STEPHEN ANTONAKOS
Package to Be Opened June 1996.
Canvas wrapped box sealed with string and wax, containing approximately 70 Ideas for Prints and Air Brush Paintings, crayon drawings on paper, 1968-1975. The box: 240x290x95 mm; 9 1/4x11 1/4x3 3/4 inches. Signed and dated in ink, and with the artist's address and instruction labels. Ideas for Prints and Air Brush Paintings: 135x90 mm; 5 3/8x3 5/8 inches, or 135x102 mm; 5 1/4x4 inches. Some with notations in pencil, verso, and accompanied by a note on graphing paper, signed and dated "Oct 1968" in ink, and stamped with the shipment date, "Jun 5 1975".
With— Yellow Line and Red Over Pink, pair of screenprints, 1970. Each 565x765 mm; 22 1/4x30 1/8 inches (sheet), full margins. Both artist's proofs, aside from the edition of 120. Both signed, dated, titled, inscribed "a.p." in pencil, verso.
Provenance: The artist to the package recipients, private collection, New York.
While living in Fresno, California as an artist resident, Antonakos (1926-2013) wrote to artists in New York requesting that they put something in a package and mail it to him. A conceptual piece, Packages was born. Antonakos exhibited these packages, from Christo, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman, among others, just as the senders shipped them to him, though he never opened them. When Antonakos returned to New York in 1972, he mailed approximately two dozen packages, with the contents known only to him, to his friends and associates with instructions for opening them on or after a certain date or occurrence (or not at all). Antonakos experimented further with the concept of concealment, the unknown, and choice with other package projects, including one in 1975, when he put a package in a freezer with the caveat that it would only be opened if the appliance broke down.
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
