Making ‘updates’ of famous works.
“I’ve never actually had to go to court over one of these things,” Eric Doeringer said recently, standing in front of a wall of his latest artworks. “Generally, when they ask me to cease and desist, I do that.”
Mr. Doeringer, known for his appropriations of works by famous contemporary artists, had been holed up in his studio in New York, working on his new project. At the beginning of May, his show, “Christy’s,” debuted at the gallery space High Line Nine curated by A Hug From the Art World. Mr. Doeringer exhibited and sold bootleg versions of artworks up for auction last month at the Post War and Contemporary Art evening sale at Christie’s New York.
The authentic versions of the works, that were on view at Christie’s New York before the auction, included pieces by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Their sale prices reached well into the millions.
The asking price for Mr. Doeringer’s copies? A flat $1,000 each. “In the art world, auction prices are pretty much the only public record of what a work is worth, so it sort of sets the value of artists’ work,” he said. “The idea was to take this event and knock it off and make these multimillion dollar works of art available for a lot less.”
In his studio are versions of works by Frank Stella, Wayne Thiebaud, KAWS, Giorgio Morandi, Rauschenberg and Warhol. The knockoffs are smaller than the pieces they are based on and with clear imperfections — a wobbly line here, a visibly pasted-on bit there — but instantly recognizable.
“They’ll fool you from a distance,” Mr. Doeringer said. “They won’t fool you close up.”
Mr. Doeringer, 44, who has a Master of Fine Arts from Tufts University in Massachusetts, has been making his bootlegs since 2001, when he began selling homemade copies of works by artists like Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin and Damien Hirst from a street stand in Manhattan.
Since then, he has exhibited in actual galleries. (“Those in search of exact look-alikes, beware,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 2014. “These works are not copies as much as updates based on current company designs.”)
What does Christie’s think of his latest imitations?
“We’re flattered,” said Alex Rotter, an official at Christie’s. “Whether it is art or music, a good bootleg version reminds you of an experience that you enjoyed and want to hold onto.”
Making the bootlegs involves working backward. For a copy of Warhol’s “Double Elvis,” a silkscreen portrait of two identical, overlapping images of Elvis Presley in cowboy regalia, Mr. Doeringer found a digital version of the photo Warhol used and created a stencil from it. His “Andy Warhol (Double Elvis)” was essentially made using a digital approximation of Warhol’s method.
For a version of Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit,” a stainless steel sculpture that sold for a record $91.1 million, Mr. Doeringer inflated one of several plastic rabbits he bought online. Its shape was strikingly similar to Mr. Koons’s sculpture, though it was also translucent neon yellow and had a cartoon face. Mr. Doeringer painted it silver.
“It’s not exactly right,” he said. “But it’s pretty close.”