At the recent Phillips/Poly new format, dual location 20th Century & Contemporary & Design Sales, a total of 17 artist records were made and none more impressive than the oil on linen modest-sized painting by New York based artist, Emily Mae Smith. “Broom Life” achieved a price 20 times more than its high estimate, selling for US1.5m.
Mae Smith, who grew up in Austin, Texas, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, creates lively compositions that offer a subtle social and political commentary, with a nod to distinct historical painting movements, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her avatar, an anthropomorphic broomstick figure. Simultaneously referencing the painter’s brush, a domestic tool associated with women’s work, and the phallus, the figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work. By adopting a variety of guises, the broom and other symbols speak to contemporary subjects, including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence.
Coming up:
Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
New York Auction 23 June 2021
LOT 9
Emily Mae Smith
“Waiting Room”, 2015
oil on linen
121.9 x 94 cm
Estimate: US$40K to US$60K
About the work:
Painted in 2015, Emily Mae Smith’s Waiting Room is a hypnotic example of the artist’s sleek and highly imaginative visual language that combines symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Through this lexicon, Smith addresses themes of scopophilic desire and consumption, tinting the results with a subtle feminist agenda. Merging two of the artist’s signature themes of the figure of the broom and round eyeglasses, the present work portrays an anthropomorphized broom, whose bristles have transformed into shimmering, glamorous hair, wearing sunglasses reflecting numberless clockfaces. Included in the monographic exhibition Medusa at Laurel Gitlen, New York, in 2015, the work subsequently featured in the ground-breaking show Unrealism curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian for Art Basel Miami in the historic Moore Building.