The New York season of contemporary art is only now taking place at Phillips this semester, a month later than at rivals Christie's and Sotheby's;
because the new headquarters on Park Avenue is inaugurated.
With fifty lots, the “20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale” on June 23rd is comparatively extensive;
Phillips has not planned a summer appointment with contemporaries in London for this.
The evening program is dominated by young talents who have proven their traction over the past two years: most recently at the beginning of the month at Phillips' auction in Hong Kong, in collaboration with the Chinese auction house Poly. There, works by Matthew Wong, Emily Mae Smith and Salman Toor were brought to the Asian market, many times over. Smith's broom with sunglasses on an ice cube, "Broom Life", with an upper estimate of the equivalent of $ 76,700, rose to a staggering $ 1.6 million (with premium). In New York, Phillips has Emily Mae Smith's portrait “Waiting Room” (estimate 40,000 / 60,000 dollars) and Matthew Wong's 220 centimeter high “Field in a Dream” (1.5 / 2 million) in the program. Both should exceed their estimates: In Hong Kong, a picture of Wong of similar size scored the equivalent of 4,$ 7 million (with premium).
By Dana Schutz, who is equally popular with Asian collectors, Phillips offers a group portrait of a “Swiss Family Traveling” (1.2 / 1.8 million), whose cheerful colors contrast with the pinched faces of the family. The French Julie Curtiss also sees the world in a humorous, but rather surreal and macabre way with her three widows "Three Widows" (110,000 / 150,000). For Mickalene Thomas, Christie's set a record of 1.8 million dollars (with premium) in May, and her “Portrait of Jessica” is now conservatively valued at between 200,000 and 300,000 dollars. One of the youngest artists is the South African painter Cinga Samson, born in 1983, who had a solo show at Perrotin in New York in 2020; he kicks off the auction with the portrait “Two Piece 1” (25,000 / 35,000).
The center lot is a view of a gray apartment block in the style of the 1950s with neatly trimmed hedges and lush green lawns including a David Hockney sprinkler. “A Neat Lawn” was created in 1967, looks more like a small work on paper in the catalog illustration, but it is an almost six square meter painting on canvas. The consignor bought it in 2006 from Christie's in New York for $ 3.6 million; now the expectation is twelve to eighteen million.
The highlights also include works by Wayne Thiebaud, Gerhard Richter, Basquiat and the New York-based Latvian Vija Celmins. Thiebaud's "Winding River" (6/8 million), a river between fields and orchards, plays with different aerial perspectives. Celmin's oil painting of a gently moving sea surface, "Untitled (Ocean)" (5.5 / 6.5 million), from the eighties is also associated with water. It was on display in her solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.
The early 20th century is only represented by the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose neo-impressionist moat from 1921 in the gold frame "The Moat, Breccles" (1.5 / 2 million) formally falls out of the program. Churchill gave the painting to Aristotle Onassis in the 1960s, on whose yacht Christina he had previously been a guest several times. It hung on the yacht for many years alongside works by Van Gogh and Vermeer and has now been submitted to Phillips by the Onassis clan.
The total expectation for the fifty lots in the evening auction is $ 81 million to $ 113 million. Fifteen factories were backed by guarantees, almost all of them financed by third parties; however, this number will continue to rise until the start of the auction. The following daily auctions are expected to bring in another 22 to 32 million dollars with 327 lots.