This March 21st at Clars Auctions, we will be featuring a curated assortment of artwork from a wide range of periods and locales.

Starting in our own state of California, we have an oil on canvas by plein air painter Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel (American, 1876–1954). Wachtel was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and studied in Chicago before moving to California, where she studied under Scottish American master landscapist William Keith.

Keith’s influence coupled with her new surroundings inspired Wachtel to move away from portraiture and embrace landscape painting, focusing her attention on the mountains, coasts, and foliage of southern California. The painting in this month’s sale is titled Autumn, Trabuco Mountains, California, (estimate: $8,000–$12,000) and depicts the leaves changing color amidst the peak on the border of Orange and Riverside Counties.

Next in our selection of highlights this month is an oil on panel painting by contemporary Canadian artist Ambera Wellmann (Canadian, b. 1982). Wellmann is known for her surreal, collage-like painting techniques that evoke the work of earlier experimental painters like Francis Bacon and Max Ernst, often depicting hybrid bodies and intensely pigmented bacchanal-like scenes. These works regularly bring over $100,000 at auction, and Wellmann is currently represented by major contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth. In Wellmann’s early work, her mastery of blending color is apparent, as is her ability to access emotion in unexpected imagery. The piece featured at Clars this month is titled Cloud #7 (estimate: $8,000–$12,000) and dates to 2009. Wellmann presents a mass of gray and white clouds in varied tones moving against a cerulean sky while a hint of peachy, warm sun glows from behind the vapor.

A third feature in our March auction is a large-scale sculpture by German artist Wolfgang Stiller (German, b. 1961) titled Matchsticks (estimate: $5,000–$7,000). Stiller, whose first solo gallery show was in 1986, focuses his practice on objects and installations, often transforming familiar and ordinary items into uncanny and unsettling facsimiles. Among his ouvre are cast wax geodes, a recreation of a scientific laboratory inside a disused train car, and bronze baby heads fashioned into ginseng roots. The human head is a common point of inspiration for Stiller, and this is apparent in Matchsticks, in which three wood matchsticks are topped with hairless, male heads, burnt black and resembling medieval death masks in a kind of postmodern memento mori.

Also among the featured highlights in our March auction are works by Thomas Hill, Maurice Braun, John Frederick Kensett, Tavakol Esmaili and much more.

This January at Clars we are excited to offer unique works by the fascinating artist, Cady Wells, whose style was inspired by Southwestern desert landscapes and topography.

Wells was born in Massachusetts in 1904 and was raised in a household that valued arts education, taking music, literature, and fine arts classes in his youth. Despite his interest in cultural education, Wells did not fare well in the boarding schools he attended, and after dropping out of several New England academies, he was sent to Arizona in 1992 where he fell in love with the desert landscape. By 1932, Wells had decided on painting as his artistic path forward and was invited to stay at the artist’s colony in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was also home to Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Dasburg, and a host of poets and writers at the time.

Wells began exhibiting alongside artists including Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Jackson Pollack while living between Taos and Santa Fe, and during this time the painter came to terms with his sexuality, entering a committed relationship with author and poet Myron Brinig. Wells’ relationship and career were interrupted by his service in World War II. While serving in Germany during the last nine months of the war, Wells worked with topographic maps, the influence of which is apparent in his subsequent work. Upon returning to New Mexico in 1945, Wells remained deeply affected by what he had seen in Europe, and by his own home’s proximity to the nuclear testing site at Los Alamos. He spent his final years traveling the world while remaining anchored in New Mexico, and finally finding national recognition with exhibitions in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, before his premature death from heart failure in 1953 at the age of 49.

Wells stands out among his peers for being a truly original artist whose abstract compositions emulate only the curves and colors of the Southwestern landscape and avoid recalling the techniques and styles of any other painter. His work remains a hidden gem among the swaths of artists who have flocked to Taos and Santa Fe over the years, never quite gaining the same reputation as his local contemporaries who favored traditional landscapes and figural painting over emotive and avant garde abstraction. The works in this month’s auction show a range of Wells’ stylistic variety, with examples displaying his interest in topographic maps as well as his prowess in color, form, and movement.