LONDON.- Phillips will present highlights ahead of the London Photographs auction on 21 November. The 18th edition of ULTIMATE showcases 14 works, seven of which are by artists making their auction debut, including Evelyn Bencicova, Mous Lamrabat, Carlos Idun-Tawiah and Tokuko Ushioda. Alongside the auction debuts in ULTIMATE are remarkable works from celebrated visual artists including, among others, Nick Knight, Ikkō Narahara, Prince Gyasi, and Bastiaan Woudt. In addition to ULTIMATE and ULTIMATE STEVEN KLEIN, this season's auction encompasses works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Peter Lindbergh, Seydou Keïta, and Nobuyoshi Araki. This is the first time that a substantial offering of Araki’s unique Arakiri Polaroids has come to auction. The auction is online now with highlights on view in Phillips London galleries on Berkeley Square from 15 to 21 November until the live auction on 21 November at 2pm.

Yuka Yamaji, Head of Photographs, Europe, and Rachel Peart, Head of Department, London, said, “In ULTIMATE this season, we are excited to present seven auction debuts, including Japanese photographer Tokuko Ushioda with her 1981 ICE BOX diptych, these are the only early prints from the ICE BOX project known to exist and come to auction from the artist’s private collection. Other highlights from the sale include Thomas Struth’s Paradise 25 and Marina Abramović's Cleaning the Floor as well as iconic portraits of Kate Moss and Devon Aoki by Nick Knight, and a fresh-to-market work by Peter Lindbergh. We are thrilled to also showcase ULTIMATE STEVEN KLEIN; a collection of 18 unique Polaroid works handpicked by Steven from his archive. We look forward to welcoming visitors to view the pre-sale exhibition and attend the sale in person this November.”

ULTIMATE features two iconic works by Nick Knight. In 1997, Knight’s futuristic portrait of Devon Aoki – a manga- inspired transformation for Visionaire’s 20th issue – became a lasting masterpiece, embodying Knight's distinctive style. The second featured work is Knight’s controversial photograph of Kate Moss taken in 2008 for the RED issue of The Independent. For this special issue dedicated to the fight against Aids in Africa, Knight created a singularly arresting image of one of the most recognisable women in the world by use of digital manipulation. One of his best- known works, Kate encapsulates the visionary image-maker's commitment to pushing the boundaries of photography, both technically and aesthetically, to challenge our notions of beauty as well as reality. Devon has not appeared at auction since 2009 and Kate has not appeared at auction since 2016, making it a special opportunity to acquire these highly sought-after works.

Included in ULTIMATE are seven fresh to market auction debuts from Evelyn Bencicova, Mous Lamrabat, Andrea Torres Balaguer, Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Adrienne Raquel, Tokuko Ushioda and Scandinavian artist duo Inka & Niclas.

For her ongoing ICE BOX series, Tokuko Ushioda has photographed refrigerators, shut and open, since 1981, starting with her own as seen in this early diptych on offer in ULTIMATE. A deeply personal portrait, Ushioda showcases her refrigerator, the exterior and its contents, as this common household item takes on a life of its own, providing a portal to her family’s domestic landscape.

Following his widely acclaimed debut exhibition Human Land in 1956, Ikkō Narahara continued to explore his distinctive approach to photography. Narahara went on to photograph various places around the world while living in Paris (1962-65) and in New York (1970-74). It was during this time that Narahara travelled across the United States, which led to his seminal 1970-74 series and 1975 book Where Time Has Vanished. With his otherworldly sensibility, the Japanese photographer captured the vast American landscape, including the present work Shadow of car driving through desert, Arizona, included in ULTIMATE.

Marina Abramović has dedicated over four decades to powerful and deeply emotional performance art. Cleaning the Floor, captures a moment from her 2004 performance which explored themes of femininity and domesticity, addressing the contradictions imposed on women. This image graced the cover of ARTnews' December 2009 issue dedicated to The Feminist Evolution, coinciding with Abramović’s performance The Artist is Present and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Abramović has had seminal exhibitions worldwide with a notable recent highlight being a significant retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, which opened in September 2023.

Appearing at auction for the first time, this cinematic portrait of a barefoot and windswept Sasha Pivovarova holding a vintage Bolex – a film camera that is legendary within the industry – graced the cover of the May 2006 special issue of Vogue Paris, dedicated to the Cannes Film Festival. During the shoot on Le Touquet beach in Northern France for the cover story ‘Spécial Cannes par Wim Wenders’, Lindbergh collaborated with Wenders to reference the themes of the festival as seen in the work offered here. Acquired in 2006 at amfAR’s legendary Cinema Against AIDS Gala auction, this monumental work by Lindbergh has remained in the same private collection for 17 years.

Also on offer are three groups of carefully composed studio portraits, taken in the 1950s by master photographer Seydou Keïta and originating from the personal collection of French photojournalist and Co-Founder of the Bamako Biennale Françoise Huguier. After the two met in 1990, Huguier arranged for some of Keïta’s works to be exhibited internationally for the first time, attracting high-powered attention, and leading to Keïta’s worldwide recognition as a definitive photographer of his generation. Printed during the period of the 1994 Bamako Biennale, which showcased Keïta’s talent, the present works represent the earliest printing of his portraits outside Mali.

Nobuyoshi Araki's use of Polaroid photography is significant in his artistic practice. In 2015, he started creating spliced Polaroid composites due to a vision impairment. Araki cut his Polaroids in half and combined different halves to form composites. These composites, while featuring recurring subjects like nudes, and flowers, offer only partial images, blending reality and fiction. The series, titled Arakiri, is a play on the Japanese word hara-kiri, which literally translates to belly (hara) cutting (kiri), referring to the ritual of taking one’s own life practiced by the samurai class in feudal Japan. In this body of work, however, it is Araki himself doing the cutting, invoking ritualistic connotations. Featuring two lots of 30 spliced Polaroids each, this sale marks the first time a substantial offering of Araki’s Polaroids from this series has come to auction.