Doeringer, known for his appropriations of works by famous contemporary artists, had been holed up in his studio on a graffiti-speckled block in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, working on his new project. On Friday, he will debut “Christy’s,” a show at the Chelsea gallery space High Line Nine curated by A Hug From the Art World. Doeringer will be exhibiting and selling bootleg versions of artworks up for auction this month at the Post War and Contemporary Art evening sale at Christie’s New York.
The authentic versions of the works, on view at Christie’s New York beginning Saturday, include pieces by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Their expected sale prices reach well into the millions.
The asking price for Doeringer’s copies? A flat $1,000 each.
“In the art world, auction prices are pretty much the only public record of what a work is worth, so it sort of sets the value of artists’ work,” Doeringer said. “The idea was to take this event and knock it off and make these multimillion dollar works of art available for a lot less.”
On the studio walls hung Doeringer’s versions of works by Frank Stella, Wayne Thiebaud, Kaws, Giorgio Morandi, Rauschenberg and Warhol. The knockoffs are smaller than the pieces they’re based on and with clear imperfections — a wobbly line here, a visibly pasted-on bit there — but instantly recognizable.
“They’ll fool you from a distance,” Doeringer said. “They won’t fool you close up.”
Doeringer, 44, who has an MFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, has made his bootlegs of famous art since 2001, when he began selling homemade copies of works by artists like Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin and Damien Hirst from a stand he set up on West 24th Street, near galleries that was showing some of the very work he was appropriating.
He was inspired, he said, by vendors selling knockoff handbags on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan.
Since then, he’s exhibited in actual galleries, and recently started making more altered riffs on famous works. (“Those in search of exact look-alikes, beware,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in a review of Doeringer’s 2014 exhibition, “Paintings & Sculpture,” which featured his takes on Warhol soup cans at the now-shuttered Lower East Side gallery Mulherin & Pollard. “These works are not copies as much as updates based on current company designs.”)
What does Christie’s think of Doeringer’s latest imitations?
“We’re flattered,” Alex Rotter, the chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, said in an email. “Whether it is art or music, a good bootleg version reminds you of an experience that you enjoyed and want to hold onto. We hope people will come and experience the original artworks at Christie’s as well as the bootleg versions in Chelsea — both are free and open to the public. I may do some shopping myself.”
Making the bootlegs — Doeringer is creating versions of around 30 artworks for the “Christy’s” auction — involves working backward. For a knockoff of Warhol’s “Double Elvis,” a silk-screen portrait of two identical, overlapping images of Elvis Presley in cowboy regalia, Doeringer found a digital version of the original photo Warhol used — a publicity still from the Don Siegel western “Flaming Star” — and created a stencil from it. So Doeringer’s version, titled “Andy Warhol (Double Elvis),” was essentially made using a digital approximation of Warhol’s method.
For a collage copy of Thiebaud’s “Eating Figures (Quick Snack),” a painting of a man and a woman sitting holding hot dogs and drinks, Doeringer painted a white background and chair legs onto canvas and stuck on top of it a digital print of the two people taken from an image of the original painting — which he pulled from the Christie’s website.
For an impromptu in-studio demonstration of how he created a scaled-down version of Jeff Koons’ “Rabbit,” an iconic stainless steel sculpture that Christie’s estimates will sell for $50 million to $70 million, Doeringer inflated (by mouth) one of several plastic rabbits he bought online. Its shape, it had to be said, was strikingly similar to Koons’ sculpture — though it was also translucent neon yellow and had a cartoon face.
Doeringer would paint it silver.
“It’s not exactly right,” he said, holding out the fully inflated bunny. “But it’s pretty close.”
—
‘Christy’s’
Through May 30, High Line Nine, highlinenine.com.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.