Sonja Sekula

Art Brokerage: Sonja Sekula Swiss Artist: b. 1918-1963. Swiss-born artist Sonja Sekula's paintings and works on paper capture a key transitional moment in American modernism, bridging surrealist tropes and geometric abstraction with the gestural mark-making of action painting. In 1951 her work was included alongside Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, and other members of New York's avant-garde in the pivotal "9th Street Show," which helped usher Abstract Expressionism into the mainstream. Sekula was a fixture among the New York art scene of the mid-20th century; her work was exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century, and she counted Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage, as well as émigré Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, among her peers. Mental illness cast a shadow over her life from a young age, and after years spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals, Sekula took her own life at the age of 45. Listings wanted.