With Phillips just opening its new headquarters at the M+ complex before Sotheby’s and Christie’s have opened their own dedicated Hong Kong salesrooms, the Hong Kong auctions are beginning to gravitate toward each other. Taking place in adjacent weeks, the stats from Phillips and Sotheby’s Contemporary sales have been combined together (Sotheby’s notably held substantial Modern art sales the same week) Christie’s will hold their Hong Kong sales on their traditional Memorial Day weekend (in the US.) 

Each auction house hold two sales, one evening sale and one day sale. In total, four sales generated over USD 1.265 billion, or USD 164.5 million.

 

In the meantime, the numbers show the Asian Contemporary market holding its own. Sotheby’s Contemporary sales were down 15% but Phillips had already risen substantially suggesting the market remains relatively stable. In total, almost USD 165 million was spent through the sale of 333 lots.

The sell-through rate was a strong 88% which is above the overall sell-through rate for the auction houses and reflects good sale management.

 

The two most sold artists are, not surprisingly Yoshitomo Nara and Yayoi Kusama. If Nara gets the two most expensive lots, Yayoi Kusama with the sale of 28 lots generated over USD 39.7 million turnover which represents a 24.2% market share. With 12 lots Yoshitomo Nara generated a turnover of USD 30.2 million for 18.3 % market share. Far below, Matthew Wong generated just over USD 11.7 million with the sale of only 3 works.

Top 5 Lots

#1. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
HKD 100,555,000 / USD 12,809,717

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
In the Milky Lake, 2012
Acrylic on canvas
197×194 cm (77 1/2 x 76 3/8 inches)

#2. Yoshitomo Nara

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
HKD 83,850,000 / USD 10,681,665

#3. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
HKD 62,638,000 / USD 7,979,465

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin (L), 2014
Bronze
241 x 235 x 235 cm (94 7/8 x 92 1/2 x 92 1/2 inches)

#4. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
HKD 56,110,000 / USD 7,147,862

#5. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
HKD 55,169,500 / USD 7,028,051

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
A-Pumpkin (BAGN8), 2011
Acrylic on canvas
162×130 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2011 on the reverse

 

1. Phillips

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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Hong Kong Auction 30 March 2023

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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale: Hong Kong March 2023 (phillips.com)

# Lots: 40 Lots
Low Estimate: HKD 212,700,000
High Estimate: HKD 292,700,000

———-

Total Revenues:
HKD 351,701,500 / USD 44,803,310
# Lots sold: 36
Sell-Through Rate: 90%
Top Lot:
HKD 83,850,000 / USD 10,681,665

———-

Above Estimates: 19 Lots (48%)
Within Estimates: 14 Lots (35%)
Below Estimates: 2 Lots (5%)
Estimate On Request: 1 Lot (3%)
Unsold: 4 Lots (10%)

 

#1. Yoshitomo Nara

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimates On Request
HKD 83,850,000 / USD 10,681,665

Yoshitomo Nara – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 13 March 2023 | Phillips

Exceptionally rare in composition and arresting in its visual power, Lookin’ for a Treasure is a singularly special painting by art world phenomenon, Yoshitomo Nara, whose ‘Nara girls’ have captivated audiences around the world. The protagonist embodies a unique combination of traits that are most highly sought after in the Japanese painter’s oeuvre and are characteristic of his work from this period, as she is depicted full-length with a large, chickpea shaped head and pudgy cheeks, fixatedly piercing jellybean eyes, and with small, cherry-red lips which here, form the expression of a mischievous, confident smirk that quietly confronts the viewer.

In stark contrast to the pastel blue, pristine background of seemingly infinite depth built through thin layers of repainting, the protagonist in Lookin’ for a Treasure wears a golden dress that is as vibrant as her sapphire-toned eyes. The subject’s canary dress, along with their bob haircut, brings to mind the iconic appearance of Madeline, the Parisian orphan schoolgirl who is the titular character of a media franchise that originated from children’s books by Ludwig Bemelmans in 1939. Madeline is renowned for her courageous and outgoing nature, which was brought to life through animated adaptations starting in 1993. Interestingly, Lookin’ for a Treasure, which similarly portrays a child whose mature confidence contradicts their youthful innocence, was created just two years after the animated series premiered.

 

#2. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 40,000,000 – 50,000,000
HKD 56,110,000 / USD 7,147,862

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 10 March 2023 | Phillips

With its charming, jolly and peaceful presence, the pumpkin is unequivocally the most iconic motif of Kusama’s career. Full, symmetrical and voluptuous, the current work is an exquisite example of the artist’s highly coveted pumpkin paintings. Vibrantly rendered in golden yellow juxtaposed against ebony black, Pumpkin is undeniably and distinctly Kusama in its sharp contrast. An early example that is archetypal of Kusama’s pumpkin motif, the current work masterfully encapsulates the artist’s obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite through the combination of the three pillars that define her artistic practice – dots, nets, and the pumpkin.

Intricate in its execution and instantly arresting, Pumpkin is the epitome of the artist’s unique artistic expression through which she achieves self-obliteration through repetition. The multi-sized striated black dots in Pumpkin slither over the golden surface of the gourd’s bulbous form, creating an optical illusion of depth through varied sizes that showcases Kusama’s unparalleled skill and dexterity in her command of the medium. These all-encompassing dots coalesce into waves of pattern set against a latticed background, together forming a fluctuating visual field that moves beyond the picture plane, drawing the viewer into a delicate web of color and shape.

 

#3. Matthew Wong

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 24,000,000 – 35,000,000
HKD 36,145,000 / USD 4,604,517

Matthew Wong – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 8 March 2023 | Phillips

Adored with abandon by the art world since his explosive ascent to auction in 2020, Matthew Wong’s The Road is marked by his virtuosic symphonies of pigment and rejection of tonal modelling in favour of autonomous fields of colour. Sharing in the Modernist conviction that the application of oil onto canvas could elicit intimate yet innovative forms of expression, his short career of only 7 years produced works that are lyrical, whimsical, cerebral but most importantly, sincere.

 

#4. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 25,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 27,675,000 / USD 3,525,523

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 11 March 2023 | Phillips

In monumental effervescence, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Dots (HTI) triumphs as one the largest of the artist’s canvases to ever appear in public auction. Spanning almost four metres wide and two metres in height, this larger-than-life triptych engulfs the audience in an infinite landscape: shimmering silver dots of various sizes and shades transcend their formalist nature to blanket the canvas in a rhythmic undulation. Pulsating and ever expanding, the poetic lattice confronts the viewer’s perception of space and time, capturing the stillness of a transient moment but simultaneously weaving the audience into a boundless mindscape. The translucent silver impasto resonates a weightless quality in sheer contrast with the obsessive pattern and overwhelming magnitude of the triptych, brilliantly offsetting reality. To behold this masterpiece is to be transported into the artist’s hypnotic universe, forever billowing, swelling, and receding.

