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Phillips to Sell $12.5 M. Basquiat Painting Showcased at New Southampton Location

August 13, 2020 by Claire Selvin

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Portrait of A-One A.K.A. King” (1982). It will be at auction in November.Credit…The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/ARS, New York, via Phillips

With blue-chip galleries like Hauser & Wirth Pace, Skarstedt, Van de Weghe, and others having recently opened new outposts on New York’s Long Island, Phillips revealed on Thursday that it will open a space in Southampton. The auction house, which joins Sotheby’s and Christie’s in expanding to the Hamptons, will open its new outpost on August 14 with a curated exhibition of 20th-century and contemporary art, as well as design pieces, jewelry, and watches.

Phillips has taken up residence in a two-story, 6,000-square-foot space at 1 Hampton Road, which once served as Southampton Town Hall and has been redesigned by studioMDA. The inaugural show at the space will feature 70 works previewing some of the auction house’s forthcoming sales, including the 20th-century and contemporary art evening and day sales set for November and its online-only “Phillips x Artsy: Endless Summer” sale.

Among the major lots set to hit the block in Southampton is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting Portrait of A-One A.K.A King, which is estimated to sell for $10 million to $15 million at the November evening sale of 20th-century and contemporary art, along with works by Ruth Asawa, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Matthew Wong, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Nicolas Party, and others.Continue Reading

Sotheby’s Basquiat Mini-Collection with $25m Pollo Frito + 3 Other Works

September 28, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Sotheby’s is hoping the big Peter Brant-supported Basquiat exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (followed by an opening at Brant’s private museum outpost on New York’s Lower East Side) will continue to spur interest in the painter. Today Sotheby’s announced a group of four Basquiat paintings for the New York Contemporary sales led by Pollo Frito (1982) that comes to market with a $25m estimate. The group of works all come from one collection and will be seen at Sotheby’s venues around the world over the next few months:Continue Reading

Sotheby’s Brings Basquiat Held in Italy for 35 Years to London

June 8, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, New York, 128.4 by 226.2 cm (£ 7,000,000-10,000,000)

Sotheby’s has announced a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that has been held in the same Italian collection for 35 years since being shown in the painter’s first solo show in Modena, Italy in 1981. Offered with an estimate at $9.4-13.4m, the painting is seven feet wide and will feature in Sotheby’s June 26th sale in London.

Here’s Sotheby’s release on the painting:Continue Reading

Phillips Has $20m Basquiat for May

March 28, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Phillips continues to bring works fro the Basquiat estate to market. This May 17th the auction house will test the market’s tolerance for works produced outside of the highly valued years of 1981-82. Works from 1983 have reached just above $20m. No work from 1984 has previously made more than $10m. But that price was also made at Phillips more than a decade ago.

Flexible from 1984 comes to market with an “estimate upon request” but the whisper number has it at around $20m. The work is the highest-value and largest work to ever have been offered from the Basquiat estate. Here’s an excerpt from Phillips’s release:

Now the most in-demand American artist of all time, Basquiat first gained notoriety as a subversive graffiti-artist and street poet in the late 1970s. Operating under the pseudonym SAMO, he emblazoned the abandoned walls of the city with his unique blend of enigmatic symbols, icons and aphorisms. In the early 1980s Basquiat began to direct his extraordinary talent towards painting and drawing.

As with Basquiat’s greatest works, Flexible explores the central and reoccurring theme of the human figure within his iconoclastic oeuvre. The panel painting, which stands at a massive 8.5 feet tall, portrays a West African griot or someone who served as a storyteller, orator, or musician. Exploiting the creative potential of free association and past experience, he created deeply personal, often autobiographical, images by drawing liberally from such disparate fields as urban street culture, music, poetry, Christian iconography, African and Aztec cultural histories and a broad range of art historical sources, a practice that is particularly evident in this work.

Flexible was executed in 1984, after Basquiat had just been catapulted from the New York underground scene on to international stardom.  Basquiat already had five major solo shows across America, Europe, and Japan under his helm and was the youngest artist – at 23 years of age – ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial; only a year later his iconic stature graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine.  At the time of this work’s creation, he was working in Venice, California, preparing for his second exhibition at Larry Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.

Prior to the work’s exhibition in New York in May, Flexible will be unveiled in Los Angeles, where it will be on view from 10-13 April. 

How Crazy Is the Middle of the Basquiat Market?

January 31, 2018 by Marion Maneker

This look into the Jean-Michel Basquiat market is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. 

Ever since Yusaku Maezawa reset the Basquiat market twice with the purchases of Untitled (Devil) for $48.8m and then the Untitled (Head) for $110m there has been a breathless anticipation of a an explosion in the broader Basquiat market. Every auction and art fair is scrutinized for evidence of the Basquiat boom trickling down from the top.

So far, the market is still waiting. Too be sure, there have been some very good sales at auction to support the idea. Ten different works were sold at auction at prices ranging from $2.4m to $10.9m, though they were often hammered down to third-party guarantors or bids at or below the low estimate. This week, we got a few more clues as to what’s going on in the Basquiat market.Continue Reading

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