Distinguished Florida Collection Leads Freeman’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection, Florida, headlines Post War and Contemporary Art Sale, November 14, New York 

Freeman’s is honored to present seven distinct and exceptional selections from a Distinguished Private Collection, Florida, in the marquee Post War and Contemporary Art sale on November 14 in New York. Indeed, the selections demonstrate both the impact of visual imagery across mediums and the collector's singular focus through the undeniable quality and range of works acquired over the years.

A salient photographic work by Wolfgang Tillmans (Lot 3), Paper Drop-Haze, 2011, is one such highlight from the artist’s distinctive Paper Drop series. By photographing curled sheets of photo paper—sometimes glossy, sometimes matte—Tillmans turns the medium back on itself, transforming a simple physical gesture into a meditation on light, surface, and perception. These works collapse the distinction between subject and object: the paper is both what is photographed and what a photograph is made of. Thus, Tillmans challenges traditional tropes of representation and abstraction, underscoring photography’s dual nature as both image and object, illusion, and reality.

Lot 3 | Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) | Paper Drop-Haze, 2011 | Estimate: $15,000 - 25,000

Other seminal works from the collection include superlative paintings by Amy Sillman and Charline von Heyl. In Amy Sillman’s Untitled (Lot 6), color is both expressive and disruptive. Sillman juxtaposes both muted tones with jolts of saturated hues—acidic greens against dusky purples or fleshy pinks beside gray tonalities—to evoke tension and surprise concurrently. These unexpected combinations challenge harmony and instead convey the complexity and nuance of feeling—the ineffable. Sillman’s color acts as a form of inquiry, exposing the instability of visual and emotional experience.

In Charline von Heyl’s Untitled (Lot 5), completed in 2007, a distinctive feature of von Heyl’s oeuvre is evident: her steadfast engagement with the history of painting while refusing nostalgia. Von Heyl draws upon the legacies of Cubism, Pop, Abstract Expressionism, and Op Art, yet transforms these influences into something distinctly her own. Her surfaces often contain traces of erasure, overpainting, and disruption, revealing the tension between intention and accident. As a result, von Heyl exposes painting as a form of thinking—an active dialogue among intuition, intellect, and the materiality of the work itself.

Lot 5 | Charline von Heyl (German, b. 1960) | Untitled, 2007 | Estimate: $150,000 - 250,000

Ken Price’s Boo (Lot 2) redefines the possibilities of ceramics as a sculptural medium. Moving beyond traditional craft associations, Price fuses meticulous technique with bold color and abstract, organic forms, elevating the clay medium. Price’s vivid, biomorphic pieces, such as Boo, a ghost-like form, help shift the perception of ceramics toward a more conceptual, in fact, expressive practice.

A further highlight of the collection is a small-scale, deeply impactful painting by the artist Louise Fishman. Emerging in the 1970s, Fishman reasserted painting as a powerful, physical, and personal act, often infusing her gestural abstractions with historical, emotional, and political import. Her layered brushwork and dynamic compositions convey both strength and vulnerability, as shown in Untitled (Lot 1) (1994), thereby challenging the male-dominated legacy of abstraction. 

Lot 1 | Louise Fishman (American, 1939-2021) | Untitled, 1994 | Estimate: $6,000 - 10,000

Furthermore, a key work on paper from the collection by Kehinde Wiley (Likunt Daniel Ailin (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, Lot 4) redefines the traditions of Western art history by placing Black subjects at the center of power, beauty, and reverence. Drawing on the visual language of Old Master painting—from Renaissance portraiture to 19th-century European realism—Wiley, as evidenced in this work, replaces historical figures of authority with contemporary Black men and women. This substitution both critiques and revises the canonical history of art.

Lot 7 | Louise Bourgeois (German-American, 1911-2010) | Untitled, 1998 | Estimate: $10,000 - 15,000

Lot 7, an Untitled work on paper by Louise Bourgeois, reveals part of her artistic practice, offering direct insight into her emotions, memories, and psychological states at the time. Throughout her career, Bourgeois employed drawing and printmaking as a daily ritual: a way to process fear, desire, loneliness, and the complexities of family relationships. Her works on paper often feature recurring motifs such as spirals that allude to the body and the unconscious.