Synonymous to Kusama’s distinguished artistic career, her dotted patterns have been exhaustively canonized in sculptures, prints, and canvases of various sizes. Completed almost five decades after her initial venture into the subject, the present work materializes the artist’s most determined vision and exhaustive practice in museum-grade exquisiteness. As a jewel of extreme scarcity, Infinity Dots (HTI) has never been auctioned but nevertheless enjoyed international acclaim when exhibited in Yayoi Kusama: Dots Obsession at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney.

#5. Roy Lichtenstein

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 14,000,000 – 19,000,000
HKD 19,810,000 / USD 2,523,599

Roy Lichtenstein – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 18 March 2023 | Phillips

#6. Takashi Murakami

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 15,500,000 – 23,500,000
HKD 14,002,000 / USD 1,783,717

Takashi Murakami – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 14 March 2023 | Phillips

#7. Claude Monet

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 5,500,000 – 8,500,000
HKD 8,890,000 / USD 1,132,499

Claude Monet – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 19 March 2023 | Phillips

Confidently rendered in a flurry of rapid and yet precise brushstrokes, Paysage à Villez is a work of remarkable energy and vitality by Impressionist master Claude Monet. Depicting a line of poplar trees set on the grassy banks of the river Epte in the environs of Villez, it captures one of Monet’s most enduring themes – that of the play of light on water and the fleeting patterns meteorological and atmospheric effects that he was able to observe in nature. Evoking a quiet moment of calm on a bright, spring-like day, the light palette and loose, open brushwork are highly characteristic of the artist’s en plein air approach to painting, allowing him to record the sensations of an instant with remarkable skill.

#8. Hernan Bas

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 6,500,000 – 8,500,000
HKD 8,255,000 / USD 1,051,606

Hernan Bas – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 9 March 2023 | Phillips

#9. Liu Ye

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
HKD 6,985,000 / USD 889,820

Liu Ye – 20th Century & Contemporary A… Lot 33 March 2023 | Phillips

Whimsical and theatrical are words that come to mind when approaching Liu Ye’s bewildering yet charming oeuvre. As one of the most important living contemporary Chinese artists, Liu Ye’s most recent solo exhibition—fittingly entitled Storytelling—took place at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2020-2021, the second leg of an exhibition that began in Shanghai in 2018. The present work, Flagship No.1, the first piece from a series exploring astounding scenes in which tiny sailors peel back hefty velvet stage curtains to reveal hulking warships, was part of this thought-provoking show in Italy. Having remained in private hands for nearly a decade, Flagship No. 1 rejoins the auction stage this season as a signature work by the artist.

For all its angled perfection however, Flagship No. 1 powerfully evokes the dreamy influences of Surrealism, at deliberately great odds with the rigidity and compositional equipoise the painting demands. Liu’s use of the curtain in the present work invokes a device employed by the great Surrealist René Magritte, but also artists from a longer art-historical lineage, such as the Old Masters: as can be seen in Rembrandt’s The Holy Family with a Curtain, the curtain serves as a powerful trompe-l’oeil, drawing the viewer into the depths of its composition, signaling the artifice of the scene we are witnessing, and yet also showcasing great skill in rendering drapery. The overall effect is one that recalls a stage and make-belief, juxtaposing with the verisimilitude of the Virgin Mother and Child.

#11. Rashid Johnson

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 6,350,000 / USD 808,928

Rashid Johnson – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 23 March 2023 | Phillips

To ruminate on themes as heavy and diverse as race, gender, sexuality and identity, one could do well to turn to the oeuvre of Rashid Johnson. His artistic practice is multifaceted, encompassing various forms such as painting, sculpture, large-scale installation, film, and mosaic, and producing works that reflect visual cosmologies which reference his upbringing in Chicago and African diasporic culture.

For Johnson, the act of creation is an act of bearing his soul to the world; as such, the indication of post-blackness is crucial to Johnson’s work. The term was coined by the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden, who included Johnson in an important show, Freestyle, in 2001. It describes a new generation of African American artists who were moving beyond the constraints of identity politics and making art that addressed broader cultural concerns. One of the defining characteristics of Johnson’s work is his use of materials. He often incorporates everyday objects, such as shea butter, ceramic tiles, and books, into his works. These materials are imbued with cultural significance, and their inclusion in Johnson’s work speaks to his interest in the ways in which objects can function as markers of identity and history.

#12. KAWS

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 5,500,000 – 7,500,000
HKD 6,096,000 / USD 776,770

KAWS – 20th Century & Contemporary Art… Lot 31 March 2023 | Phillips

Adept at subverting and refashioning the familiar in pop culture, KAWS has always tended to cartoons as a means of highlighting the inherent malleability of cultural symbols. Pinch, painted in 2010, is an extravagant contortion of Cubist measures where the culturally ubiquitous character SpongeBob SquarePants is reconditioned into KAWS’ unique visual vocabulary. Facial features are unanchored and clash together to produce seismic levels of pictorial chaos that is supercharged with raw emotion. By dissecting the figure and isolating certain constituents to magnify the significance of the eyes and mouth, we are compelled to confront these abstracted forms directly. This in turn adds a complex layer to our interpretive process and necessitates our active engagement with the artwork, provoking us to imbue it with our own perspicacious conjectures.

#13. Andy Warhol

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 4,500,000 – 6,500,000
HKD 5,334,000 / USD 679,499

Andy Warhol – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 26 March 2023 | Phillips

In his 1985 Ad series, Andy Warhol appropriates advertisements to create a bold homage to consumerism and the powerful influence of ads on American society. Each work in the series uniquely and colorfully captures a cultural moment. Warhol references the dominant corporate leaders of his time by representing a product accompanied by its brand logo in each of these works. Life Savers, which depicts the iconic brand of ring-shaped hard candy, is a nostalgic nod to advertisements from the 50s and 60s, while Mobilgas and Paramount directly refer to some of the most influential American corporations of the time. Untitled, (Volkswagen Lemon) uniquely draws upon and amplifies one of the most ingenious advertising campaigns of the postwar period. The German car company, seeking to market their vehicles to countless American veterans returning from the war, labeled the image of a perfect Volkswagen model as a ‘Lemon’ or a flawed, cheaply made foreign car. This advertisement proved successful in rebranding their company and showing off the exceptional make of their car through self-deprecating humor. Warhol cleverly uses these defining moments and figures in the history of American consumerism to question what art can be and elevate advertisement to the status of fine art.

