NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced highlights and the complete web catalogue for the upcoming 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale set to occur on 15 November at 432 Park Avenue, New York. Boasting an extensive selection of artworks, the Morning and Afternoon Sessions range from established blue-chip to fresh-to-market artists, covering over a century. Amongst the Impressionist and Modern works are drawings and paintings by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Marc Chagall, seamlessly intertwined with Post-War masterworks, including the largest Ernie Barnes to come to auction. The sale will also feature artists such as Rudolf Stingel, James Rosenquist, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Alice Baber, and Caroline Walker, among others, as well as many auction debuts. The exhibition takes place from 4 – 14 November.
Annie Dolan and Patrizia Koenig, Co-Heads of the New York Day Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “We are delighted to introduce Phillips' Day Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, taking place on 15 November. The sale encompasses a diverse range of exceptional art works spanning over a century. Highlights include works by celebrated women artists, both historical and contemporary, including, among others, Alice Baber, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Etel Adnan, and Ilana Savdie. The works in the Day Sale perfectly complement and complete our most dynamic November season to date, following the highly anticipated sale of Living the Avant-Garde: The Triton Collection Foundation and the Evening Sale, which both take place on 14 November. We look forward to welcoming collectors and art enthusiasts in to explore these works in dialogue with one another during the preview for all three sales when it opened on 4 November.”
Morning Session
The works in the Morning Session range from the late 19th century to the turn of the 21st. Edgar Degas’ Trois danseuses from 1880 is a pastel of one of his most famed subjects. Together with Pierre-Auguste Renoir's still life Nature morte aux raisins, figues et grenades, circa 1895-1900, these works highlight the French avant-garde of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
True to Phillips’ goal of creating unique dialogues between works of different genres, Degas and Renoir are placed alongside Post-War masterworks, including Ernie Barnes’ impressive 1972 painting Fourth and One. Measuring over five- feet-wide, Fourth and One presents a jumble of bodies intertwined. The present work highlights the drama for which the artist is known, recalling the work of Old Masters like Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens, while translating it to a distinct 20th century moment. Football is one of Barnes’ most revered subjects, having been a professional player himself, and this is the largest work by the artist to come to auction to date.
The three canvases which make up James Rosenquist’s seminal Dog Descending a Staircase, 1979, reflect a surrealist interpretation of a domestic scene with a Pop-like sensibility rendered by hand. First shown to the public at Castelli-Feigen-Corcoran Gallery in 1980, the painting was later reproduced in the form of a lithograph, created in an edition of 33. Bought by its current owner at auction more than 40 years ago, Dog Descending a Staircase was included in the artist’s groundbreaking retrospective at the Menil Collection and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which then traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2003 – 2004. Just over nine feet long, the triptych is a museum quality piece, with the scale and composition relating to other monumental, multi-part works by the artist.
Alongside Gerhard Richter’s large-scale 1987 Abstraktes Bild being offered in our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 14 November, the Day Sale will feature five domestically scaled Richter paintings on paper, panel, and canvas. Leading the group is a 1984 Abstraktes Bild, originally gifted to the artist Jörg Immendorf to decorate his legendary bar, La Paloma, in Hamburg. In its current collection since 1988, this work represents the famed painter’s investigation of the ways in which we perceive reality and, subsequently, the way that viewers interact with different forms of representation, whether it be abstraction or realism.
The sale also features additional fresh-to-market works, including those from an Esteemed Maryland Collection, led by a never-before-seen-at-auction panel painting by Horace Pippin, Man Seated Near Stove, from 1941, and a vibrant painting on paper by Alma Woodsey Thomas, Untitled, 1972.
