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"I’ll often have quick flashes of imagery appear in and out of my thoughts, they could be shaped or triggered by something I saw or heard out in the world, an artwork I have seen...Going by intuition and my emotions I will then head to the studio and set out to elaborate in paint these vague glimpses I get."
—Matthew WongPainted in 2018, Day 1 is a striking example of Matthew Wong’s highly coveted landscapes rendered in monumental scale. Indeed, the present work bears resemblance to the artist’s current world record, River at Dusk, also from 2018, both in grandeur and also with its unique perspective, high horizon line and rich amber palette. In the present work, long grasses guide the viewer into an expansive, jewel-like field that gives way to a grove along a riverbank, all set below a mystic daytime sky. Encapsulating the “mental database of art I have seen or impressions from day to day life,” in Wong’s words, Day 1 evokes a fusion of the artist’s influences and lived environments—namely Edmonton, Alberta, where he spent the last three years of his all-too-brief career.i Marking the first of eight paintings from his Day By Night series, the present work featured at Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong in 2019, the artist’s first solo exhibition in China.
Matthew Wong, River at Dusk, 2018. Sold Phillips, Hong Kong, December 2020 for $4,871,441. Artwork: © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York "Living a fairly reclusive life and finding the most stimulation and enjoyment from matters of the mind...it’s inevitable that the solitary nature of this pattern seeps into and informs my work."
—Matthew WongAfter living in the United States and Hong Kong between 2007 and 2016, the Toronto-born artist returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton, where he worked in solitude and prolifically painted the works for which he is now celebrated. It was “a city where he knew no one...For those three years, periods of intense productivity in Edmonton were reclusive lulls in his frenetic and supercharged march through the art world,” Winnie Wong observed.ii Between 2017 and 2019, the artist presented glimpses of Edmonton in his paintings, including Day 1. In this case, the foregrounded field recalls the grasslands of the Canadian Prairies, whilst the upper half of the composition conjures Edmonton’s tree-lined river valley, which “Wong would have gone up and down, crossing the North Saskatchewan River, every early morning on his way to his studio.”iii Here the artist’s elicitations of the natural world around him echo the Canadian landscapes of Group of Seven painters as Emily Carr, as well as the work of his cited influence Marsden Hartley, who similarly found painterly subjects in his home region of Maine when he returned there late in life.
Marsden Hartley, Mount Katahdin, Autumn, No. 1, 1939-1940. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York "I’d like to think of my art practice as an open-ended dialogue between myself and other painters, both living and dead."
—Matthew WongTransforming Edmonton’s landscape into a vista of his mind, the present work showcases Wong’s abounding painterly imagination as he uses the exterior world to explore the subconscious—a hallmark of the artist’s practice. As Lauren DiGiulio observed, “Wong worked at the intersection of inner psychology and exterior expression, troubling any simple explanations for the tension between them. He constructed paradoxical spaces that, rendered in landscapes and domestic scenes, go deep into the psyche while looking outward to the fields of Western and [Eastern] painting.”iv Channeling his great influences from both canons, the richly speckled field in Day 1 evokes the Pointillism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac as well as the hallucinatory nets of Yayoi Kusama, while the foregrounded grasses recall the calligraphic strokes of traditional Chinese landscape painting. By intuitively painting the dots over the dominating plant forms in certain areas, Wong flattens the compositional perspective as if to collapse space into the singular plane of the mind, ultimately materializing his “existential meditation on the act of painting.”v
[left] Georges Seurat, La Luzerne, Saint-Denis, 1884-1885. National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh. Image: © National Galleries of Scotland, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY [right] Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Image: Minneapolis Insitute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund "Wong can be considered a kind of nouveau Nabi…Like his forebears, he synthesizes stylized representations, bright colors, and mystical themes to create rich, evocative scenes. His works, despite their ebullient palette, are frequently tinged with a melancholic yearning."
—Eric SutphinFor the series comprising the present work, Wong painted four pairs of day and night scenes, starting with the former and recalibrating his palette for the latter. By exploring the changing effects of light through color between Day 1 and its counterpart Night 1, the artist evokes the Poplars of Claude Monet and the olive groves of Vincent van Gogh, his most cited influence. Refracting throughout the composition, the colors of Wong’s daytime light conjure the evocative hues of Symbolism, whilst the blue seeping in at left reflects the melancholic sensibility that culminated in his series of Blue paintings from 2017 to 2019. As he expressed in the year of the work’s creation, “I do believe that there is inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life, and on a broader level I feel my work speaks to this quality in addition to being a reflection of my thoughts, fascinations, and impulses.”vi
The present work and Night 1 installed at Day By Night, Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong, January 10 – March 16, 2019. Image: Winnie Yeung, Courtesy Massimo de Carlo, Artwork: © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Collector’s Digest
Upcoming Institutional Show
Dallas Museum of Art, Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances, October 16, 2022 – February 5, 2023
• Wong’s works reside in notable public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dallas Museum of Art, Estée Lauder Collection, New York, and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut.