#14. Stanley Whitney

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
HKD 5,080,000 / USD 647,142

Stanley Whitney – 20th Century & Conte… Lot 16 March 2023 | Phillips

STANLEY WHITNEY
The Last Cowboy Song, 2019
Oil on linen
72×72 inches (183×183 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘”The Last Cowboy Song” 2019 Stanley Whitney’ on the reverse

All-encompassing is an unusual way to describe a painting, given the limitation of dimension and subject matter, yet it precisely defines the canvas of Stanley Whitney. Drawing influences from Renaissance painting to jazz music, Whitney’s color grid paintings are integral to the current discourse of abstract painting in contemporary art. He developed his signature style in the 1970s when he discovered the paintings of Morris Louis, which enlightened his intuitive sense of pure color exploration. Since then, he has been an active proponent of color field painting and highly regarded for his spontaneous approach.

Integral to Whitney’s approach to painting is the process by which he is able to ‘lay two colors so close to each other and not trap them, but rather allow air for the canvas to breath’.ⁱ The present lot, The Last Cowboy Song painted in 2019 exemplifies Whitney’s distinctive approach to painting that gives complete autonomy to colors. A sense of composure is formed between the loosely structured grids and the rhythmic hues stacked against one another. To create his signature style, Whitney stacks irregular-shaped rectangles of color within a square format canvas and works in a sequential manner, moving methodically from one square to the next, row after row, from left to right, top to bottom. In doing so, Whitney is able to let the color form the structure rather than having a structure to fill in the color.

#15. Mr.

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
HKD 5,080,000 / USD 647,142

Mr. – 20th Century & Contemporary Art … Lot 32 March 2023 | Phillips

Featuring a sprawling cityscape and anime-inspired characters, The Endless Landscape of this Reality is characteristic of Japanese artist Mr.’s iconic oeuvre. Internationally recognized for his vibrant and nostalgic aesthetic, the artist examines otaku subculture– the Japanese fan community for anime, manga, and video games. By incorporating such motifs into his works, Mr. blurs the lines between high and low culture. Taking visual cues from the Japanese culture of cuteness, Mr. first gained popularity in the early 2000s for drawing young female characters, who remain synonymous with the artist to this day. These characters are rendered in typical kawaii style– sparkling wide eyes, colourful hair, and round, blush-tinted faces– and are meant to evoke moe, the Japanese pop-culture notion of feeling affection and protectiveness for fictional characters due to their cuteness and innocence.

A protégé of art world superstar Takashi Murakami, Mr. is often associated with the Superflat movement pioneered by his mentor. ‘Superflat’ is a conflation of high and low culture, usually comprising a flat painting style reminiscent of anime and manga. Alongside a roster of artists such as Yoshitomo Nara and Aya Takano, Mr. has played an important part in the elevation of Japanese pop culture to high art. Though his work is often compared with that of his mentor and his contemporaries, Mr.’s style is unique in its explicit referencing of anime aesthetics. His oeuvre pays homage to both otaku media and Japan’s youth culture, as epitomized by the current work.

#18. Christina Quarles

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,600,000 – 2,600,000
HKD 4,064,000 / USD 517,714

Christina Quarles – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 2 March 2023 | Phillips

Intertwined with fluidity, rhythm and poise, the bodies in Christina Quarles’s figures are often enclosed within graphical space, through a windowpane or across patterned tabletops. The torsos, faces and limbs of her entangled protagonists emerge from a patchwork of colour, pattern, and perspectives, giving us charged compositions that create an almost physical tension with the viewer.

Quarles’s works feature abstract, line-drawn, and fragmented bodies that aim to visually represent the complexities of how we all inhabit multiple identities, selves, and forms. Informed by her own identity as a mixed-race, queer woman, Quarles investigates the universal experience of being in a body, as well as how race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities. First unveiled at a group exhibition Abstract/Not Abstract organized by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch in 2017, then subsequently exhibited at the Berkley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in 2018, Our Eyes Our Open/Are Eyes Are Open presents bodies in a state of flux or transformation – forms are ambiguous and fluid, melting and morphing into each other.

#19. Andy Warhol

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 3,810,000 / USD 485,357

Andy Warhol – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 27 March 2023 | Phillips

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
HKD 3,302,000 / USD 420,642

Takashi Murakami – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 30 March 2023 | Phillips

A master cultural synthesizer of our time, Takashi Murakami was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential icons. Celebrated as multi-hyphenate icons and leaders of contemporary consumer culture, Murakami uses pop culture as a springboard to transform contemporary art, attracting new audiences and building a stronger bridge between art and the general public, fashion, and subculture. Known for blurring the lines between high art and popular visual culture, and for challenging the divide between artistic practice and commercial enterprise, Murakami’s colorful sculptures and paintings, such as Cherries, belie the sharp, subversive intelligence of their creator.

With its irresistible charm and a sly provocativeness, Cherries shows Murakami to be an artist skilled at navigating the realm of the surreal. The traditionally sexual connotations of cherry fruit are undermined by the disarming, candy-colored smiles of Murakami’s Cherries, offering a joyfully surreal encounter for viewers. In the midst of his deep dive into otaku culture during the mid-1990s, Murakami realized the greater relatable appeal and potential of kawaii (cuteness), and thus re-oriented his art from confrontation to cuteness. He created a strange, imaginary world of iconic characters including Mr. DOB, Kaikai, Kiki and enchanted mushrooms, eyes, and flowers.

Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 800,000 / 1,200,000
HKD 2,413,000 / USD 307,392

Louise Bonnet – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 4 March 2023 | Phillips

 

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale: Hong Kong Auction March 2023 (phillips.com)

 

Total: 
HKD 121,561,860 / USD 15,485,785
# Lots: 182
# Lots sold: 166
Sell-Through Rate: 91%

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# Lots sold above Estimates: 54 (29%)
# Lots sold within Estimates: 87 (47%)
# Lots sold below Estimates: 25 (13%)
# Lots unsold: 16 (8%)

 

#1. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 3,500,000 – 5,500,000
HKD 4,445,000 / USD 566,249

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contemp… Lot 135 March 2023 | Phillips

YAYOI KUSAMA
Pumpkin, 1991
Acrylic on canvas
15.8 x 22.7 cm (6 1/4 x 8 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 1991 “Pumpkin” [in Kanji]’ on the reverse

The present bicoloured red and black piece, painted in 1991, represents a short, plump and chubby pumpkin, whose ribs are covered in Kusama’s signature polka-dots. The peduncle stands on top of the pumpkin’s ribs, darker than the rest of the fruit, thick and straight. The background consists of a repetitive pattern of angular red lines whose intersection forms an irregular and chaotic reticle of triangles, a unique and hypnotic version of Kusama’s Infinity Nets iconic design.

