Emerging artists such as Lucy Bull and Anna Park are included in Philipps 20th Century and Contemporary Art and Design show.
Phillips Auction just announced the full lineup for its Hong Kong Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design online.
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Leading the way are celebrated artists such as George Condo, David Hockney, Matthew Wong, Lee Ufan, Zhang Xiaogang, and Yoshitomo Nara.
Other highlights include paintings by in-demand contemporary stars such as Nicolas Party, Ernie Barnes, Ouattara Watts, alongside rising young female artists Lucy Bell, Anna Park, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Issy Wood, Shara Hughes, Allison Zuckerman, and Anna Weyant.
The Day Sale will take place on 21 June at 12pm HKT, followed by the Evening Sale on 22 June at 6pm HKT.
“We are excited to present a strong and vibrant selection of artworks this June across the Hong Kong Evening and Day Sales,” says Jonathan Crockett, chairman, Asia, Phillips. “Our Evening Sale spans over 100 years of art history and includes Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s delicate 1902 La Bergère, and David Hockney’s seminal 1965 Painted Landscape, as well as highly desirable works by exciting new market stars such as Ernie Barnes, Ouattara Watts and Scott Kahn.”
Additionally, Crockett says, they are delighted that LAAB Architects, appointed designers of Phillips’ Asia new headquarters, will curate this season’s Pantone Room. This will be the project’s finale before they move into their new space in the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Isaure de Viel Castel, head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Phillips Hong Kong, says that they have assembled auctions that offer a broad array of international names, reflecting the current collecting tastes.
“The Evening and Day Sales champion a rich diversity of female artists from the contemporary scene, including artists such as Lucy Bull, Issy Wood, and Anna Park, each with her own distinct style and artistic vocabulary,” Castel says. “We look forward to welcoming collectors and art lovers in Hong Kong to view the works at JW Marriott from 18-22 June.”
Leading the Evening Sale is George Condo’s “Transparent Female Forms,” 2009 from his seminal Drawing Paintings series.
Marking the beginning of what would become a decade-long preoccupation with the Drawing Paintings, this exquisite work synergizes the traditionally disparate processes of drawing and painting—all whilst retaining the artist’s signature brand of “psychological cubism.”
In “Transparent Female Forms,” a kaleidoscope of jewel-like hues emerges from a neutral ground, superimposed with gestural improvisations that lend the work a sense of rhythm invoking Condo’s preoccupation with music, which he studied alongside art history in university.
Art of scenery
This season, a series of works in the style of landscape that crosses cultures and eras will highlight the 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. These range from David Hockney’s semi-abstract landscape from the 1960s, Scott Kahn’s strikingly atmospheric landscape, Shara Hughes’ surreal landscape, to the late Matthew Wong’s imagined landscape.
A lyrical fusion of geometric Cubism, Surrealist abstraction and still life, “Painted Landscape” (Or Red and Blue Landscape) showcases David Hockney’s unparalleled ability in creating an utterly intriguing composition. Created when the artist was only 28 years old, the work is an early example of Hockney’s objective in engaging in dialogues with other artists through layers of complex imagery.
Phillips is also excited to present a work by Ernie Barnes for the first time, who stole headlines during New York auctions last month when his iconic 1976 painting sold for a remarkable $15.3 million.
A widely loved and popular painter during his time, Barnes was a professional American football player before becoming an artist. It was this past as a football player that informed his mastery over the human anatomy, reconciling his roles as an athlete and artist.
While time will tell whether the art establishment will reconsider its eschewal of one of America’s great modernist painters, what is undoubtable is the reverence that Ernie Barnes deserves for masterful, joyous compositions – with “Life After Sundown” offered this season being a shining example of such.
Like Barnes, Ouattara Watts is an artist who is undeserving to be passed over in the canon of art history. Born in the Ivory Coast, Watts studied art in Paris where he met fellow artist and friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was impressed by his works and encouraged him to move to New York.
Watts has been involved in notable exhibitions and his work can be found in the collections of leading institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Presented in this season’s Evening Sale is Intercessor, an accomplished late work by the artist, in which an assemblage of chromatic variations and geometric shapes and symbols is balanced by biometric figures in an intoxication of color, line, and form.
Future is female
This season’s Hong Kong Sales continue to present works by rising stars in the Contemporary art scene. Among them are a number of young female artists such as Lucy Bull, Anna Park, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Issy Wood, Allison Zuckerman, and Anna Weyant.
Bull is one of the world’s most exciting and forward-thinking young painters active today. Marking her auction debut in Asia, 8:50 is defined by dialectic, opposition, contrast—precision and abandon, order and chaos, concord and discord.
“It” stands as one of the artist’s largest visions, where forms and patterns seem to emerge to allow us grounding in the composition, only to then fall away as the kaleidoscopic sands of pigment shift eternal, forcing self-accusations of pareidolia.
Composed with an amalgamation of references culled from the artist’s obsessive absorption of visual culture, the bewildering 2019 painting “Hand’s Job” takes the viewer on another adventure into the humorously bizarre and wild visual realm of Italian American artist Jamian Juliano‐Villani.
Working with projectors and sourced imagery, her signature practice of combining disparate styles and subject matters pushes the envelope of the conventional subconscious preconception that everything should make logical sense, garnering her growing recognition and popularity in the international art scene.
Born in South Korea, the 25-year-old Korean-American artist Anna Park’s frenetic charcoal drawings that teeter between abstraction and figuration have earned international recognition.
First discovered by KAWS at the New York Academy of Art open studio exhibition, the artist has had sold out solo shows in New York and Tokyo in the past year alone, and her vast charcoal compositions went to major museum collections including the ICA Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
Marking her first appearance at auction, “I to I,” presented here, is a prime example of the artist’s charcoal-drawn scenes that take us back to the quintessential chaos of pre-pandemic New York life.
Banner: “La paysanne au panier,” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
