The Collection of Shawn & Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace LA 
12 September 2024
The Collection of Shawn & Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace LA 
138

Thierry Noir b.1958

I Rehearse in Front of the Mirror Before Leaving The Arguments that Will Later Convince My Clients

2020
acrylic on canvas 11⅞ h × 9½ w × ¾ d in (30 × 24 × 2 cm)
estimate: $1,000–1,500
result: $6,930
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Signed to lower left ‘Noir’. Signed, titled and dated to verso ‘Thierry Noir Oct. 1. 2020 I Rehearse in Front of the Mirror Before Leaving The Arguments that Will Later Convince My Clients’.
provenance: Acquired directly from the artist, Collection of Shawn and Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace Projects, Los Angeles

This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.

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They are a symbol of a freedom that does not come from the sky, a freedom that is not given to you, but a freedom that you have to fight for.

Thierry Noir on the Berlin Wall murals

Q & A With Andrew Hosner

Reflecting on nearly 20 years of LA’s Thinkspace Projects, Andrew Hosner spoke with Fine Art Specialist Leon Benrimon about the history of the gallery, the collection he built with his wife Shawn Hosner, the evolution of LA's art scene, and more. This is an excerpt of our full Q & A, which can be viewed here. 

Leon Benrimon: I’ve read that you and Shawn really considered yourselves art collectors first and gallery owners second. Could you describe how you began collecting?

Andrew Hosner: When I first came out to Los Angeles to be with Shawn, we knew that we wanted to have a couple hobbies and we were always both kind of into antiques due to our parents, especially the mothers on both sides. We had started going to flea markets pretty early on, Rose Bowl being a favorite, and were collecting the old early acrylic radios from the fifties and sixties, just because we felt it was a connection to both of us being in the music industry. From there, that led us into slowly starting to go out to gallery openings. Shawn was already a regular of Merry Karnowsky and a few other galleries back then, like Corpo Gallery and some others. We eventually bought our first print together and then not too long after that, we bought our first little original from BLK/MRKT Gallery, which was Dave Kinsey's gallery who had started Studio No. 1 with Shepard Fairey back in the day, and we had been going to his gallery. So when he opened BLK/MRKT we were excited to go check that out and support it. And it was the second solo show from Jeff Soto after he had had his big first solo with Marsea over at New Image Art. That was the first little original we had bought, I think it was a little 6-by-9 for $300. I’ve actually held on to that one, couldn’t let that one go.

LB: Do you remember what your first print purchase was?

AH: I know Shawn’s first print purchase of any significance was Mark Ryden, Balloon Boy. A friend of hers encouraged her to get it on a credit card and that still hangs in the house, too. I think our first print that we bought together, I want to say was a Joe Sorren. But there’s a part of me that thinks that might have been Ryden, too. Actually no, it was Camille Rose Garcia, it just popped into my head. It was a big print that’s in the auction actually, hand-embellished with lots of glitter and things of that. That was the first piece where we found out that some dealers are Satan and will actually let you pay on payments, which we do now too. You always see the look in the person’s face, like, I thought I talked to myself out of buying it, damn it. But then they’re like, you’re gonna let me pay for it over the next six months?

That’s really what opened up the world of art to us—knowing that you didn’t have to be rich.

That’s really what opened up the world of art to us—knowing that you didn’t have to be rich. That you could get by putting three or four hundred down a month over the course of six, seven, eight months and get a little $2,000 or $3,000 piece—which for the first many years we collected, I don’t think we ever went too north of $2,000 or $3,000, just because that was our comfort zone.

LB:  What draws you in or appeals to you when you’re looking at artworks?

AH: The first rule of buying for us, and myself moving forward, will always be you have to like it. We’ve never really tried to buy simply because of a name. When you’re just buying because of name, it seems like you're almost collecting bugs or something. Like, you don't care what the art is, you just want to have that person in your specimen realm. And I get that, and a lot of that’s driven by different facets of the art world and such like that. But we’ve always had to make sure that we really wanted to live with it for the rest of our lives, if we could.