#2. Matthew Wong

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 3,810,000 / USD 485,357

Matthew Wong – 20th Century & Contemp… Lot 114 March 2023 | Phillips

Fresh to the market, The Painter captivates with a symphony of texture and rich, warm colour, conjuring a dreamlike landscape of dense rocks, curling brambles and trees. A red sky ablaze with the fire of a setting sun bursts out from a gap in the terrain toward the midpoint of the composition, through jagged framing that mimics the form of a crown. Pouring out from beneath this window is a dappled yellow and green road, which cascades out like oozing honey or hot lava toward the lower right corner, where the titular painter stands. As twilight approaches, the solitary figure raises their paintbrush to delicate details of a brown flower and sun, indicating this is the composition they are working on.

#3. Gerhard Richter

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
HKD 3,556,000 / USD 452,999

Gerhard Richter – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 125 March 2023 | Phillips

Grün-Blau-Rot, painted in 1993, is part of a prolific series of 105 works on canvas in the same format, all revolving around the endless chromatic and visual variations which can be obtained by mixing three colours – green, blue and red – with a squeegee. In the present piece, made of voluptuous, hazy, melting lines, the colours smoothly blend into each other, beautifully expanding across the canvas as a result of the soft pressure and levelling action applied by the blade.

#4. Scott Kahn

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
HKD 3,048,000 / USD 388,285

Scott Kahn – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 113 March 2023 | Phillips

 

 

 

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 March 2023
Estimated: HKD 400,000 – 600,000
HKD 889,000/ USD 113,250

Scott Kahn – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 115 March 2023 | Phillips

 

2. Sotheby’s

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50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction
Hong-Kong, 5 April 2023

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50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

# Lots: 47 Lots
Low Estimate: HKD 609,900,000
High Estimate: HKD 895,400,000

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Total Revenues:
HKD 670,791,200 / USD 85,452,197
# Lots withdrawn: 4
# Lots sold: 41
Sell-Through Rate: 95%
Top Lot:
HKD 100,555,000 / USD 12,809,717

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Above Estimates: 18 Lots (42%)
Within Estimates: 22 Lots (51%)
Below Estimates: 1 Lot (2%)
Unsold: 2 Lots (5%)

 

#1. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 80,000,000 – 120,000,000
HKD 100,555,000 / USD 12,809,717

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | In the Milky Lake 乳白色湖中 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
In the Milky Lake, 2012
Acrylic on canvas
197×194 cm (77 1/2 x 76 3/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2012 on the stretcher and signed and dated 2012 on the reverse

Immediately captivating and sumptuous in scale, In the Milky Lake is a monumental example of Yoshitomo Nara’s mature artistic output. Featuring the most recognizable Nara heroine rendered in meticulous detail, the little girl in a green dress emerges from a pearlescent neutral background, her feet submerged in a rippling puddle. A major motif in the artist’s work and after which Nara named his first major solo exhibition in 1995, In the Deepest Puddle, In the Milky Lake traces an overarching thread in the artist’s practise. Using sensitive brushwork and delicate palette, Nara paints his protagonist with orange hair standing serenely in the middle of a milky lake, arms behind her back and a knowing look written on her face. Beautifully detailed through meticulous layering of pigment, the eyes of this work are the soul of the painting and articulate the artist’s move away from the early mischievous stare of his figures to his later ethereal dreamy gaze. Impressive in size and beguiling in its visual power, it is the first time that the enigmatic In the Milky Lake has been offered at auction.

YOSHITOMO NARA, TOBIU, 2019, © YOSHITOMO NARA, PHOTO: RYOICHI KAWAJIRI © YOSHITOMO NARA

Speaking to the artist’s love of music, Nara’s puddle is partially inspired by the cover image of folk singer John Hiatt’s album Overcoats (1975), which shows the singer half-submerged in water wearing his overcoat. Found in some of Nara’s earliest work, the feet of the angel in Fallen Angels (1986) and the girl in Pandora’s Box (1990) are surrounded by concentric circles, with 1995’s In the Deepest Puddle II depicting a girl submerged against a milk-white background. From ancient times, humans have understood a deep reverence toward the transformational power of water as the source of life on earth. Baring a universality in ideology across different cultures, the milky water of Nara’s composition articulates the dialectic relationship between the interior and exterior worlds. Analogous for healing, rebirth and peace, the critic Midori Matsui finds “a mysterious evocation of a boundary” between natural and supernatural worlds in Nara’s paintings, suggesting that Nara’s girls “gaze back at this world from another world beyond it” (Midori Matsui, quoted in Shigemi Takahashi and Michael Lacoy Eds., Yoshitomo Nara: Shallow Puddles, Tokyo 2015, p. 13). It was puddles that began to appear in the first large scale canvases Nara began painting after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, their milky white water absorbing innumerable tears after the devastating events of that year, conveying a universal emotional depth.

#2. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 40,000,000 – 60,000,000
HKD 62,638,000 / USD 7,979,465

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin (L) 南瓜（L） | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin (L), 2014
Bronze
241 x 235 x 235 cm (94 7/8 x 92 1/2 x 92 1/2 inches)
Incised Yayoi Kusama
This work is number 8 from an edition of 8, plus 2 artist’s proofs

Dazzling in its paradigmatic dot-covered pumpkin motif, Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin (L) (2014) is rare example of the artist’s highly coveted sculptural pumpkins. Beautifully materialized in bronze, the artist’s iconic striations of multi-sized polka dots meticulously encase the pumpkin from stem to base in an effusive and sophisticated pattern. Produced for the artist’s installation at the Victoria Miro Gallery in 2014, a significant year for Kusama whose work was the subject of three international museum exhibitions, this meticulously executed sculpture is the largest version of this series in bronze and the first of this monumental scale to be offered at auction. As the subject of Kusama’s first permanent public artwork in New York City, editions of the bronze Pumpkin (L) have been displayed in front of the Sky residency building in Manhattan, as well as the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park in Des Moines, Iowa.

ANOTHER EDITION OF THE PRESENT WORK INSTALLED IN THE JOHN AND MARY PAPPAJOHN SCULPTURE PARK, DES MOINES ART CENTER IN IOWA

Inspired by the matured pumpkin’s organic surface, Kusama’s stylized ribbons of multi-sized spots are most frequently depicted in yellow and black, making this iteration in bronze an exceptional example of the artist’s most fertile subject. Standing at over two metres tall, the exacting precision of Kusama’s skill can be felt throughout the biochromatic body of the sculpture, it’s monumental size and towering presence drawing attention to the undulating rows of meticulously placed dots. Going on to explore this form in a series of mirror-polished bronze pumpkins in 2016, the largest of these later works are equivalent to the Pumpkin (M) from the 2014 series, making the present work the largest of Kusama’s not colored bronze pumpkins.

