Michael Lynne, the former CEO of New Line Cinema, is a longtime art collector and supporter; as an entertainment lawyer in the 1970s and ’80s, he represented artists like Julian Schnabel and Jean Michel Basquiat in exchange for some of the works they were creating. Today, he is both the owner of the North Fork, Long Island, winery Bedell Cellars and a Museum of Modern Art trustee — which is how, at a MoMA party in May, he found himself seated next to his friend, the artist Mickalene Thomas, whose work he also collects. “They were actually serving his wine,” Thomas remembers, “and the bottles had Barbara Krugers on them, and Eric Fischls.” Bedell’s long-running series of artist collaborations has also featured works by Chuck Close, Ross Bleckner, April Gornik and Howard Schatz. Tapping Thomas to contribute a label was a natural next step — and an uncomplicated one. “He just sort of asked if I would be interested, and I said sure, it’d be fun,” Thomas says. “It was just one of the easiest projects to do.”
It was particularly fortuitous timing for Thomas, who had lately been working on a new series of collage paintings, “Tête de Femme,” which opened in June at Lehmann Maupin. She knew immediately which of the images she wanted to repurpose for the bottle: “Untitled #3,” a joyful portrait of a female face, both obscured and augmented by glitter and strips of color. But rather than scaling down the finished painting, which ended up an expansive eight feet tall, Thomas returned to the preparatory collage she’d made from glitter, cut paper, makeup and acrylic in a much more manageable size — about 12 by 10 inches. “The collage ended up just being the perfect choice,” she says. “The various layers of papers created a nice dimension to a really two-dimensional surface, which was beautiful. It just really made it sort of pop off the surface.”
The bottles will be available tomorrow, after a launch party tonight. Thomas also plans to bring a case with her to Art Basel Miami Beach next month, to pair with a series of tote bags she’s created based on a text painting currently on view in an exhibition of her work at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. But a few close friends have already received bottles — and offered rave reviews. “They’re like, ‘We’re keeping this bottle! Maybe we won’t open it,’” Thomas says. “‘Maybe we’ll use it for candleholders or something.’”