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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

Bacon, Picasso, Lichtenstein Top 2020 Global Modern & Contemporary Auctions: Analysis

August 12, 2020 by Angelica Villa

Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, oil on canvas, 1981.

This report on the Summer auctions is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.) 

After a period of uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic — which was only resolved by a wholesale restructuring of the international auction calendar — the top three houses finally presented hybrid live auctions of their most valuable works early this Summer.

Houses merged the modern and contemporary art categories and updated virtual platforms to draw global audience and bidding clients to a week of live-streamed marquee sales held around the world. Sotheby’s offered the first market test on June 29th;  it yielded $363.2 million. Phillips held a modest $41 million sale comprising mostly works by female and non-white artists. Finally, Christie’s staged a complex, four-auctioneer sale spanning their international sales centers that brought in $420.9 million.

The series of sales were successful enough to encourage Sotheby’s to quickly turn around a second sale, Rembrandt to Richter, to capitalize on the demand. That auction combined a smattering of Old Master works with modern and contemporary art to make $193 million in sales.

Each session proved global demand undiminished by the economic lag. The leading lots of the auctions staged in June and July were by Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The results from 2019 to 2020 is not a direct comparison due to the reformatted sales but key trends in artists’ markets are still apparent. In Spring 2019, more than $1.2 billion in contemporary art was sold in the New York day and evening sales. That was a rise of 6.7% over the previous year. Continue Reading

Phillips London Contemporary Has Richter, Kippenberger and Lichtenstein

February 20, 2019 by Marion Maneker

Gerhard Richter’s Düsenjäger (1963) is back on the market after a brief dalliance with an over-confident Chinese guarantor. The work was sold by collector Paul Allen in November of 2016 to Zhang Chang who had provide a third-party guarantee at $24m. Zhang would not or could not pay for work. Now Phillips is bringing the major work in Richter’s oeuvre back to market with an estimate £10-15m, almost the same estimate it carried nearly a dozen years ago when it sold to Allen in November 2007.

The work comes to market amid rumblings within the art market that the third-party guarantee system has gotten over-extended in both the number of works that it covers and the number of buyers that participate. Questions remain—that will only be answered in sales to come this year—whether there are more dis-illusioned guarantors out there burned by the failure of works to find buyers. Are these guarantors sufficiently put off to retreat from the guarantee market?

In the meantime, Phillips has more than one noted German artist in their London sale. Martin Kippenberger’s Ohne Titel (Meine lügen sind ehrliche) (1992) (£3.5-4.5m) leads the sale along with another self-portrait the artist. In between the Kippenberger and the Richter is an example of Roy Lichtenstein’s enamel, Girl in Mirror (1964) with an estimate of £4.5-6.5m. The Lichtenstein enamel is an editioned work with eight examples and two artist’s proofs.

The Lichtenstein is guaranteed by Phillips. The example on offer was bought at the sale of Max Palevsky’s at Christie’s in 2010 where the buyer paid $4.89m. Four years later, another example of the work was sold at Christie’s for $6.885m. Over at Sotheby’s, the work has had its day in the sun too. One sold in 2007 for $4m in New York. Another sold in London in 2012 for nearly £2.4m.

Mary Weatherford Neon Leads Phillips New Now

February 18, 2019 by Marion Maneker

 

A Mary Weatherford painting from among her early neons is one of the highlights of Phillips’s New Now sales that will coincide with the ADAA Art Show and The Armory Show in the coming weeks. The Feb 27th auction focuses on Contemporary art where the house has an historic advantage as the maker of markets for many emerging talents. Weatherford’s auction history has begun to gain traction with another example from the 2012 neon works selling in London last October. Varick St. (2012) was offered at Christie’s with a £250-350k estimate range and made a solid £344k selling price. Varick St. was no stranger to the podium. Three years earlier it changed hands in New York at Sotheby’s for $237.5k in a May day sale , giving the consignor a half-decent profit.

That was followed by Pico Rivera (2013) making $372.5k in a November day sale at Christie’s. Now Phillips has put an attractive $250k low estimate on Truxton and we’ll get a better sense of how deep the demand is for these works:

“Phillips’ New Now auctions have become a staple of the auction season, with collectors all over the globe eager to acquire works by both established and emerging artists alike,” said Samuel Mansour, Head of New Now Sales, New York. “This season, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to present an exceptional group of works, with some examples that are are solidly and deservedly established within in the art historical canon, such as Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and Andy Warhol’s Toy Paintings, as well some that serve as a new and exciting opportunity for collectors.

After Phillips introduced Awol Erizku to the secondary market in 2017 with his photography, this auction will mark the first time that one of his paintings is being offered at auction, along with other first timers, such as Caitlin Keogh and Louisa Gagliardi.