 

#3. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 40,000,000 – 55,000,000
HKD 55,169,500 / USD 7,028,051

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | A-Pumpkin (BAGN8) | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
A-Pumpkin (BAGN8), 2011
Acrylic on canvas
162×130 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2011 on the reverse

Created in 2011 at the apex of the artist’s global rise to pre-eminence, A-Pumpkin (BAGN8) bursts with whimsical charm, an emblem of the artist’s epochal multi-faceted oeuvre. Vibrating with luminous energy, the anthropomorphic pumpkin presents the legendary artist at the height of her powers – a testament to decades of astonishing dedication to creation, technique, and a singular artistic vision. Executed in the artist’s signature black and yellow color palette and of large size the artist conducts her pumpkin compositions, A-Pumpkin (BAGN8) exudes a luminous quality, the bright yellow of the pumpkin’s surface cutting through the shadowy blackness of Kusama’s all-over scaled tessellations. An iconic iteration of another of the artist’s instantly recognizable motifs, the net pattern is so dexterously rendered that the canvas hums with rhythmic intensity.

Embodying an iconic, charismatic and highly personal motif, Kusama’s early pumpkins were painted in the traditional Nihonga style of which she was formerly trained. Enrolling at the at Kyoto City Senior High School of Art in the late 1940s, Kusama described that “During my time in Kyoto I diligently painted pumpkins, which in later years would become an important theme in my art” (Kusama Yayoi, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, London 2011, p. 75). Following an explosive rise to fame in New York in the 1960’s, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, beginning to combine her signature all-over Infinity Nets and obliterating polka-dot aesthetic with the motif of the ubiquitous gourd. During the 1980’s, Kusama explored colorful variations of her pumpkin-pattern in two-dimensional paintings, drawings and prints; the distinctive texture of the vegetable’s hardy skin growing ever more deft and accomplished, with the flowing lines of dots advancing and receding rhythmically in a fastidiously precise yet dynamically organic manner.

#4. Matthew Wong

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 40,000,000 – 60,000,000
HKD 52,297,000 / USD 6,662,213

Matthew Wong 王俊傑 | River at Dusk 黃昏的河流 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MATTHEW WONG (1984 – 2019)
River at Dusk, 2018
Oil on canvas
80×70 inches (203.2 x 177.8 cm)
Signed in Chinese, titled and dated 2018 on the reverse

An iridescent patchwork of color, River at Dusk (2018) is a superlative masterwork by Matthew Wong, in which an emerald green river meanders down the heart of the canvas, snaking its way through the artist’s signature chromatic lollipop trees. An archetypal example teeming with Wong’s lively brushwork and impasto dabs and dots that dance across the canvas, River at Dusk captures the quintessential essence of dusk, expressing the artist’s unparalleled ability of depicting a familiar, specific moment in time whether it be Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, dawn, dusk or night. Wong created this work the year before his passing, employing saturated pigments of orange, yellows, purples and greens to achieve this precise time and feeling of twilight. That same year, the artist examined the same scene but at night, employing a darker palette of blue hues to achieve River at Night and realizing a different, more melancholic mood. Towering two metres in height, River at Dusk envelops the viewer in Wong’s rich dreamscape of pointillist dots and impastoed dabs, deriving from memories and his mental database of artists and artworks that he encountered online, spanning centuries and genres.

Wong’s artistic language synthesizes endless artistic references in his own distinctive manner, articulating an enchantingly vulnerable, immersive and acutely alluring language rich in chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities. Wong’s unique vocabulary is characterized by intricate tactile surfaces, spirited abstracted strokes, ebulliently radiant palettes, and dramatic foreshortening that recall modernist spatial abstractions. Earnest, urgent, yet always sublimely graceful, the works are tinged with a melancholy that extends from the personal to the universal.

#5. Gerhard Richter

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 32,000,000 – 45,000,000
HKD 36,750,000 / USD 4,681,588

Gerhard Richter 格哈德・里希特 | Abstrakte Bilder 抽象畫 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Abstrakte Bilder, 1992
Oil on canvas, in 4 parts
Each: 200×70 cm (78 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches)
Overall: 200×280 cm (78 3/4 x 110 1/4 inches)
Each: signed, dated 1992 and numbered 760-1, 760-2, 760-3 and 760-4 on the reverse

An exceedingly rare and enigmatic four panelled painting from the height of Gerhard Richter’s abstract practice, Abstrakte Bilder stands over the viewer with immediate chromatic impact. Executed in 1992, a period of thrilling international and critical acclaim for the artist, Richter delivers a panorama of abstract colour across four expansive panels, allowing the viewer to experience the work in its entirety, as well as intimately within each plane. Offering a unique visual spectacle, each panel bares the representational characteristics which have come to define Richter’s practise; rich, layered marbling and vivid chromatic fusions that bloom to reveal recesses of carefully orchestrated colour. Vertical ribbons of deep, opulent blue cascade downwards like water, yet, certain gestural elements continue across all four panels, bringing each into dialogue with one another and imbuing Abstrakte Bilder with a sense of dynamism that runs throughout the composition.

#6. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 25,860,000 / USD 3,294,309

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | My Heart is Flying to the Universe 我心飛向宇宙 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
My Heart is Flying to the Universe, 2018
Mirrored box and LED lighting system
220x214x185 cm (86 5/8 x 84 1/4 x 72 7/8 inches)

In her Mirror Rooms from the mid-1960s onwards, Yayoi Kusama is able to achieve all-encompassing repetitions that are, for the first time, truly infinite. My Heart is Flying to the Universe (2018) is a magnificent, sophisticated example of Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, referencing her seminal early mirror installation in Peep Show or Endless Love Show in 1966. My Heart is Flying to the Universe is the first Mirror Room of this scale to be offered at auction in Asia and marks the second time that a Mirror Room of this size has ever come to auction, making it an incredibly rare, exciting work by the artist to be offered in Hong Kong. Towering over two metres in height, the present work allows viewers to peer into infinity and lose themselves in the vastness of the universe that Kusama creates using lights and mirrors. My Heart is Flying to the Universe visually immerses the viewer in a galaxy of shimmering LED lights that twinkle in a rhythmic pattern, creating a phenomenological experience that inspires a sense of boundlessness.

