Chara Schreyer Facsimile Objects

a photo of a glenn ligon neon sculpture in which the word america is shown twice in white, right side up and upside down, and the lower letters are painted black, so the white neon reflects on the wall behind them. this full-scale photo was made for collector chara schreyer for some reason
Photograph after Glenn Ligon (Double America, 2012, 36 x 120 in.), 2016, Diasec flush-mounted, 44 x 129 in. sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023. Were the power cables photoshopped out, or did Schreyer have them hidden in the wall?

I cannot remember what I was searching for when I found the buck wildest things sold from the collection of quirky legend Chara Schreyer, but it was not a 13-foot long face-mounted photo of a Glenn Ligon neon sculpture.

a screencap of a sotheby's video tour of the absolutely beigest deluxe interior imaginable, i think it's actually a condo in the four seasons in san francisco, but a richard prince photo of a girlfriend, ie. a biker girlfriend posing next to a motorcycle for a biker magazine, which prince rephotographed, hangs on a greige wall over a greige love seat with oatmeal and charcoal throw pillows and two tiny round aluminum cafe tables in front. it's not clear if this is actually the richard prince photo, tho, or the identical copy collector chara schreyer had made.
Richard Prince of After Richard Prince? Who knows? A screenshot from a Sotheby’s video tour of some of Chara Schreyer’s homes.

I mean, a full-scale photograph of a Richard Prince girlfriend photo, that’s inexplicable, but at least conceptually logical, and also kind of hilarious. There was a similar full-scale photo of a Warhol car crash painting. Both the photocopies sold five months before the real [sic] things, in Schreyer’s sale at Sotheby’s.

a towering blobby concrete-like sculpture painted silver has a package of vintage doilies propped on top of a crag near the top, except this is actually a photo of the sculpture, by rachel harrison. the sculpture is by harrison, that is; the photo was made for chara schreyer, as part of a full-scale box replica of the sculpture. which she donated to sfmoma. the sculpture, that is, not the box.
After Rachel Harrison, &c. &c., 2017 [sic], 105.5 x 39 in., photo flush-mounted on diasec, sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023

The best, the most baffling, and the one I regret not having in my house this minute, is the 10-foot tall photo of a 1o-foot tall Rachel Harrison sculpture, sold as “After Rachel Harrison, Untitled (Sculpture with Doilies), circa 2017″. Reader, that is Harrison’s Hail to Reason, a 2004 that was first [?] shown at SFMOMA. Schreyer donated it to the museum, but not before commissioning a whole-ass, four-sided photo facsimile of it.

two faces of a 10-ft box object will full scale photos of two sides of a silver rachel harrison sculpture sits in a fabrication studio in los angeles. the shoulder of a guy who was probably involved in making it is left in for scale, but the rest was cropped out because he's just doing his job and didn't ask for his face to turn up on random art blogs ten years later

I got this image of Schreyer’s Harrison from the photo studio who’d been asked to make them. In.credible. This side shows the portable DVD player with the video of an auction.

Interestingly, the photo and painting photos are each made a couple of inches smaller than the originals, but the sculptures are full-scale, in prints—and photocubes—that take up even more space. There were gallery/advisor intermediaries, and the purpose of the facsimiles was not clear, only that they were works in the collection. Did Schreyer put them up when she loaned works for exhibitions? Did she have an original in one house and a copy in another? Did she install the copies in the sun and tuck the originals away for conservation reasons?

Who can say? All I know is there may be three other giant photos of a Rachel Harrison sculpture out there, and I would love to find them.