Featured Works

Years ago, when artist John Sonsini began approaching Spanish-speaking day laborers in Los Angeles to ask if he could paint their portraits, he had some communication problems. "My Spanish was so poor," Sonsini admits.

First, he was introducing himself as an artista, a word that many Spanish speakers associate with a singer or dancer. But when he switched to pintor that didn't necessarily clear up the confusion — the men thought this professorial-looking, Italian-American with a salt-and-pepper beard was offering them a job painting houses. 

Christie's features John Sonsini as one of the top 10 American post-war and contemporary artists to have in your collection.

A selection of artists whose burgeoning art-world profiles are matched by their rising markets — featuring works offered in our Post-War to Present auction in New York.

I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.

That’s because his pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about the world in which we live.

Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially as those visions take shape in relationship to others: people with different backgrounds, different upbringings, different dreams.

There have always been multiple entry points for viewers to come to terms with John Sonsini’s bravura portraits of single or multiple male subjects, most of whom are Mexican day laborers, and “the age of Trump” has unexpectedly provided us with yet another. We as a people have never in living memory been forced to listen to the occupant of the White House vilify Hispanic migrants and asylum seekers with the excessive slander and bitterness as its current occupant, and for millions of Americans, such rhetorical excess has prompted its own collective soul-searching.