#8. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 24,045,000 / USD 3,063,096

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Infinity Nets (QNTBH) 無限之網（QNTBH） | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Infinity Nets (QNTBH), 2006
Acrylic on canvas
161.9 x 130.2 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled in English and Japanese and dated 2006 on the reverse

Spectacular for its rhythmic undulations of small, thickly painted loops, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) created in 2006 is a testament to Yayoi Kusama’s most celebrated corpus of paintings. Captivating in its level of detail and the artist’s mastery of spatial abstraction, the present work consists of an endless maze of oscillating, kaleidoscopic white lines atop a luminous grey-blue background. Filling up our entire field of vision, the apparent uniformity of the over-a-metre net belies minute differences in the size of the individual loops and the quantity of paint utilized in every stroke: each tiny loop is painted by hand, creating a subtle yet pronounced change in effect throughout the composition. Continuing the legacy of Kusama’s most iconic series that the artist first exhibited in New York in 1959, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) employs the same repetitive and hypnotic mark-making that has stood as the most enduring iteration of her indelible aesthetic. Created almost 50 years after she began this expansive series, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) closely corresponds with these very first examples owing to its wonderful texture and exclusively white-monochromicity.

Full of reflected light and the artist’s labyrinthine web of mesmeric pigment loops, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) exudes an irrepressible and hypnotically irresistible force. Drawing the viewer towards the shimmering spaces contained within the tightly woven blanket of paint, the present work’s almost topographical surface meanders across the extent of the picture plane, mirroring the painterly process by which it was created. Kusama’s innumerable brushstrokes pile onto one another, culminating in some parts of the canvas in mounds of expressive impasto, and solidifying into radiating planes of white pigment in others. Each dab of paint is laid with a painstaking devotion to the act of mark-making, consuming the canvas in a field of texture.

#9. George Condo

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 14,000,000 – 25,000,000
HKD 22,230,000 / USD 2,831,883

George Condo 喬治 · 康多 | Inside the West Wing 西翼內部 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GEORGE CONDO (b. 1957)
Inside the West Wing, 2017
Oil and graphite on linen
78×92 inches (198.1 x 233.7 cm)
Signed and dated 2017

Presenting an enigmatic tableau of decadence and betrayal, the sinewy mass of Inside the West Wing from 2017 dances with George Condo’s frenetic, textural energy. Drawing and painting a dizzying assemblage of forms and figures that collide and fragment, the viewer catches glimpses of recognisable human features; an arm, teeth, curvaceous hips and legs, delicate hands which emerge from the captivating chaos only to be subsumed again beneath the mass of quivering bodies. Telling a story of debauchery, the present work presents fragile hands holding a bottle, searching, solitary eyes and Condo’s characteristic open-mouthed and toothy whispering grins. Capturing many different states within one compositional frame, Inside the West Wing feels almost like a visual puzzle, the moment one picks out a form, it slips back into the delirium of the whole. A captivating large-scale composition in acrylic and graphite on linen, the rich textures of Inside the West Wing embody Condo’s knife-edge dance between the enticing and the grotesque, sanctifying his place as one of the leading painters of his generation.

PABLO PICASSO, LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON, 1907 © 2023 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Exhibited as part of Condo’s first solo exhibition with Almine Rech Gallery in Paris in 2017, Inside the West Wing depicts a network of deceptive activities and dangerous liaisons. This exhibition’s title of “Life is Worth Living” was taken from an old note Condo once sent to his long-time friend Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, a sentiment felt in Condo’s carnivalesque compositions. Exploring the reactionary quality of great art like Picasso’s Guernica and Andy Warhol’s Race Riot, Condo’s work from this exhibition (Collusion, The Trial, The Investigation, along with the present work) are a response to the political atmosphere of our contemporary world. Not just a political caricature, Inside the West Wing is Shakespearean in its theatrical portrayal of deception and misinformation at the heart of political life. Seeing art as the only constant in an ever-shifting landscape, Condo declared “art is the truth and everything else is a lie” (the artist, quoted in “Interview: GEORGE CONDO – Life is Worth Living”, Our Choices Art, online).

Exemplifying the artist’s use of drawing and painting together in a structurally destructive method of working, Inside the West Wing is a passionately charged example of Condo’s uniquely disconcerting techniques and exploration of the human psyche. Carrying the Cubistic quality of Picasso’s work of the 1930s applied to psychology more interpersonal rather than singular, Condo expands his compositions from an initial point, whether it be a face a limb or an expression, before moving outwards in large, gestural swathes of inky-black colour. There’s a performative element to Condo’s practice, his expressive moments at points slow, before speeding up to reach their crescendo. The particularly animate cluster of shapes in the upper right-hand corner explode outwards into the billowing and luscious curves of other bodies. There is an innate tempo and rhythmic quality to Condo’s work, a musicality informed by his study of Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts. Translating the composition of music onto the canvas, Condo adopts the approach of a composer, with periods of thrilling hyper-activity within the picture frame being expertly balanced by moments of quiet.

#10. Liu Ye

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 12,000,000 – 18,000,000
HKD 22,230,000 / USD 2,831,883

Liu Ye 劉野 | A View of My Teacher’s Back 背影 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

LIU YE (b. 1964)
A View of My Teacher’s Back, 2004
Acrylic on canvas
80×65 cm (31 1/2 x 25 5/8 inches)
Signed in Pinyin and Chinese and dated 04

Famed for his whimsical paintings that often feature young girls in ambiguous settings, A View of My Teacher’s Back is a masterwork of Liu Ye’s deeply enchanting and hypnotic oeuvre. Along with My Teacher II/ Yellow (2001), a piece held at the momentous Sigg Collection at M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the present work hails from the artist’s series of teacher paintings. Unlike the (thoroughly) more eroticized figure of My Teacher II/ Yellow however, A View of My Teacher’s Back is an enigmatic work shrouded in tantalizing fantasy, offering a unique glimpse into the perceptions of beauty and femininity that defines Liu Ye’s acclaimed oeuvre. Executed in 2004, the present piece is a rare work and the only example from the series to feature a woman with her back to the viewer, Liu Ye’s teacher now turned from us, brandishing her whip behind her back.

