NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced highlights and the full web catalogue from the upcoming 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sales taking place on 16 May at 432 Park Avenue, New York. Maintaining a firm hold on the growing middle market, the Morning and Afternoon Sessions feature a wide range of blue-chip and fresh-to-market artists. Amongst important post-war names, such as Wayne Thiebaud, Joan Mitchell, and Keith Haring, are many exciting works from artists hitting their stride. The sale preview will commence on 6 May and will be on view through 15 May with the works available to view online for the Morning Session here and the Afternoon Session here.

Annie Dolan and Patrizia Koenig, Co-Heads of the New York Day Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “We are pleased to present one of Phillips’ largest Day Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art to date, encapsulating some of the strongest material we have had the privilege of offering. The breadth and caliber of the works in this auction underscore the strength of the middle market and Phillips’ commitment to this important sector. In assembling these sales, we have made it a priority to champion historically underrepresented artists and are proud that the sale features such an inclusive selection of women, LGBTQ+, and artists of color, including Lois Dodd, Sylvia Snowden, Denyse Thomasos, Jenna Gribbon, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, and many others. As collectors are increasingly seeking out works that authentically represent their lived experiences, the market has evolved to meet this demand and we are all the better for it.”

Morning Session

The Morning Session is led by Wayne Thiebaud’s Sliced Circle from 1972. Rendered in his signature style, a deep red velvet cake painted in thick and gestural brushstrokes creates a tactile, hyper-realistic effect reminiscent of frosting. Emblematic of the artist’s renowned painterly practice and chosen motifs, Sliced Circle is a masterpiece within Thiebaud’s body of work. A celebration of texture, light, shadow and perspective, the present work explores the formal qualities of painting. This work comes to auction on the heels of the artist’s celebrated exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, this year.

The Morning Session features additional works from established makers such as Brice Marden and Alex Katz placed in dialogue with other 20th century artists’ whose work is being rediscovered

on a global stage, including Lois Dodd, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Sylvia Snowden, and Lynne Drexler. Phillips will be offering the first major work by Snowden at auction, Salvation, a 1982 painting from the artist’s M Street Series, inspired by people she encountered in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. during a period of gentrification. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is currently the subject of the first ever major museum retrospective for an indigenous artist, which opened last month at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work, I See Red: Redskin War Shirt, includes multiple art mediums frequently seen throughout Smith’s pieces, including found collage.

Lois Dodd, who is 96 years old and only recently receiving long overdue recognition, is also being spotlighted at the newly expanded Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Her painting, Burning House with Clapboards, 2007, belongs to a discrete series of six large-scale works depicting a house on fire, compositions which are both disquieting and beautiful.




Another top lot of the sale is Keith Haring’s Untitled from the watershed year 1982. Painted in fluorescent DayGlo on shaped plywood, the work was featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York the same year and was subsequently featured in several of Haring’s retrospectives around the globe. Drawn to brightly colored, hand-painted matryoshkas, Haring interprets the motif of stacking dolls as signifying change, transition, and transformation. The effect gained from using such vibrant green and orange hues that jump off the face of the wood is furthered with the artist’s quintessential use of rhythmic, cartoonish lines, surrounding the forms to suggest their movement.

Phillips will be offering three more early works by Andy Warhol from the collection of the Paul Warhola Family. Following the success of Nosepicker I and Living Room sold in Phillips’ 2022 November 20th Century and Contemporary Evening sale, the morning session this May will include Nosepicker II, Girl in Park (Phipps), and Boy and Tree. Each of these were painted in 1948 during Warhol’s years at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Best stated by Andy Warhol’s nephew, James Warhola, “before there was the soup can, there was the nosepicker.”