Thomas’ Untitled will kick off the sale, followed by more trailblazing 20th century female artists that have been experiencing long overdue recognition in the art world, such as Alice Baber and Lynne Drexler. Having achieved renewed market attention, Baber’s color field works are some of the most sought after in the realm of female abstraction. Untitled, 1972, boasts bold medallions of color rendered in her signature vibrant palette. Other exciting highlights include Joan Brown’s work on paper Untitled, circa 1960, and a small 1956 canvas by Jane Piper titled Study II. Piper, like Drexler, was a student of Hans Hofmann as well as Arthur B. Carles, with a lyrical style reminiscent of Matisse. Piper’s work is held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Afternoon Session
Highlighting Phillips' grasp on the Contemporary Art scene, the Afternoon Session introduces auction debuts by Naudline Pierre, Elizabeth Glaessner, Blair Whiteford, and Alake Shilling in addition to works by sought-after artists such as Marina Perez Simão, Jo Messer, Celeste Rapone, Francesca Mollet, and Louis Fratino. Following the auction record Phillips achieved for Caroline Walker this past March, the session includes Maid, 2016, an exquisite painting that notably represents the first work in which the artist painted herself.
Leading the Afternoon Session is Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (Triptych), 2015, a monumental work that immerses the viewer into a seemingly infinite, pictorial field. Daubs of thick dark grey and burgundy enamel coalesce across the metallic grey canvases into spectral impressions of an ornamental carpet, giving the sensation of standing within a grand hall. The first large-scale triptych to come to auction, this work takes a singular place within Stingel’s oeuvre. While the specific reference points for his acclaimed carpet paintings tend to be more oblique, Untitled (Triptych) specifically connects to Stingel’s Plan B famous carpet installation at New York City’s Grand Central Station in 2004. At the time, it represented the artist’s first major public project in the United States, with its counterpart shown at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
The Afternoon Session will be kicked off with Ilana Savdie’s Deliberate Rotation of The Nips (y un Manguito), 2021. This will be Savdie’s first mature work to be offered at auction since Phillips achieved the current record for her work in last year’s Evening Sale and comes to market just as her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York concludes on 5 November. Another highlight in the front-run is Caroline Kent’s Out of the solitude and into the daydream, 2022, the first major work to come to auction on the heels of Kent’s yearlong presentation in The Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art and in anticipation of her first major institutional solo show at the Queens Museum, New York, opening this December.
Phillips will showcase works by Salvo, Denzil Forrester, Miriam Cahn, and Etel Adnan – artists whose careers span decades, but whose practices have only recently received their long-overdue recognition, with many of their auction records achieved within this past year. Of particular note is Denzil Forrester’s Dub Salute, 1983, as the first painting by the Grenadian-British artist to come up at a major auction house, notably amidst increased institutional recognition following solo shows at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida, this year. Dub Salute exemplifies Forrester’s career-defining subject of capturing the dynamic energy of the London reggae and dub nightclub scene and was included in the 2016 solo show, curated by Peter Doig and Matthew Higgs, that garnered the artist wider attention.
Additional top lots include Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage, 2018, Matthew Wong’s Blue Tree, 2016, coming to auction concurrently to the artist’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anish Kapoor’s Untitled, 2000, and Pat Steir’s From Dark to Light (from the Waterfall series), 1990. Coinciding with Henry Taylor’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Phillips is also offering two examples by the artist, notably PAAK, 2017, an impressive portrait of rapper Anderson .Paak.
The Day Sale will also feature Andreas Gursky’s, Cocoon I, 2007, an impressive example of the artist’s acclaimed rave works. Included as well is a painting by Günther Förg, Untitled, 2001, coming from Collection of Mikael Andersen, with proceeds to benefit the development of the Sonja Ferlov Mancoba Museum Pavilion in Bornholm Denmark. The Day Sale will conclude with works from several leading digital artists presented in partnership with Fingerprints DAO, featuring Grant Yun, Kjetil Golid and Dmitri Cherniak. The pieces will also be presented at the 0x. 17 Gallery in The Seaport, New York, ahead of the sale open for preview from 4 – 15 November. These pieces will be available for purchase in USD or Ethereum.
