Phillips Announces April Highlights Sales to editions
Sale from April 19 to 21 to present genre sets by Warhol, Nara, Haring, Chagall, Bourgeois and others
NEW YORK – APRIL 6, 2022 – Phillips is pleased to announce the April Editions & Works on Paper sale, the second of three New York spring sales for the category. Composed of 373 lots in total, the impressive selection will be offered over three days, in four sessions, with 100 works in the Evening Sale and 273 lots in the Daily Sale. The sale will feature rare works by Vija Celmins, Brice Marden, Keith Haring, as well as a rare print by Mary Cassatt alongside an impressive number of complete sets by artists Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Andy Warhol, Yoshitomo Nara, Keith Haring, Jasper Johns, Julian Opie statuettes, among others. As previously announced [LINK]the sale will also include the Anderson Collection: 10 works from the family collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson as a sole proprietor section in the April 19 editions evening sale at 432 Park Avenue, New York.
Kelly Troester and Cary Leibowitz, Global Co-Heads of Publishing and Vice Presidents, Americas, said: “Following the tremendous success of our new March sale, the April auction is one of our most ambitious to date. From a unique and newly discovered Mary Cassatt drypoint executed in 1890 to Warhol’s most iconic celebrity portraits to a Rashid Johnson serigraph from 2019, our April auction showcases the full breadth of everything the Editions category has to offer.
Leading the sale are Andy Warhol’s iconic flowersrarely encountered as the full portfolio of 10 serigraphs, which are considered exemplary illustrations of the artist’s style and work. flowers marked a unique and pivotal moment in Warhol’s career, a departure from the exclusive treatment of celebrities or commercial subjects. He exalts everyday life by treating ordinary scenes and objects as if they were a famous figure or brand. flowers illustrates Warhol’s achievement of a certain artistic status, in which he produces images that the public would not have previously paid attention to, until Warhol decided he should. Other outstanding Warhols in the evening sale include a unique tiger essay proof and a selection of starlets: Grace Kelly, Marilyn, and Liz (Elisabeth Taylor).
After setting the world auction record for this set last fall, another flawless and captivating Untitled a set of Yoshitomo Nara prints will be offered during the evening sale. Printed by master printer Yasu Shibata at Pace Editions workshop, Yoshitomo Nara’s complete set of 10 ukiyo-e woodblock prints effortlessly showcases Nara’s iconic imagery through a labor-intensive engraving process. of work rooted in Japanese heritage. Referencing his nimble drawings, these woodcuts embody the same immediacy, but more refined. Rendered with attitude, somewhere between melancholy and punk, Yoshitomo Nara’s famous “femmes fatales” entice the viewer. His characters evoke forgotten memories or feelings of childhood, revived by their childish features.
Making its first appearance on the auction market, the monumental and rare silkscreen on canvas by Jean Dubuffet, Memory Site I. The series was the last large-scale work the artist produced in a small edition of 10. The imagery used to create Memory Site I started as a collage drawing of the same image, titled Annals II, now kept at the Fondation Jean Dubuffet, Périgny-sur-Yerres. Stitched together from various places in the artist’s own memory, the motifs present in the work are formed with the simultaneous notions of intention and destiny present in daily life. Large-scale nature creates an immersive panorama, not only engaging the viewer, but enveloping them in the landscape of mind and memory. The 1979 New York exhibition at the Pace Gallery caught the attention of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, continuing Dubuffet’s legacy into the next generation of great contemporary artists.
Described by the artist as “a perfect time capsule from my early days in New York”, Keith Haring’s film Plan drawings (L. pp. 174-183) The portfolio is being auctioned for the first time as a complete set of 17. Haring explains the series as follows: “These 17 drawings were created over a period of a few weeks between December 1980 and January 1981. The drawings originals were executed on vellum with Sumi ink as I intended to make blueprint copies of each of the drawings. Periodically I would bring my drawings to the local blues, where I had great pleasure in try to explain the contents of these works to the men who used the blueprint machines. After a few weeks everyone in the shop knew my drawings. It was also at this time that I started to draw in the blueprints. New York City subways. The drawings were exhibited in a small gallery in the Westbeth Painter’s Space in February 1981. […] Before selling any of them, I made photostats of each of the designs. These impressions were made from these statistics.
Adam Pendleton’s comprehensive set of four prints, almost graffiti, explores the intersection of the Black Arts Movement, Dada, Abstraction and Conceptualism to examine issues of representation, appropriation, history and identity. As shown in his retrospective advertisement from MoMA 2022 to the 2022 Whitney Biennale, Pendleton’s multidisciplinary artistic practice is situated within the conceptual framework of Black Dada, a term coined by Amiri Baraka, a leader of the Black Arts Movement and an American beat poet. . The term is without a singular definition or understanding, but rather a fluid, abstract notion that provides “a way to talk about the future while talking about the past.” This is our present moment.” Untitled (2019) includes four monoprints displaying statements or questions that reflect this notion: BLACK DADA; WHAT IS BLACK (CK DADA); and WE ARE NOT. Pendleton’s use of fragmented or incomplete language seeks to disrupt logic, refute the familiar, and challenge institutional authority. Thus, drawing attention to the power of language to define and redefine, to include or exclude, to recognize or ignore.
Two other notable monumental works in the sale are by Roy Lichtenstein reflections series; Thoughts on the crash and Thoughts on the Scream. Layered in technique and interpretation, Lichtenstein reflections straddles the imagery of the Pop era and the contemporary moment of the 1990s while offering a nod and nod to some of the most iconic works of the 19th and 20th centuries. Taking advantage of Tyler Graphics’ extensive facilities and Ken Tyler’s innovative approach to printmaking, Thoughts on the Scream and Thoughts on the crash contain elements of lithography, serigraphy, woodcut and metallic collage on an impressive scale.
Throughout the sale, the colorful and brilliantly captured scenes of Marc Chagall from Arabian nights. by Chagall Four Tales from One Thousand and One Nights, 1948, was his elaborate lithograph project for Pantheon Books in New York that illustrated excerpts from ancient Persian, Indian and Arabic tales. His illustrations ultimately enhance the descriptive nature of the text in an unparalleled way that truly establishes his mastery of color lithography. In all, Chagall created 12 different images illustrating the four tales. Set 3 contains a signed and numbered print of the final image as well as 10 of the rare progressive color proofs. Lots 4 and 5 are examples of the signed and numbered final states, in color, and lots 131-135 are groups of progressive proofs for other images in the series.
Auction: April 19-21, 2022
Consulting the auctions: April 13-19, 2022
Location: 432 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022
Click here for more information: https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/NY030122