Leading the auction is Mary Weatherford’s Truxtun. Arresting and color-driven, this work belongs to The Bakersfield Project, Weatherford’s most celebrated series of neon paintings inspired by her experiences within the uniqueness of city landscapes. Throughout this series, Weatherford utilized diluted Flashe paint to create a translucent effect that forms a gradient of richness in hue, integrating her mixed media to create a harmonization of color. Elevating this subdued aesthetic, two delicate bands of neon stretch across the canvas and beam above the color field with an eye-catching illumination that adds depth and vigor. Further highlighting this element, Weatherford showcases the transformer and power cords as an essential part of the piece. She rejects hiding these elements for aesthetic purposes and rather drapes them elegantly over the canvas as an intentional compositional element. Executed in 2012, Truxtun is one of the first to feature the neon rods that were a career-altering experimentation for the artist and have been featured in her work ever since.

Jenny Holzer’s Truisms: All things are delicately interconnected…, a stone bench from the artist’s provocative series, executed in 1987, will also be featured among the highlights. Standing authoritatively, this work expertly embodies Jenny Holzer’s artistic practice. Shortly after moving to New York City, Holzer worked nearly exclusively on her acclaimed Truisms series from 1977-1979, marking a turning point in the artist’s career. This body of work is a conglomeration of blunt stream-of-consciousness declarations that touch upon an array of themes such as feminism, violence, oppression, and vulnerability. Candidly professed from an anonymous and universal perspective, the artist’s Truisms poetically reveal one’s most intimate, and at times irreverent, thoughts. The present lot features a selection of Truisms that cover the entirety of the object allowing viewers to meander around and absorb the piece in its unique totality.

Andy Warhol’s Rollover Mouse from his series Toy Paintings is an outstanding example of the artist’s preoccupation with commercialism and animation, as well as his fascination with the universality of toys and their ability to transcend age and nationality. Created in 1983, this painting is part of the artist’s later body of work that witnessed a resurgence of his energetic and colorful canvases. Zurich gallerist Bruno Bischofberger, who hosted one of the most significant Pop-Art shows in Europe in 1965, later requested a series of work conducive for children and bought the resulting 100-work compilation with London gallerist Fabian Carlsson. These works were then displayed in Bischofberger’s gallery, hung at children’s eye level in an installation that resembled a shiny and whimsical toy store. Serving as a more child-oriented expression of Warhol’s acclaimed advertising motifs of Brillo and Mott’s boxes from the 1960s, his Toy Paintings series embodies the same consumerist spirit.

Untitled (The World Stage: Brazil), 2012, by Kehinde Wiley captures two subjects, wearing contemporary urban attire, rendered in a photo‐realistic style set against and contrasted with a decorative floral background. Wiley’s subjects typically derive, however, from “street casting” people he encounters in Harlem. Culling from a wide range of art historical sources, Wiley captures these young African American men assuming poses that connote the canonical works of Holbein, Titian, Velázquez, David, and Ingres. Wiley inserts these brilliantly rendered compositions within a lineage of traditional portraiture while also drawing attention to the absence of African Americans from cultural and historical narratives. The present lot exemplifies Wiley’s unmatched compositional instinct and ability to deliver layers of visual and conceptual gravity that simultaneously coalesce and collide.

London Gives Some Second Thoughts About June Sales

June 29, 2018 by Marion Maneker

This wrap-up of the coverage of the June Contemporary sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

The great surprise of the London Contemporary art sales was not the strong performance of works by younger artists or overlooked historical masters. Taken together, all four auction houses transacted somewhere around £186m with only a few of those works selling above £10m.

That trend within the art market continues to be pronounced and persistent. We’ll have a more detailed discussion of the sales composition and performance when we publish our sales analysis in the next week. In the meantime, let’s marvel at the unexpected strong performance of the Evening sales of Contemporary art in London just when it looked like these events were getting squeezed out of the calendar.

To be sure, the top of the market is much lower than it has been in the past for these sales. Sotheby’s posted the biggest single lot with a guaranteed Lucian Freud reclining nude that sold for nearly $30m. Just below that was the surprise lot of the week, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s untitled work sold from an American collection (said to be New Line’s Michael Lynne) that composed a significant portion of Sotheby’s sale. It made just below $20m but had carried a low estimate nearly half of the final selling price.

The dogged bidding over the Basquiat began with auctioneer Oliver Barker pushing the opening bids toward the low estimate. It wasn’t long before two aggressive telephone bidders engaged in pitched campaign to out do each other. Their bids came either without the briefest hesitation or in increments greater than the crying required. The underbidder bowed out several times before finally capitulating.

In the current climate where high-value works are sold with an armature of financial support surrounding them which have a tendency to often but not always dampen bidding, it was a rare show of determination by two collectors. Continue Reading

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