LB: How would you describe the aesthetic that draws you in?

AH: I've been asked that question a lot over the years and we've always just said we show and buy what we like, and then when people try to drill into it, I would say that there's stuff that I’ve bought in the last few years that I don't think I would’ve ever bought 20 years ago and vice versa. So I think, as with everything in life, tastes change and you also just grow when you get exposed to more travels and exposed to more people and exposed to more, I guess just outlets of creativity. By and large, if it's got a cat in it, that's always going to win, just because we're cat folks.

Past that, we’ve purchased everything from abstract to super-realism to all manner of sculpture. I think the only thing we never really delved too far down was video art, even though we do have one little piece. There's no real way to pigeonhole it. We definitely like things that capture a time, but we're also not looking to be too time-specific. I mean, definitely figurative always wins, I guess. That might be the best way to put it, we're definitely more figurative, and I myself as a curator have always geared our vision a bit more towards the figurative-driven than the abstract.

Thierry Noir b. 1958

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French artist Thierry Noir was born in Lyon, France in 1958. He moved to West Berlin in 1982, at first intending to become a musician. After touring as a multi-instrumentalist with the German group Sprung Aus Den Wolken ("Jump from the Clouds"), Noir began painting the Berlin Wall with another French artist, Christophe-Emmanuel Bouchet, in 1984. Making use of paint left at construction sites, Noir responded to the melancholy, claustrophobic pressure exerted by the Wall on those living nearby with vibrant, playful murals that were quickly rendered through a simple recipe of "two ideas, three colors" since East German soldiers were always patroling in the vicinity.

Prior to this time, the Berlin Wall had been covered only with anti-American, racist, or comic slogans. No one had dared to paint large images on the forbidding Wall. Noir and Bouchet broke this taboo, even among those in the artistic community, because they wanted to make the Wall appear obscene and absurd, to help hasten its demise as a literal and figurative barrier to freedom. Residents were initially suspicious of these murals, but they became fond of them over time. Once local artists like Kiddy Citny and international artists like Richard Hambleton and Keith Haring joined the cause, Noir's work was lauded. In the five years leading up to the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Noir painted murals on about six kilometers total. Subsequently, Noir was commissioned to paint murals at the East Side Gallery, a 1,316-meter remnant of the Wall in the former East Berlin.

In 1990, thirty-three sections of the Berlin Wall with Noir murals were auctioned at the Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo, which led to his iconic work spreading globally through museums and private collections. Irish rock band U2 hired Noir to paint six East German Trabant cars for the 1992 Zoo TV tour and images of them were incorporated into album art. For the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, Noir painted ten original segments of the Wall in Los Angeles, the sister city to Berlin, with fellow artists Shepard Fairey, Retna, and Kent Twitchell; these works were then permanently exhibited near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2013, Noir painted various murals in London, and two years later held a retrospective exhibition there. Since 2014, Noir's art has been projected onto various Berlin landmarks in the annual Festival of Lights. Noir created his three largest public compositions ever in 2017 in London, Los Angeles, and Sydney.

One of the most famous, influential, and accomplished street artists, works by Thierry Noir are now held in private and public collections worldwide. In addition to his murals at the East Side Gallery, the Allied Museum in Berlin has a significant range of examples. Other institutions and landmarks featuring Noir works include: the Migration Museum in London; the Newseum in Washington, DC; Battery Park in New York City; and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Noir's painted Berlin Wall segments are now also part of the urban fabric of cities in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Auction Results Thierry Noir

Thierry Noir

Je presse le pas dans la dernière ligne droite, j’arrache le bitume

estimate: $10,000–15,000

result: $15,120

Thierry Noir

Fred cherche un bar sympathique

estimate: $5,000–15,000

result: $11,340

Thierry Noir

Occasionally an Inspiration Crosses My Cheek and Suddenly I am Radiant

estimate: $5,000–12,000

result: $11,340

Thierry Noir

I am Now Keeping My Eyes Straight Ahead, the Last Curve Turned Out Fine

estimate: $5,000–15,000

result: $10,710

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