Bankruptcy Lawler

the poster for kathryn bigelow's epic film point break has the disembodied stonefaced heads of its two stars, keanu reeves and patrick swayze, floating in the sky above a white foam wave crashing on the rocks of the shore, while three bank robbers in rubber presidential masks (nixon, carter, reagan) make a goofy swaggering pose with their guns. except here, the face of patrick swayze, but not the hair, has been replaced by the handsome young mug of photographer roe ethridge, whose blue eyes look straight at you. faint crease marks confirm that this was a photo of a poster, scanned and manipulated into a self-portrait of the artist. an edition of a 2010 work that will be sold by the bankruptcy trustees of lisa schiff, an art advisor who spent millions of her clients' dollars on personal items, including art.
Roe Ethridge, Untitled (Point Break), 2010, 35 1/4 x 23 7/8 in., ed 1/5+2AP, via Phillips, 2019

Untitled (Point Break), 2010, Roe Ethridge’s self-portrait as Patrick Swayze;

a 2019 sam mckinniss pastel drawing of a basket of pansies with a thick, loosely woven base, against a very pastel crayon lines distinguishable dark grey background is floated in a white shadowbox frame, and is being sold at phillips to pay the creditors of art advisor lisa schiff, who spent millions of her clients' dollars on her own stuff, like, perhaps, this drawing, which the artist donated to a benefit auction for the swiss institute
Sam McKinniss, Pansies in a Basket, 2019, pastel on paper, 9×12 in., via artsy

[feb 2025 update: it’s selling here, auction ends march 11.]

Sam McKinniss’s Pansies in a Basket (2019), from a Swiss Institute benefit auction;

oh the drama. louise lawler photograph of a white arc/wedge ellsworth kelly sculpture mounted on a concrete wall, but the photo is at night, and the only light sources are little spotlights in the thickets and shrubbery along the base of the wall, so the sculpture is dramatically lit from below, except one of the lights is pointed right into a shrubbery clump, so it's lighting that up instead. the lower third of the image is almost all blackness, though the foreground lawn or whatever barely breaks through. in the foreground, and bisecting the photo at the left third is the silhouette of a skinny, leafless tree, with black branches which seem to crawl across the white sculpture. anyway, this 2013 print of a 2011 photo is being sold to liquidate lisa schiff's assets and repay her clients and creditors at least some of the money she fleeced them for.
Louise Lawler, Silent Night, 2011/13, cibachrome on museum box, 51 x 39 x 2 in., via Sprüth Magers

and Louise Lawler’s Silent Night (2011/13) are three of the over two hundred artworks and design items included in the inventory of assets of Lisa Schiff and her former advisory firm, Schiff Fine Art. The inventory was filed as part of a bankruptcy proceeding and, as recently reported here, will possibly be liquidated at auction as early as November.

I broke out the inventory from its larger filing [pdf]. It’s after the jump.

In other filings from May, the bankruptcy trustee is seeking to recover deposits paid to two galleries by Schiff Fine Art of nearly $1m for work whose sale was never completed. $575,000 was paid to Thaddeus Ropac for a $750,000 Cory Arcangel work, Topline (2019). [idk, but Arcangel lists Topline as the title of a 2019 show in which none of the works have that title. Maybe it’s me for not keeping up with his prices, but that does seem like the price of an entire show?] And $398,000 was paid to Gladstone for a $650,000 sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, The Seated IV (2019), which was installed on the facade of the Met.

Though not identified in the filings, both purchases were initiated on behalf of Candace Carmel Barasch, the collector and former client who sued Schiff in 2023 for $6.3 million in undelivered art. It must suck to have a million dollars of your money sitting somewhere, and to have it classified as the assets of a bankrupt company, and you’re classified as a creditor, not an account holder. Has Barasch’s and others’ lawsuits prompted people to change the fiduciary or custodial agreements they made with their agent/art advisers?

sfa-filing-phillips-inventoryDownload