Hasta La Ideas

James Rosenquist’s “The Richest Person Gazing at the Universe Through a Hubcap” (2011), one of 26 works donated to the Artists for Haiti auction (Photo: David Zwirner)

Earlier this year, actor Ben Stiller and gallerist extraordinaire David Zwirner teamed up to organize Artists for Haiti, an art auction to benefit huminatiarian efforts in the wake of the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake that took 230,000 lives. Months of work on the project have paid off in the form of a jaw-dropping selection of 26 pieces—most created specifically for the sale—that will go on the block at Christie’s on the evening of Thursday, September 22, in New York. Artists including Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Cecily Brown, and Raymond Pettibon have donated works, and they’re not standard benefit-auction fare. Mamma Andersson has contributed a haunting oil called “Night Train” (2011), and Neo Rauch is represented by a breathtaking new canvas of alienated souls poised to break into song in a technicolored forest. In “Le juif errant” (2011), Francis Alÿs depicts a figure traversing a map while carrying the built world on his shoulders. The canvas could function as a new identity for Architecture for Humanity, one of several nonprofits and NGOs that all of the proceeds from the Artists for Haiti auction will support. Learn more about the auction and check out all of the works in person at David Zwirner (September 6-14) or at Christie’s (September 17-20). Click here to watch Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, who has written a text in the Artists for Haiti auction catalogue, discuss the situation in Haiti during his recent appearance on Charlie Rose.

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