International Women's Day - 8 March 2022

Happy International Women's Day to all the fearless females out there!

While any day makes for a great opportunity to celebrate the women in your life, this upcoming International Women’s Day (on Tuesday, 8th of March) gives you that one extra reason to do exactly that. For this annual festivity, we created an intimate selection of 10 limited art editions by leading contemporary artists, you will not want to miss out.

Our International Women's Day 2022 Selection

Donald Baechler, Red Rose, 2005

“ I'm an abstract artist before anything else, for me, it's always been more about line, form, balance and the edge of the canvas—all these silly formalist concerns—than it has been about subject matter or narrative or politics.” —Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler is a renowned figurative artist, who emerged from the East Village art scene in the 1980s in New York. His works depict simple everyday objects that allude to the cultural symbolism of nostalgia and cliché.

The Red Rose is a notable imagery used in Baechler's works. The voluptuous, comic-style rose is universally understood as a symbol of love, sexuality, and femininity. Placed as the centerpiece of this silkscreen, the Red Rose is the main protagonist in this edition series. The image is initially referring to a photograph of a rose tattoo that Baechler photographed. Looking at this Red Rose silkscreen, one can only think of Gertrude Stein’s quote “a rose is a rose is a rose”, its beauty, simplicity, and pop-ness.

Peter Blake, Marilyn (with Diamond Dust), 2010

“People say, "Why do you paint?" and I say, to make magic.” —Peter Blake

Peter Blake, best known for designing the album cover for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he considers painting to be central to his oeuvre. After studying at the Royal College of Art in London, he quickly achieved notoriety, receiving a knighthood for services to visual arts in 2002.

As a boy Peter Blake would often visit the cinema with his mother where he became an admiring follower of the Hollywood stars. This homage to Marilyn Monroe explores the relationship between celebrity icon and adoring fan through nostalgic childhood fantasies, and Blake’s silkscreen with Diamond Dust showcases Marilyn as an emblem of popular culture in a playful and affectionate way. The notable Marilyn is presented as a symbol of desire and set against a popping red background to compliment her signature smile, her mouth slightly open painted in a cherry lipstick colour. The work is finished with a shimmering layer of Diamond Dust for a glamorous finish and is signed and numbered by the artist. This is a limited edition series of only 150 Marilyn pieces.

Tracey Emin, On My Knees, 2021

“There should be something revelatory about art. It should be totally creative and open doors for new thoughts and experiences.” —Tracey Emin

A prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Tracey Emin´s production encompasses different mediums including film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, writing, installation and sculpture. Inspired by Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, Emin maintained a continuity in themes throughout her career, exploring gender and relationships with sometimes explicit imagery.

Her work is intensely personal, revealing intimate details of her life with honesty and humour. Tracey Emin uses all aspects of her life in her art, turning her autobiography into broader statements about sex, love, death, freedom, and everyday life. This audacious and confessional approach earned her a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1999.

Alex Katz, Yellow Tulips, 2014

“Flowers are some of the most difficult forms to paint because you have to capture the spatial aspect, their physicality, the surface of the flowers, and the colors”—Alex Katz

Born in 1927 in New York, USA, Alex Katz is the outstanding protagonist of figurative painting and one of our era's most acclaimed artists. His paintings are the result of a transformation of the three-dimensional world into simplified landscapes and portraits. He chooses to minimize details and shading and to present bold contours and blocks of colour.

Yellow Tulips is part of the famous flower painting series by Alex Katz. The aesthetics of flowers such as flags, tulips, and roses has been continuously explored by the artist throughout his career. The cropped, flattened composition displays a debt to Japanese woodblock art printing. Yellow Tulips is another of Katz's wonderfully bright exploration of the nature and the landscape.

Jeff Koons, Seated Ballerina, 2015

“Seated Ballerina is like a Venus. You could be looking at a Venus of Willendorf or some of the oldest Venuses. It is really about beauty and even a sense of contemplation, a sense of ease.”—Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons (born 1955) is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, ready-made and art objects, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic status. Jeff Koons´s art is the result of his intention to bring it out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms of contemporary pop and commerce-driven culture.

Seated Ballerina, commissioned by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Museum's 50th anniversary, reproduces the famous larger-than-life sculpture Seated Ballerina in mirror-polished stainless steel, inspired by a porcelain figure.

Part of the series Antiquity, Seated Ballerina explores themes of beauty, fertility, love, and the connectivity in the artistic dialogue that spans the history of man. The piece, according to a statement, “symbolizes notions of beauty and connectivity”. Her pose echoes that of a classical crouching Venus while the work also references Degas’s sculptures and images of ballet dancers at rest.