Also among the sale is an important early Philip Guston painting, Lemonade and Doughnuts, 1943, which is being sold by the Ames School of Art at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. It is the only major still life from the decade 1941-1949 and was painted while Guston taught at the University of Iowa. The work was acquired by the university just two years after its creation in 1945 and is a testament to Guston’s influence on modern painting during mid-century America. Providing an intimate look at Guston’s preoccupations with compositional structure and perspective, this is one of the most important paintings by the artist to come to auction, concurrent with the artist’s highly publicized retrospective Philip Guston Now currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The Morning Session will also continue the sale of works from the Rosa and Aaron Esman Collection, building upon the success in the recent Photographs and Editions auctions. Additional highlights include an early, abstract Tom Wesselmann still life from 1964 and a Joan Miró drawing from 1942, the first work the Esmans purchased together.

Afternoon Session

A testament to Phillips’ reputation as the auction house for cutting-edge contemporary art, the Afternoon Session includes auction debuts by Mario Ayala, Jill Mulleady, Theresa Chromati, Sarah Cunningham, Henni Alftan, and Jess Valice. Starting with Matthew Wong’s First Snow, 2018, the sale also includes works by highly sought-after artists Ambera Wellman, Karyn Lyons, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Raghav Babbar, Caroline Walker, Kyle Dunn, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Emma Webster.

Phillips is proud to feature a wide selection of works from women artists, including Shara Hughes’ landscape painting Milky Way, 2017, as well as Cecily Brown’s Long Hot Summer, 2017-2018, and Untitled (Sirens in Paradise), 2017, which come to auction concurrently to Brown’s acclaimed solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Denyse Thomasos’ Inside Wyoming, 2001, is the first major painting by the artist to come to the public market since Phillips set the auction record for Spin in May 2022, selling for twelve times its low estimate. Thomasos’ work has gained renewed interest in the past year following her inclusion in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and the artist’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario, within which the present work was notably included.

The top lot of the Afternoon Session is David Hammons’ Untitled, 2008, a monumental example from the artist’s acclaimed series of tarp paintings, of

which other examples are housed in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Pinault Collection, Paris. Tarp paintings such as the present one display a subtle but unambiguous message about the experiences of race and poverty in American society, all the while subverting the purported sanctity of abstract painting. The work exemplifies Hammons’ unique ability to wholly transform objects through the simplest of actions, reinventing their visual affect while retaining the signifiers of their origins.

Albert Oehlen’s Vergessen auf Rädern exemplifies another subversive position on the discourse of abstraction. Executed in 2005, the work is testament to Oehlen’s continual, over three- decades long grappling with the history of painting. Belonging to the artist’s discrete series of Gray Paintings, Vergessen auf Rädern specifically evokes Gerhard Richter’s seminal Tisch, 1962. This piece has been notably exhibited in the artist’s seminal exhibitions at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and the Arnolfini, Bristol, as well as at the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

Georg Baselitz’s Wir fahren aus is a monumental self-portrait of inimitable gravitas that the artist painted in 2016 and which was notably included in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in 2018. With a nod to Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, Wir fahren Aus demonstrates the full force of Baselitz’s painterly virtuosity as he confronts his own self with an uncompromising gaze.

Another highlight is Harold Ancart’s monumental and atmospheric Untitled, 2020, which comes to auction concurrently to his first solo exhibition at Gagosian, New York,
this May. The work is a lush example from the artist’s coveted series of tree paintings, which he executed during COVID lockdowns. Cropped to the border of abstraction, Untitled delights in the textures and visual splendor of dense foliage and beautifully exemplifies Ancart’s virtuosic handling of color and texture to blur the boundaries between observed and imagined realities.

Phillips will also present works from the personal collection of Hollywood actor and comedian Jim Carrey,

including two sculptures by Anish Kapoor and one from Jeppe Hein. Shown here, Non-Object (Spire), 2007, is an iconic example of Anish Kapoor’s Spire sculptures that have been prominently shown across the globe in exhibitions. With its delicate, tapered pinnacle, precisely round base and polished steel surface, the outdoor sculpture almost otherworldly in its geometric perfection. Stretching up towards the sky, the work at once reflects and pierces its surroundings.