W hen Swiss chef Daniel Humm purchased the restaurant Eleven Madison Park in 2011, the gravity of the space was not lost on him. Construction began on the building nearly a century ago, when it was intended to stretch into the tallest structure in the world at the time. Then the Great Depression hit, leaving the stately Art Deco tower incomplete for decades. The historic character of the building served as a guidepost for Humm, who conceived of renovating the ground floor level restaurant with an eye for retaining its spectacular original elements, such as molding and marble arches.

Showcasing spectacular works of art throughout the airy main dining room and adjacent bars was equally important to Humm. The challenge lay in establishing a meaningful aesthetic that didn’t detract from the splendor of the building itself. “It’s hard to know what to do with it, to not get in the way of the room,” he tells Sotheby’s. “It’s kind of like working with food: You don’t want to get in the way of the ingredients.”

Humm then came to a realization: “Welcoming people to your restaurant is welcoming people to your home,” he says. “So what are the things you have in your home? All things that are personal to you. And if someone visits your home, the home has a soul or it doesn’t. And you might not know all the things, what they are. But you can feel they were curated with heart.”

For this fall’s Contemporary Curated auction at Sotheby’s New York, Humm aptly took his role as a guest curator fully to heart. Launching on September 26, the auction, organized in partnership with Velocity Black, features a gobsmacking array of works by stalwarts like Keith Haring, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Etel Adnan, Roni Horn and other contemporary artists.

Humm’s curatorial picks were inspired by his own curiosities and the numerous artists he’s worked with at Eleven Madison Park. Inside the restaurant, Humm commissioned the artist Rashid Johnson to take on a side bar area, which he decked out with drawings, ceramics, and a starry ceiling. He describes it as a “permanent mini Guggenheim show because every piece in here is curated by Rashid.” Humm believes in giving trusted artists “carte blanche” to work artistically at his restaurant, because “artists know best how to react to a space.”

These inspired reactions often have a personal touch for Humm. When Humm was about to purchase a new stove, he felt an unshakable melancholy about leaving his old stove behind – the one he’d used to create so many recipes. The artist Daniel Turner then had an idea: Why not turn the stove into an elegant sculpture? Turner took Humm’s old stove to an upstate New York foundry, then melted it into a large block and placed it on the floor of the restaurant. It now rests as a step, often one of the first that guests take inside the restaurant. Humm loved the idea of guests surreptitiously “stepping over something to be in the present, where we honor the past as well going forward.”

A forward-looking homage to the building’s past also informed Rita Ackermann’s vast chalkboard paintings in the main dining area. While working on ladders to create these six paintings, Ackermann made an abstract version of a painting that had previously been displayed in that very room. “For me, a chalkboard is a beautiful thing because obviously it's about learning, it’s about teaching, it's about creating,” Humm says. “But then it’s also so much about erasing and new beginnings, and that’s where the restaurant was at that time.”

Past Auction

Contemporary Curated

26 September 2025 | 1:15 PM EDT | New York