• Continuing the momentum around the artist’s acclaim, the Dallas Museum of Art will host Wong’s first museum retrospective in the United States on the heels of the painter’s institutional debut, Matthew Wong: Blue View, which took place at the Art Gallery of Ontario from August 2021 to April 2022.
i Matthew Wong, quoted in Maria Vogel, “Matthew Wong Reflects on the Melancholy of Life,” Art of Choice, November 15, 2018, online.
ii Winnie Wong, “Genius from Nowhere: Postcards from Matthew Wong,” in Postcards, exh. cat., Karma, New York, 2020, p. 7.
iii Ibid.
iv Lauren DiGiulio, “See You on the Other Side: Matthew Wong’s Vistas of the Mind,” Momus, April 1, 2021, online.
v Matthew Wong, quoted in Elaine Wong, “They Are Artists: Matthew Wong,” Altermodernists, October 29, 2014, online.
vi Matthew Wong, quoted in Maria Vogel, “Matthew Wong Reflects on the Melancholy of Life,” Art of Choice, November 15, 2018, online.Provenance
MASSIMODECARLO, Hong Kong
Acquired from the above by the present ownerExhibited
Hong Kong, MASSIMODECARLO, Day by Night, January 10–March 16, 2019
Artist Biography
Matthew Wong
Matthew Wong was a Canadian artist who enjoyed growing acclaim for his lush, dreamlike scenes that play on a rich tradition of art historical precedents. His work depicts the vivid but often melancholy terrain between sleep and wakefulness, lonely landscapes and isolated interiors rendered with a carefree hand and an ebullient palette, yet which contain an ineffable sorrow and a palpable but unnamed longing.
Wong spent his childhood between cultures: he was born in Toronto, Canada and at age 7 moved with his family to Hong Kong where he lived until he was 15, at which time the family returned to Canada. Wong began to experiment artistically already well into his adulthood, first with photography, which he pursued at the postgraduate level at the City University of Hong Kong, and then with painting. A self-taught painter, Wong developed his aptitude for the medium by immersing himself in online conversations with other artists and dedicated personal study of the history of art. His paintings attracted almost immediate attention, but Wong tragically passed away in 2019 just as his work was beginning to receive widespread critical praise.
30
Day 1
signed, titled and dated "DAY 1 王 二O一八" on the reverse
oil on canvas
70 x 60 in. (177.8 x 152.4 cm)
Painted in 2018.
Estimate
$2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $3,176,000
Amanda Lo Iacono
Global Managing Director and Specialist, Head of Evening Sale, New York
+1 212 940 1278
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Carolyn Mayer
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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
New York Auction 18 May 2022
1
Anna Weyant
Buffet II
Estimate $100,000 - 150,000
Sold for $730,800
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2
Robin F. Williams
Nude Waiting It Out
Estimate $150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $327,600
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3
María Berrío
Burrow of the Yellow
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $998,000
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4
Hilary Pecis
Adrianne's Bookshelf
Estimate $300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $630,000
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5
Lisa Yuskavage
Northview (Impressionist Jacket)
Estimate $700,000 - 1,000,000
Sold for $1,106,900
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6
Mark Rothko
Untitled
Estimate $6,000,000 - 8,000,000
Sold for $8,435,000
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7
Yves Klein
Monochrome bleu sans titre (IKB 267)
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,752,500
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8
Shara Hughes
The Not Dark Dark Spots
Estimate $300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $1,603,000
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9
Helen Frankenthaler
Blue Dance
Estimate $1,800,000 - 2,500,000
Sold for $2,208,000
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10
Alexander Calder
39=50
Estimate $10,500,000 - 14,500,000
Sold for $15,648,500
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11
Yayoi Kusama
Untitled (Nets)
Estimate $5,000,000 - 7,000,000
Sold for $10,496,000
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12
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled
Estimate On Request
Sold for $85,000,000
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13
Andy Warhol
Multicolored Retrospective (Reversal Series)
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $3,748,750
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14
Pablo Picasso
Figures et plante
Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Sold for $10,267,000
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15
Yves Klein
Relief Éponge bleu sans titre (RE 49)
Estimate $14,000,000 - 18,000,000
Sold for $19,999,500
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16
Carmen Herrera
Basque
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $1,603,000
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17
Amy Sherald
She was learning to love moments, to love moments for themselves
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $1,482,000
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18
Emmanuel Taku
The Three Damsels
Estimate $50,000 - 70,000
Sold for $252,000
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19
Roy Lichtenstein
Nude
Estimate $8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Sold for $10,267,000
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20
Issy Wood
Actual car 2
Estimate $150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $478,800
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21
Wayne Thiebaud
Berry Cake
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $2,813,000
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22
Andy Warhol
Flowers
Estimate $8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Sold for $9,351,000
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23
Reggie Burrows Hodges
Intersection of Color: Suite
Estimate $200,000 - 300,000
Sold for $730,800
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24
Robert Delaunay
L'Équipe de Cardiff
Estimate $700,000 - 1,000,000
Sold for $877,000
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25
Justin Caguiat
Doll 3 Eros
Estimate $380,000 - 450,000
Sold for $504,000
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26
Andy Warhol
The Star (Greta Garbo as Mata Hari)
Estimate $7,000,000 - 10,000,000
Sold for $9,580,000
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27
Cecily Brown
Angie
Estimate $4,500,000 - 6,500,000
Sold for $5,959,000
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28
Hans Hofmann
In Upper Regions
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $2,571,000
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29
Cy Twombly
Untitled
Estimate $7,000,000 - 10,000,000
Sold for $8,206,000
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30
Matthew Wong
Day 1
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $3,176,000
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31
This lot is no longer available.
32
Rafa Macarrón
La Perrera
Estimate $80,000 - 120,000
Sold for $378,000
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33
David Wojnarowicz
Fuck You Faggot Fucker
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $937,500
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34
Dondi White
Rebel Rocking the Blind Light
Estimate $100,000 - 150,000
Sold for $151,200
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35
Lauren Quin
Second Palm Third Stem
Estimate $40,000 - 60,000
Sold for $302,400
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36
Andy Warhol
Three works: (i-iii) Campbell's Tomato Juice Box
Estimate $700,000 - 900,000
Sold for $1,058,500
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37
Dana Schutz
Sneeze 2
Estimate $80,000 - 120,000
Sold for $277,200
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