NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced the sale of Matthew Wong’s Field in a Dream in the upcoming 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. On view to the public from 17 June in the new state-of-the-art galleries at 432 Park Avenue, this unique work by Wong will star in the Evening Sale on 23 June at 5pm.

Painted between 2014-2017 and depicting a lone figure in a dreamlike field bursting with vegetative life, Field in a Dream captures the chromatic and material vibrance of Matthew Wong’s hypnotic landscapes. Defying laws of gravity and space, the landscape of brilliant flora collapses into a singular plane of the mind. Intermixing Western and Eastern art historical influences, Wong developed a unique painterly sensibility that has redefined the genre of landscape. Evoking the luscious scenes of Gustav Klimt and the expressionist power of Edvard Munch, the present work epitomizes Wong’s mesmerizing treatment of landscape to poignantly explore the subconscious.

Both in its title and subject matter, the present work embodies the heart of Wong’s practice of using landscape to explore interiority. Here, Wong appears to visually address the Symbolist and Expressionist explorations on interior subjectivity and dreaming. In this lyrical mirage, the figure wanders on an indefinite path in a subliminal, horizonless space crafted by the profuse marks of the artist’s painterly touch that express the landscape of his mind. Wong’s employment of this spatial perspective in the case of this work is particularly impactful by embodying the surreal logic of the dream world—at once atemporal, aspatial, and at times vertiginous and fantastical.

A self-proclaimed “omnivore for sights, sounds, and ideas,” Wong was a sensuous painter. As the artist explained, “None of the works are planned in advance, but rather worked out through an intuitive engagement with the pigment and surface. Therefore, my work can be seen as an existential meditation on the act of painting, painting as a marker of time.”

Wong’s works reside in notable public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Esteé Lauder Collection, New York, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Phillips currently holds the world auction record for the artist, achieved last December when Wong’s River at Dusk achieved over $4 million.

“I’d like to think of my art practice as an open-ended dialogue between myself and other painters, both living and dead.” – Matthew Wong