Phillips Announces Highlights from the London Sales of
20th Century & Contemporary Art
Including
Works from the Miles & Shirley Fiterman Collection;
Property
from the Collection of Alex Rodriguez;
And Property
from the Estate of Ryan Brant
As
well as a Historically Important Luc Tuymans Painting
LONDON
– 14 JUNE 2019 – Phillips’ June sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art
will offer works from a number of private collections, including the Miles
& Shirley Fiterman Collection, property from the Estate of Ryan Brant, and property
from the collection of American baseball star Alex Rodriguez. The Evening Sale,
taking place on 27 June, will present 36 lots of Modern, Post-War, and
Contemporary Art, and will be followed by the Day Sale on 28 June, comprising 160
lots.
Luc
Tuymans’s Schwarzheide, 1986,
leads this season’s Evening Sale with unparalleled conceptual and historical
significance. The painting – essentially a landscape depicting a line of sparse
pine trees – appears to present an innocuous subject. However, taking its name
after a World War II concentration camp, Schwarzheide belongs to a cycle
of works that Tuymans commenced in the latter half of the 1980s, touching on
themes of loss and violence in the context of the Holocaust. Tuymans has said
of the work, “I wanted to make my paintings look old from the start, which is
important because they are about memory.” Having resided in the same
private collection since its execution, the work has been exhibited extensively
over the last three decades, including showings at Museum of Contemporary Art
in Chicago, The Tate Modern in London, the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and at
Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. It has recently been reproduced as an immense
marble mosaic at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, on the occasion of the artist’s
solo exhibition La Pelle.
On view with Tuymans’s Schwarzheide at Documenta IX in 1992 was Marlene Dumas’ Losing (Her Meaning), 1988, and the two works will be reunited once again, with the Dumas also being offered in the Evening Sale. An early masterpiece by Dumas, Losing (Her Meaning) draws the viewer into an ethereal scene painted in a palette of moody blues and greens.
Property from the Miles & Shirley
Fiterman Collection
Phillips
is pleased to offer Property from the Miles & Shirley Fiterman
Collection, comprising 95 works
to be offered across the auction house’s salerooms throughout the year. The May
auctions in New York were the first to feature these works, and now the London
Evening Sale is to be led by Roy Lichtenstein’s The Conductor, 1975. The
Conductor boasts Lichtenstein’s characteristically delineated forms, his distinct
red, blue and yellow colour palette, and his iconic Ben-Day dots. It is an
example of the artist’s musings on modern art, taking Gino Severini’s Mare = ballerina (Sea = Dancer), 1914,
as a point of departure. It was one year before the execution of the present
work that Lichtenstein first engaged with Futurism as his subject matter,
painting a limited number of Futurist-inspired works between 1974-1976. Two
other highlights from the Fiterman Collection presented in the June Evening
Sale are Pablo Picasso’s Homme assis
(Mardi gras), 1972, and Alexander Calder’s Two Moons, 1969.
Property from the Collection of Alex Rodriguez
Coming
to auction for the first time are two works from the private collection of
American baseball star Alex Rodriguez. Considered one of the greatest baseball
players of all time—setting numerous records for the Seattle Mariners, Texas Rangers, and
New York Yankees— Rodriguez has employed his passionate spirit and acute eye to
pursue new collecting ventures within the realm of art. Two works, which have
resided in his Florida home, will figure prominently in the Evening Sale –
Richard Prince’s Mustang Painting,
2014-16, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Pink Elephant with Fire Engine, 1984.
Falling
within the iconographic field of muscle-car culture, Mustang Painting
presents an iridescent mustang cruising amidst an abstract and indistinct mass
of blue paint. A brilliant example of Prince’s thematically driven work, the
work continues the artist’s sustained exploration of his series-oriented
practice, the most celebrated of which focus on various different elements of
the same fetishized culture: cars, nurses, cowboys and dry jokes.
Jean-Michel
Basquiat’s Pink Elephant with Fire Engine pulsates with the
artist’s characteristic energy. The work, which has been exhibited
internationally over the last thirty-five years, not only mirrors the energy of
New York’s bustling cultural scene, but also conflates a number of the artist’s
most revered artistic tropes and idiosyncrasies, brimming with chromatic vigor and
presenting a spontaneous, gestural style throughout.
Property from the Estate of Ryan Brant
Phillips is honoured to present to market four works
by the acclaimed artist KAWS, from the estate of Ryan Brant. The Brant surname
is synonymous with contemporary culture, and many will be familiar with the Brant
Foundation, or indeed with the long-standing family ownership of Interview Magazine. Brant’s passion for
art was driven in an absolute belief of the talent who created it, and it was
this commitment, combined with his natural creative foresight, which led him to
acquire works such as UNTITLED (MBFV5),
to be featured in the Evening Sale. This
painting, brimming with rich chromatic hues, presents KAWS’s prodigious reinvention
of Snoopy, as part of his relentless exploration of graphic imagery and the
cartoon world. Also presented in Phillips’ Day Sale from the Estate of Ryan
Brant are two sister paintings by KAWS, both entitled KIMPSONS and dated 2005, along with the artist’s UNTITLED (HTLD5), 2011.
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale | 28 June
Among
the leading highlights in the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale is the
cover lot, Dana Schutz’s Crapping,
Braiding and Whistling, 2009, and back cover lot Anti-Entropy, 2011, by William Kentridge, whose work is the current
focus of an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel. The Day Sale is led by KAWS’s UNTITLED, 2014.
20th Century &
Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Auction: Thursday, 27 June 2019, 7pm GMT
Auction viewing: 18 - 27 June
Location: 30 Berkeley Square, London
Click here for more information.
20th Century &
Contemporary Art Day Sale
Auction: Friday, 28 June 2019, 2pm GMT
Auction viewing: 18 - 28 June
Location: 30 Berkeley Square, London
Click here for more information.
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