Rago/Wright Previews Two Spring Sales With Gilliam, Ito, Martins, and Boafo
Rago/Wright will bring two major spring sales to market in May 2026, pairing a focused presentation of geometric abstraction with a broader offering of postwar and contemporary art. The house’s Fine Art Director, Meredith Hilferty, said the dual offerings reflect its “expanding leadership in presenting important postwar painting and sculpture,” adding that the team is proud to place works of this caliber before collectors.
The first sale, Pure Edge: American Geometric Abstraction, Selected Works from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, includes 19 works from the museum’s collection. The second, Post War and Contemporary Art, spans 20th- and 21st-century art and brings together painting and sculpture across several generations.
Among the headline lots is Sam Gilliam’s Sun Woman (1970), estimated at $300,000–$500,000. The American artist Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) is best known for his “Drape” paintings, which emerged in the late 1960s when he began leaving canvases unstretched. The resulting works, often saturated with color in a manner that recalls Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique, could be hung and arranged in multiple ways, introducing chance and a direct relationship to the surrounding space.
Other notable works include Annie Morris’s Stack 7 (Ultramarine Blue) (2015), estimated at $150,000–$200,000; Miyoko Ito’s Adam and Eve (1957), estimated at $200,000–$300,000; Maria Martins’s Impossible (1946), estimated at $150,000–$200,000; Amoako Boafo’s Girl in Yellow (2019), estimated at $80,000–$120,000; and Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Small Figure with Polygon (1993), estimated at $70,000–$90,000.
British artist Annie Morris (b. 1978) began her “Stack” sculptures in 2014, building forms that balance monumentality with visible instability. Miyoko Ito (1918–1983), who spent most of her life in Chicago, developed a singular abstract language shaped by Cubism, Surrealism, and personal iconography. Her work has since entered major museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Brazilian artist Maria Martins (1894–1973) is represented by Impossible, a 1946 work from her New York period and, according to the sale preview, the earliest of three known examples. The sculpture reflects her interest in transformation, nature, and the biomorphic forms that made her a key Surrealist figure in the 1940s. Boafo’s Girl in Yellow and Abakanowicz’s Small Figure with Polygon extend the sale’s range into more recent figurative and sculptural practice.
Taken together, the offerings suggest a market still attentive to works that combine formal invention with art-historical weight. For collectors, the appeal lies not only in names, but in the way these artists reshaped the language of painting and sculpture.
