NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips’ New Now sale on 9 March is set to kick off the auction house’s spring season in New York, featuring 195 lots. Taking place at 432 Park Avenue, the sale will introduce several artists to the secondary market, including Anthony Cudahy, Sarah Slappey, Angela Heisch, Caleb Hahne and legendary tattoo artist Dr. Woo. Their works will be exhibited alongside those by established names with the likes of Eddie Martinez and Mary Heilmann.
Avery Semjen, Phillips’ recently appointed New Now Sale Head, said, “The highly anticipated New Now sale at Phillips have come to serve as a barometer of the ever-changing tastes of collectors around the world. Over the years, we have seen artists introduced in these sales go on to become tremendously significant forces in the secondary market, like Milo Matthieu and Alex Gardner. I’m delighted to present an exciting group of artists in conversation with one another in our first New York auction of 2022.”
"We’re thrilled to start off this season’s New Now sale with auction newcomer, Sarah Slappey. The artist’s Yellow Touch from 2018 employs her iconic use of an anthropomorphic figure that straddles the line between soft femininity and unsettling danger. With her dark humor revealing itself through her figure, Slappey uses life-size hands and parts of the body to stand in for the whole figure, creating the mystery of what the figure represents. After successful solo shows at Sargent’s Daughters in New York and Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, we’re thrilled to bring this work to auction this season."
Painted in 2017, Ian with Knots by Brooklyn-based artist Anthony Cudahy reveals the artist’s tendency towards an intimate subject matter and domestic spaces. Using source materials that range from found photographs to queer archival images and art historical reproductions, Cudahy’s tender scenes are drawn from his own records of reference material, adding to the personal and poetic nature of his paintings. The subtle complexities in Ian with Knots weaves the past and present through the medium of painting to speak to a poignant, universal truth that binds the human condition.
Seen for the first time in the saleroom, GaHee Park’s work stuns with bright, abstracted forms to create an interior space that feels initially familiar and recognizable yet separates itself with a distinctive geometric flatness. An early example from 2017, Still Life with Fish, perfectly exemplifies Park’s delicate relationship to the private self, utilizing a single canvas to explore a multitude of perspectives and experiences.
Globally recognized for his intricate single needle tattoos, Dr. Woo’s auction debut, 21 Stories, made up of the artist’s acetate papers created between 2015-2021, embraces a style that seamlessly unifies fashion, tattoos and art. His practice absorbs the iconography of popular culture as well as historical images, translating it into his own unique style of exquisite detail with an emphasis on geometric lines, sharp angles and celestial symbolism. Phillips is excited to welcome Dr. Woo to the auction market.
Coming off the heels of last season’s successful sale of an Eddie Martinez flower arrangement, we are pleased to include, I Feel Alright, another fantastic large-scale work from his flower still-life series from 2007. Presenting a theatrical build-up of forms converging into a vivacious bouquet of flowers, the work is a quintessential example of the artist’s highly diverse practice and is firmly rooted in the canonical history of painting that has inspired the artist throughout his career. Through his keen sensibility of channeling various practices that have shaped the art historical canon, Martinez brings to life an amalgam of modern and contemporary traditions.
Also among the top lots of the auction is Mary Heilmann’s The Secret from 1989. A stunning example the of hard-edge geometric work that the artist is known for, Heilmann’s work employs her iconic sharp linearity and depth in color. The enormous scale of The Secret arrests the viewer, its glazy red field bisected by a wavering diagonal that gives way to overpainted white with subtle hints of the red acrylic in the artist’s distinct painterly aesthetic.
