Ivy Haldeman

Ivy Haldeman was born in 1985 in Aurora, Colorado. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York in 2008, where she received the Pietro and Alfreida Montana Prize for excellence in drawing and a full tuition scholarship. After graduating during the recession, and doubting that art was a viable path, she trained as an emergency medical technician before returning to studio practice full time.

Haldeman lives and works in New York City. Her paintings, typically acrylic on canvas, depict stretched, curving figures modeled on a hot dog form alongside hollow, standing power suits, imagery she uses to probe how commercial packaging, fashion, and corporate uniform shape ideas of the body and of power. Her exhibition history includes early solo shows at artist-run spaces in Providence and Oakland, followed by gallery solo exhibitions at Downs & Ross (now Tara Downs) in New York beginning in 2018, Capsule Shanghai in 2019, and Francois Ghebaly in Los Angeles beginning in 2020. In 2022 the Yuz Museum in Shanghai gave her a dedicated solo museum presentation, Pictures for Use and Pleasure.

Haldeman's work has been the subject of coverage in Artforum, Artnet News, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, The New York Times, T Magazine, W Magazine, and Observer, according to her representing galleries' biographies, alongside features in Juxtapoz and Cultured. Critical attention has centered on her use of a single, recurring hot-dog figure and empty suit as vehicles for reading gender, consumer branding, and corporate power through the language of Pop-inflected figuration. No verbatim, independently sourced critic quote could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Haldeman's auction market is young: consistent public results date only to 2021, spanning day and evening sales at Phillips, Christie's, and Sotheby's in London, New York, and Hong Kong. Her reported auction high is USD 176,400, for the painting Colossus, Lips, Two Fingers Enter Left, Toes Touch Top, at Sotheby's New York on 20 May 2022; this figure and date come from a compiled auction-record list rather than a primary saleroom archive, so it is presented here as the best-documented figure available rather than an independently audited one. Other notable results reported by the same sources include USD 138,600 for Two Suits, Wrist Bent, Cuff to Pocket (Mauve, Peach) at Phillips New York on 24 June 2021, against a USD 20,000 to 30,000 estimate, and USD 88,200 for Full Figure, Head Rests on Back of Hand, Knees Akimbo, Thumb Inside Book at Christie's New York on 12 May 2023. Separately, day-sale results at Phillips in London and New York in 2022 and 2023 sold from about USD 22,860 to just over GBP 40,000, showing a broader base of demand beneath the top results.

Haldeman's market is thin and early stage: consistent public auction results only date to 2021, and prices have varied considerably by venue and by result, from Phillips day sales in the low twenty-thousands to just over GBP 40,000, up to the higher-value 2021 and 2022 results discussed above, which makes any single price point an imperfect guide to value. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through her representing galleries, Francois Ghebaly and Tara Downs, matter more than usual. Her presence in seven public collections, including the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, is the strongest available signal of institutional interest for a market still building its auction track record.