White Light Black Light

Martin Ramirez, 1895-1963 Martin Ramirez's entire oeuvre was created in California institutions during the 1950s and 1960s, where he began making his drawings and collages from scavenged scraps of paper, held together with potato starch and spit. Marked by a reverberating and repetitive line, his drawings have the obsessive quality of Louise Bourgeois's contemporaneous drawings. Of the 300 plus extant works, the most recurring images are the horse and rider (lot 16) and trains (lots 12 and 13), potent symbols of the freedom and escape that were denied to him.