#11. Takashi Murakami

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 18,000,000 – 28,000,000
HKD 22,230,000 / USD 2,831,883

Takashi Murakami 村上隆 | Homage To Francis Bacon (Three Studies of Lucian Freud) 向弗朗西斯·培根致敬（盧西安・弗洛伊德習作三幅） | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

TAKASHI MURAKAMI (b. 1962)
Homage To Francis Bacon (Three Studies of Lucian Freud), 2017
Acrylic, gold leaf and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum, in 3 parts
Each: 197.8 x 147.5 cm (77 7/8 x 58 1/8 inches)
Overall: 197.8 x 442.5 cm (77 7/8 x 174 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2017 on the overlap of the second panel

Takashi Murakami’s best work stages an intricate negotiation between past and present, orient and occident, high culture and mass consumerism. He now irrefutably stands as one of the most internationally acclaimed artists of the Twenty-First Century and Homage To Francis Bacon (Three Studies of Lucian Freud) perfectly exemplifies his eclectic oeuvre. Across the entirety of this visually dense and chromatically brilliant painting, Murakami combines artistic precedents so that the panel takes as much influence from the monolith of western art, Francis Bacon, as it does from the ancient Eastern practice of decorative flower painting and the formidable landscape paintings of Edo-period masters. Known for his “Superflat” theory of art that emphasizes the flatness of Japanese visual culture, Murakami has risen to global prominence for his diverse oeuvre that draws upon elements from pop culture, history and fine art. An avid admirer of Irish-born British figurative painter, Francis Bacon, Murakami first paid tribute to the mid-twentieth century master in 2003. Since then, he has created multiple iterations of Bacon’s compositions, strikingly reappropriating one of the 20^th century’s most admired compositions in the present work; Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud from 1969.

A golden masterpiece, Murakami further developed Bacon’s palette in his treatment of the background. In line with other works from Murakami’s oeuvre, the present work stands as a self-conscious integration of the pre-modern era of Japanese arts and crafts. In its incorporation of metallic leaf as a decorative ground for his portrait, the present work is directly related to such examples as the famous eighteenth-century screen by Kôrin Ogata. Echoing the repetition of Ogata’s painted iris motif composed against a ground of gold leaf across several highly lacquered panels, Murakami’s integration of an expertly applied and flawless gold ground substantiates the fundamentally classical arts and crafts aspect of the artist’s ‘Superflat’ manifesto. As seen in Homage To Francis Bacon (Three Studies of Lucian Freud), metamorphosis is ever apparent in Murakami’s work. In his reformulation of Bacon’s original triptych portrait, Murakami reconfigures his predecessor’s iconic composition in the guise of his own unique artistic vision. At each layer of the painting, both physically and psychologically, an ongoing process of transfiguration occurs. Thus, Homage To Francis Bacon (Three Studies of Lucian Freud) surpasses its surface of tribute and imitation, ultimately using comparison and amalgamation to question and explore complex Japanese identity politics in the unsettled post-war world.

#12. Cecily Brown

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 18,000,000 – 25,000,000
HKD 21,625,000 / USD 2,831,883

Cecily Brown 塞西麗・布朗 | Where They Are Now 他們現在在哪裡 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Where They Are Now, 2013
Oil on linen
67×83 inches (170.2 x 210.8 cm)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse

A cacophony of sumptuous color and movement, Where They Are Now (2013) is an exquisite example of Cecily Brown’s celebratory exploration of the possibilities of oil paint in the depiction of the interaction between the human form and its environment. Utterly redolent of the artist’s uniquely tactile oeuvre, Where They Are Now presents a tableau of loose gestural brushwork that coalesces into jostling figures, existing in the tantalizing intersection between abstraction and figuration. Exploring the tradition of the nude ensemble in painting, Where They Are Now dissolves the boundaries between the sensual figures and the physical medium through which these subjects are expressed. Paint is pressed, smudged and squeezed into corporal pigment on the canvas, a physical intimacy that can be felt in every stroke.

Pop culture plays an important part in the work of Cecily Brown, the artist embarking on an entire series based on the record sleeve of The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s iconic 1968 album, Electric Ladyland. Exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2013 alongside other works in this series, Where They Are Now is a standout example. At once reminiscent of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Le Bain turc (1862) and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), this painting transforms the nude women of David Montgomery’s iconic 1960s photograph into a sea of fleshy painterly marks. Of the cover art, Brown explains “Formally, I was drawn to it,” citing the arrangement of the women “like a pile of body parts…I certainly didn’t want to paint a room full of groupies.” (the artist, quoted in Rachel Small, “Cecily Brown Shows Her Women Uptown”, Interview Magazine, 7 May 2013). Recognisable fragments of art historical references can be felt throughout the present composition; Brown’s palette passes swiftly through the palettes of other artists. Flitting between the Baroque debauchery of Peter Paul Rubens and the fleshy brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning, Brown’s images recall the artist’s famous quip that flesh was the reason oil paint was invented. Situating herself at the centre of this canonical conflict, Brown’s painterly language is one of ambiguity.

#13. Adrian Ghenie

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 19,810,000 / USD 2,523,599

Adrian Ghenie 亞德里安・格尼 | Figure on the Beach 沙灘上的身影 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ADRIAN GHENIE (b. 1977)
Figure on the Beach, 2019
Oil on canvas
230×260 cm (90 1/2 x 102 3/8 inches)

Monumental in scale and cinematic in scope, Adrian Ghenie’s Figure on the Beach (2019) is a masterpiece of painterly and psychological intensity. A self-portrait of the artist in a vibrant blue baseball hat, Figure on the Beach presents an enigmatic tableau that blurs the boundary between the real and the imagined, Ghenie’s handling of paint creates a broody, dreamlike haze across the composition. Ghenie’s meteoric rise to fame has seen the artist become one of the leading painters of his generation, his work marked by a combination of blurred, rough textures and chiaroscuro tones which are at times shapeless, but elsewhere sharply outlined with the artist’s almost photograph definition. Depicting a mass of vulnerable limbs against a tempestuous blue sea and sky, Figure on the Beach shares the turbulent existential vision of the likes of Rembrandt, Picasso and Bacon in both texture and spirit. Taking inspiration from Picasso’s seminal On the Beach (La baignade) from 1937, Ghenie similarly appropriates the subject matter of beaches and bathers to unite individual experience with traditional figuration to create this revelational work. Aiming at a sensual, intuitive perception of figuration, Ghenie’s combining of chaos and order affects the viewer on a physiological and visceral level.

#14. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 14,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 18,116,000 / USD 2,307,800

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | Sprout in Hands 手中芽苗 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
Sprout in Hands, 2011
Acrylic on wood
135.5 x 82 x 2.8 cm (53 3/8 x 32 1/4 x 1 1/8 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese and dated 2011 on the reverse

Naive, precocious, sweet, wicked, complicated, and concerned, these are but a few of the words that can be used to describe the wide-eyes girls of Yoshitomo Nara’s compositions. In touch with something elemental, these figures possess an extensive breadth of expression that remind us of long-forgotten feelings, of our intuitive wisdom. A sensitive, thought-provoking work, Sprout in Hands by Yoshitomo Nara depicts two of the artist’s most famous motifs – the large-headed girl and the two-leaf sprout. A painterly response to the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011, Sprout in Hands presents the little child as a messenger of peace that encapsulates the spirit of Nara’s undeniable oeuvre. Symbolizing the possibility of reconstruction and transformation, the wood panel of the present work measures over a meter high, its physicality heightening the gravity of Nara’s poignant message of hope.

