is emblematic of how Rosen plays with language to social and political effect.
Recently, the artist filled a billboard with the word WARNING—the first N bearing a conspicuous extra stroke in bright red paint that imparted a double reading, WARMING. Titled This Means War…, the piece was commissioned by Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh.
The artist traces her obsession with language to her childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she heard Spanish and English on the streets and Yiddish spoken by her grandmother at home. Such early exposure to what Rosen has referred to as the “athleticism of language” led her to pursue languages at Tulane and linguistics at Northwestern.
Prices for the artist’s prints, issued in editions of 25 to 125, range from $500 to $3,000; paintings sell for $30,000 to $50,000, though larger, multi-panel works can bring $100,000. “She’s underappreciated, but we’re working to change that,” says Meg Malloy, a partner at Sikkema Jenkins. The artist is also represented by Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston.
