NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced highlights from the New York Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, with the full sale now available online. Taking place on 14 November, directly following the highly anticipated dedicated auction, Living the Avant-Garde: Works from The Triton Collection Foundation, the seasonal Evening Sale will feature a remarkable selection of thirty works by artists spanning the Modern, Post-War, and Contemporary movements, including Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Joan Mitchell, Pablo Picasso, and Henry Taylor. The exhibition at 432 Park Avenue will be open to the public from 4-14 November in the lead-up to the auction.

Robert Manley, Deputy Chairman and Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “The sales assembled by Phillips this season are a true testament to the strength of our team, our relationships across the industry, and the depth and breadth of our expertise. Our strategy at Phillips has always been to embrace the entirety of the 20th and 21st centuries, matching the demands of our collecting community. With career-defining examples by Gerhard Richter and Joan Mitchell alongside such storied works from The Triton Collection Foundation, we are proud to present a group that so wonderfully encapsulates all that the market has to offer.”

Leading the auction is Gerhard Richter’s exceptional Abstraktes Bild, announced earlier this season. Painted in 1987, the work is over thirteen feet wide and nearly nine feet tall, making this one of the largest works from Richter’s oeuvre to ever be offered at auction. With Richter’s unique use of the squeegee, a tool he began using for abstract work just one year prior, the artwork captures the movement of the artist's body through the painting process, and expands his wider philosophy of artistic creation as a vital and hopeful act. Besides the present work, there is only one other Abstraktes Bild created in 1987, of similarly epic scale, which resides in the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon.

Post-War works of art figure prominently in the Evening Sale with important examples by some of the most significant figures in the movement. Among the top lots in the sale is Joan Mitchell’s Blueberry, a work that perfectly exemplifies the artist’s painting practice in the early 1960s, along with the formal innovations and emotional ferocity that brought her the respect of her international peers. Having proven herself as a formidable talent in the New York Abstract Expressionist scene of the 1950s, Joan Mitchell moved permanently to France in 1959 and set out to establish her reputation in Europe as an excellent painter in her own right. Blueberry stands as a record of Mitchell’s determined self-expression, and represents her embrace of oil paint itself as her source of inspiration in the early 1960s. While she had some solo exhibitions in Paris in her first few years in France, it wasn’t until her 1962 exhibition, Joan Mitchell: Ausstellung von Ölbildern, at Klipstein und Kornfeld, which included Blueberry, that Mitchell truly arrived at the height of her powers. Phillips’ sale marks the first time that the work will be offered publicly at auction.

Self-portrait and icon at once, Georg Baselitz’s Ein Roter, will also be featured in the Evening Sale. The work is a masterpiece from the artist’s Hero series, and was painted in his West Berlin studio in 1966. Taking on the visual tropes of academic history painting, and the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Ein Roter presents a hero for the Post-War era: an ambivalent figure devoid of national pride. The work’s inclusion in a 1968 exhibition of Baselitz’s work is markedly early for a Hero painting—the group was not shown comprehensively until 1973— suggesting that the artist held this painting in esteem as representative of the series.

Also among the Post-War works to be featured in the auction are Helen Frankenthaler’s Fire and Lynne Drexler’s Seasonal Green, both of which are being offered for the first time at auction. Fire, which has remained in the same private collection for fifty years, is now being sold to benefit the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, and Seasonal Green presents the peak of Drexler’s unique style of the late 1960s.

Pablo Picasso’s Tête d'homme et nu assis is exemplary of many of the pictorial and thematic concerns that characterized the artist’s late career. The work is one of the final variations on a subject that preoccupied the artist in the autumn of 1964 – Jacqueline Roque, his last love and muse. Executed the same day as a similar painting now held in Princeton University Art Museum, the present work shows Picasso contemplating his role as both a painter and lover.

In a strategy long-embraced by Phillips, works by artists creating today will also be included in the sale, alongside these Modern and Post-War masters. Among such works are Ambera Wellmann’s Ritz, Lucy Bull’s Dark companion, Jadé Fadojutimi’s Quirk my mannerism, and Henry Taylor’s Government Cheese, the sale of which coincides with Taylor’s widely acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Painted in 2003 and based on his brother’s mugshot, Government Cheese was prominently featured in Taylor’s first museum solo exhibition at The Studio Museum, Harlem, in 2007.