Thomas Schütte, Gisela, 2012

“I don’t want to keep producing commodities any more; I want to build permanent things instead – things that remain.” —Thomas Schütte

Thomas Schütte (born 1954) is a German contemporary artist. From 1973 to 1981 Schütte studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alongside Katharina Fritsch under Gerhard Richter, Fritz Schwegler, Daniel Buren, and Benjamin Buchloh.

Schütte has produced watercolor sketches of friends and acquaintances as well as numerous self-portraits. These works were often created in sequence, approaching the same subject numerous times as a means of engaging with the changing nature of the sitter. Each new approach captures a particular emotional state or specific moment in time.

The portrait of Gisela impresses with its monochrome simplicity, its sharp-edged, sometimes hesitant lines. This edition shows more than just a mundane face of a woman. The lady appears to be lost in her thoughts, almost melancholic. Yet Schütte is a precise, even lyrical draughtsman who brilliantly captures such emotional moments of his muses.

Sarah Slappey, Tied Up II, 2020

“I’ve always worked with the human figure and used photographic references in the past. At some point a few years ago, I needed a hand, and I thought, ‘I don’t have time to take photos, why don’t I just draw it from my imagination’, and it was leagues easier and more interesting than I anticipated. So I started making small hand paintings and drew the fingers the way they felt, rather than anatomically correct. Eventually, the hands became arms or legs, and connected to torsos or breasts. I had to grow my own figure from the fingers out, and now I know this body intimately and can morph and develop it as the work develops.”—Sarah Slappey

At a first glance, one views Sarah Slappey’s surreal works, almost like a dark adult cartoon, kinky, sensual, and sexually charged. However, the fleshy tones depicting female body parts and phallic-shaped props suggest an alternate world where a sexualized male gaze has been overcome. In Slappey’s artworks, the female form is only portrayed by those who possess it.

The American female artist works with the intention of removing feminine shame from the nude figure. In Tied Up II the scenario thickens as additional elements add to a bondage-suggestive Tied-Up with elements like marble, pearls, chain link, and clouds. Slappey has said she imagines “bodies as so overtly female/gendered that they become aggressive and threatening”.

Donald Sultan, Yellow Mimosa, July 23, 2015, 2015

“The image in the front is very fragile, but it conveys the loaded meaning of everything that is contained in the painting.” —Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan (born 1951) is a distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the New Yorker “New Image” movement. He has a unique artistic method and innovative approach to traditional subject matter. Sultan’s work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental. His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas. His powerfully sensual, fleshy object representations are rendered through a labor-intensive and unique method.

Although his paintings are often classified as landscapes and still life, Sultan states that they are first and foremost abstracts. Besides paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he has created many editions. Donald Sultan’s prints are unique: he uses specific materials like “flocking’s” to create expressive and powerful prints that are reminiscent of his forceful paintings.

Yellow Mimosa depicts the flowering plant mimosa, which is also called the sensitive plant or sleepy plant. Sultan, seems to have taken inspiration from the name with the dark black, chalky stems flowing down and covering most of the page and the clusters of white spots symbolizing the blossoms.

Any Warhol, Marilyn (Pink), 2011

“I just see Monroe as just another person. As for whether it's symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it's beauty, and she's beautiful and if something's beautiful it's pretty colors, that's all.” —Andy Warhol

Of all Andy Warhol's celebrity subjects, none seem more perfectly emblematic of how the artist perceived and synthesised America than Marilyn Monroe. Warhol saw in Monroe all the promise, beauty, sex symbol, a Hollywood product, the fame and tragedy that 1960s America was capable of realizing. In his Marilyn portraits – which he began shortly after Monroe's death, in August 1962 and taking on the suggestion of Henry Geldzahler - it's impossible to locate what one might call the truth of the subject.

Warhol liked watching Hollywood films, saying that the only real reason we watch movies is to see the stars and to see them as often as possible. His Marilyns are technically incredibly special, as when you look at them the colour of the background pops first and the drawing comes second, a complete reversal of the usual order seen in painting.

Damien Hirst, Forever (large), 2020

“The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They're extreme – there's something almost tacky about them.” —Damien Hirst

The Turner prize winner and epicenter of the YBA movement. Damien Hirst's emblematic art of our era revolutionizes the art market. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today, creating truly iconic artworks.

This edition of Forever features bright, abstract details from Damien Hirst’s new series of paintings titled Cherry Blossoms. Here, Hirst reinterprets the traditional subject of landscape painting on a monumental scale, entirely covering the surface of the works with bright colours that stretch the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. The vibrant works pay homage to the Pointillist and Impressionist art movements. With the Cherry Blossoms series Hirst bridges his explorations and examination of colour as well as its effect on the eye, where movement and dynamicity of colour have been composed freely and joyously by the British artist.