George Condo, Blues in F (detail), 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.
Postwar and contemporary art remained the largest sector of the fine art auction market in 2024, representing 52% of global sales by value and 54% by volume, according to the 2025 Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report. As the postwar and contemporary sector has grown over time, it has evolved to include newer contemporary artists, including many living artists.
Here, we highlight four living artists with well-established markets. A closer look at the artistic strengths of their works in our upcoming Hong Kong auction can show us why they have the potential to be so enduring.
Hernan Bas
Hernan Bas, Case Study (Harvey, Palmist/glove collector), 2014. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.
American artist Hernan Bas has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting with a unique perspective that redefines Les Nabis’ approach. Case Study (Harvey, Palmist/glove collector) exemplifies the artist’s exploration of the transitional space of youth, where figures hover between innocence and experience, engaging in theatrical rituals of self-discovery. Through lush, highly detailed compositions, realistic colors, and dynamic brushwork, Bas has created scenes that invite endless interpretation.
The artist’s recent solo exhibitions include: The space between needful & needless (2025, Lehmann Maupin, Seoul), Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, (2023–2024, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA), Hernan Bas: Choose Your Own Adventure, Hernan Bas, (2020–2022, Rubell Museum, Miami, USA). With works held in major institutions (MoMA, Whitney, Hirshhorn, SFMOMA) and a 2014 Rizzoli monograph cementing his legacy, Bas’s paintings resonate for their ability to bridge historical grandeur with contemporary subversion, making them essential for collectors of provocative, narrative-driven art.
Jonas Wood
Jonas Wood, Punch and Judy, 2015. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.
Known as the reigning prince of contemporary painting, Jonas Wood navigates the boundaries between the strange and the familiar, exploring the emotional nuance of everyday sights. He has held solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions, such as the Dallas Museum of Art, and his works have been collected by the Guggenheim and Hammer museums. He is represented by Gagosian Gallery, which presented their first solo exhibition of his works in 2015.
Wood’s distinctive reinterpretation of domestic spaces and objects are among his most desired works. The present lot Punch and Judy demonstrates his ability to infuse ordinary subjects with personal significance while also engaging with art historical traditions. The work showcases his signature approach to spatial composition, where realistic elements are transformed through flattened perspectives and deliberate distortions of form.
George Condo
George Condo, Blues in F (detail), 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.
George Condo’s Blue Paintings series serves as a springboard for his ongoing exploration of music and painting’s intricate relationship. "These works are like visualized blues compositions — improvisation within a structure. You have to master all the technical rules, then deliberately break them,” Condo explains. “Those 'wrong' brushstrokes often become the most authentic, just like how 'off-notes' in blues music make its soul.”
Equally rich in visual and sonic allusions, Blues in F has a palette that not only references the melancholy quality of blues music but, through subtle gradations and contrasts, creates visual melodic lines that contain tonal shifts of color. Condo's understanding of the relationship between music and visual art is remarkably nuanced — he can speak with equal authority about the relationships between Monet and Debussy's Impressionism, German Expressionist art and twelve-tone music, or Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism and the jazz of Miles Davis.
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz, Hinterglasvogel, 1997. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.
Executed in 1997, Hinterglasvogel (Bird Behind Glass) exemplifies Baselitz’s distinctive inversion technique. At first glance, the artwork appears to be an abstract composition — a chaotic background filled with gestural strokes of purple, white, and yellow converges toward the center, where vibrant yellow takes center stage, framed by swirling violet eddies in the corners. The energetic brushwork and fluid forms suggest a non-representational piece — until the canvas is rotated 180 degrees. Suddenly, the chaos comes together. Jagged lines transform into the sharp contours of a bird’s beak, wings, and talons. The bright yellow shifts to reveal the creature’s plumed breast, unveiling a silhouetted bird perched precariously on a rail.
As a prominent figure in the contemporary art scene, Georg Baselitz has been celebrated globally through major exhibitions at prestigious institutions, with a particular resonance in the German-speaking world. Some of his recent exhibitions include Georg Baselitz: Late Work (2023, Kunsthaus, Zurich ), 100 Drawings (2023, Albertina Museum, Vienna), and Nackte Meister (2023, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna). In addition, Baselitz’s work is also among the permanent collection of many public institutions, such as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; and the Tate Modern, London.
Scott Kahn
Scott Kahn, Reflecting in the Wilderness, 2005. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.
The American painter Scott Kahn is known for his singular aesthetics, which descend from a Modernist legacy. He masterfully merges magical realism with lived experience and engages nature with imagination and personal memory. Reflecting in the Wilderness stands out as a stellar example of his desire to revisit his own work, drawing upon his monumental 1984 work In the Wilderness, recently offered at Phillips New York. With a delicate sense of isolation and serenity, this work conjures a surreal and dreamlike spatiality, as if abstracting the original painting into an undefined, subconscious realm, infused with ephemeral and intangible emotions.
Scott Kahn was born in 1946 in Springfield, Massachusetts. After receiving his BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, he went on to obtain an MFA from Rutgers University in 1970, followed by further studies at the Art Students League. There, he was mentored by Theodoros Stamos and met many of the first-generation Abstract Expressionist artists, such as Mark Rothko. His refined technique and distinctive repertoire have received international recognition and critical acclaim over the years, earning him a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 1986 and 1995, as well as a fellowship at the Edward F. Albee Foundation. His work has also been honoured in numerous major private and public collections, such as that of the University of Pennsylvania.
In July 2021, Almine Rech gallery announced its exclusive representation of Kahn following its online solo exhibition of his works, One by One: Scott Kahn. Following an endorsement from the late Matthew Wong in 2018, collector interest in Kahn’s work has rapidly increased, and this demand shows no signs of slowing.
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