Robert is the guest curator of Contemporary Curated this month. He has picked six artworks that will be sold at the auction on September 30th. He posed for photos and did a short interview wherein he discussed the character curation. Check it out below, and photos in our gallery! You can also see which six artworks that Rob has picked in Sotheby’s website.
An indie darling, a blockbuster leading man and a superhero, Pattinson has displayed undeniable versatility and a willingness to take risks. This month, his latest endeavor is as guest curator of “Contemporary Curated,” coming to auction on 30 September at Sotheby’s New York. With selections including Willem de Kooning, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Anselm Kiefer, Pattinson relied on the same instinct with which he chooses his roles: by prioritizing works that evoke a sense of story and imagining how their different energies play off one another in the same gallery space. Connected through their sensuality, animalism and capacity to evoke a strong response in their viewer, Pattinson’s choices for Sotheby’s are as psychologically riveting as his on-screen career.
A long-time admirer of art, the actor has only recently begun to draw on that passion. For example, while working with Claire Denis on High Life, paintings by Marlene Dumas and Georg Baselitz provided unlikely reference points for the actor as he sought to convey the emotional complexity of this artful sci-fi. Pattinson is now honing his taste with his own burgeoning collection, including a large sculpture by Elsa Sahal and a small sketch by Giacometti (of whom he is a huge fan) — he describes collecting as “learning a language.”
“What I look for is when a piece has its own language,” Pattinson says. “It doesn’t necessarily feel like it just exists for its own sake and has a presence that hums with a bit of life. It has the ability to communicate with you on a kind of primordial level.”
As for his characters? “Bruce Wayne would definitely have a few Francis Bacons, and Cedric Diggory would get a Turner or some painting of the Thames,” Pattinson says. “Connie Nikas is a Cy Twombly kind of guy, and I think the Dauphin would have a Botero above his toilet.”
SOTHEBY’S