Jonas Wood

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 12,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 14,365,000 / USD 1,829,960

Jonas Wood 喬納斯・伍德 | Calais Drive 2 加來大道 2 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JONAS WOOD (b. 1977)
Calais Drive 2, 2012
Oil and acrylic on canvas
100×72 inches (254×183 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2012 on the reverse

Working from a digital archive of collected images which he looks through often, Jonas Wood begins tracing, drawing, and arranging the composition for each of his paintings, with Calais Drive 2 from 2012 being a prime example of the artist’s unique visual vernacular, as demonstrated in the Wood’s used of vibrant color pallet and the psychological complexity of his work.

Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 12,429,000 / USD 1,583,332

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Soul 魂 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Soul, 2013
Acrylic on canvas
194×194 cm (76 3/8 x 76 3/8 inches)
Signed, titled in English and Japanese and dated 2013 on the reverse

An explosion of visceral color, Soul (2013) is a brilliant example of Kusama’s unique style from the celebrated My Eternal Soul series of paintings. The present work is a rarity for the series, including not one but two of Kusama’s archetypal motifs within one composition; a meticulously rendered red Infinity Nets and the artist’s ubiquitous yellow and black colors of her pumpkin paintings and sculptures. The present work’s title pays homage to Kusama’s vision, imbuing the canvas with a spiritual and ontological connection with the artist herself and the joyful endeavor of the series.

Kusama began her widely celebrated body of work, My Eternal Soul, in 2009, in which she explored past themes and formal innovations in an exuberant color palette. Bursting with an array of imagery and colours, Kusama’s acrylic paintings are produced by working on a flat, horizontal surface, moving around the border of the canvas to complete her compositions. She has become known for her trademark motifs of dots, nets and pumpkins and in the late 1940s began to experiment with Nihonga, a Japanese style of painting that emphasizes forms and subjects which are unique to native Japanese art. In Soul, Kusama has applied a base web of mesmeric pigment loops in a hypnotic red hue, a mesmerising example of her signature net paintings which were first exhibited in the late 1950s. The clusters black shapes of connective tissue overlain with yellow circles recall Kusama’s fantastical pumpkins, as if seen from above.

Featuring the emblematic dot pattern seen throughout the artist’s oeuvre, these yellow and black elements evoke memories of her family’s seed field where sketching in the open air and watching the cycle of growth and harvest she developed a love of drawing and a deeply felt connection to the Japanese pumpkin. In Soul, it is these black and yellow shapes that immediately captures the attention of the viewer, floating in the infinite space of Kusama’s red net.

Takashi Murakami

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 7,000,000 – 9,400,000
HKD 10,735,000 / USD 1,367,533

Takashi Murakami 村上隆 | I’ve been to the Top of the Hill 我登過山峰 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

TAKASHI MURAKAMI (b. 1962)
I’ve been to the Top of the Hill, 2014
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum frame
199×153 cm (78 3/8 x 60 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2014 on the overlap

Smiling flowers represent the very hallmark and signature motif of Takashi Murakami’s extraordinary and ambitious artistic enterprise. I’ve Been to the Top of the Hill (2014) is a meticulously rendered example of the artist’s characteristic style: each of the densely layered smiling flowers are hand painted with immaculate precision to deliver a sense of digital-like perfection. Dominated by a rich array of red and pink hues punctuated by a glowing mixture of spectral shades and neon highlights, the present work is immediately impactful and a visually stunning paradigm of the multi-layered yet obsessively flat production of Takashi Murakami. These smiling flowers are usually depicted taking up the entirety of Murakami’s compositions, yet within the present work, colourful, tightly layered skulls construct a macabre millefiori amongst the saccharine florae. In including these sculls, Murakami examines the theme of mortality that has been explored throughout the art historical canon, from seventeenth century Dutch vanitas paintings to Andy Warhol’s famed 1976 series of silkscreened Skulls. Insidiously camouflaged within the profusion of kitsch smiling flower faces, these deathly skulls comingle with jubilant yet inherently unsettling effects.

Javier Calleja

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 6,096,000 / USD 776,570

Javier Calleja 哈維爾・卡勒加 | Everything Comes 一切都來了 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JAVIER CALLEJA (b. 1978)
Everything Comes, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
161.9 x 129.9 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches)
Signed on the bottom turnover edge; titled on the overlap

Executed in 2020, Everything Comes is a vivid example of Javier Calleja’s signature portraits depicting wide-eyes boys with emphatic phrases emblazoned on their t-shirts. His instantly recognizable iconography, bright, childlike colors and intriguing slogans command the viewer’s attention, with his ostensible saccharine subjects often baring a satirical edge. Calleja’s work exemplifies overly simplified figuration, evoking a striking, heart-warming innocence in Everything Comes, capturing a moment of childhood wonder. With his mouth shaped into an uncertain smile, this child-like figure is depicted with a bright flash of red hair, flushed pink checks and blazing blue eyes. As a recurring subject-matter throughout art history, children portraiture is a symbolic motif for carefree joy and the unbound curiosity associated with childhood.

Looking directly at the viewer, their attentive gaze and watery, glassy eyes are characteristic of the artist’s portraiture. These emphatic eyes are in contrast with the artist’s muted treatment of the other compositional elements; Calleja’s sensitive use of pure yellow on the T-shirt juxtaposing with the with the sometimes mischievous, sometimes innocent looks in the childlike figure’s three-dimensional eyes.

Drawing on René Magritte’s exploration into the broader philosophical capacities of specific languages within art, the laconic phrases of Calleja’s works come across as form of indirect speech. Calleja’s ostensibly simple aesthetic and subject matter lends itself to confronting the viewer with an element of surprise, often delivering profound and thought-provoking messages frequently dismissed as clichéd. The childlike figure is accompanied by such a statement clearly written in red paint across their chest: Everything Comes. Calleja creates works that can be universally understood and admired, and many critics and collectors have compared the artist to the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara in their unique ability to capture the transient naïveté of a child. Calleja has seen immense success and his work has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, including most recently at the K11 Musea in Hong Kong (Little Maurizio, 2021) which explored Calleja’s admiration for Maurizio Cattelan’s celebrated irony and social criticism. Calleja’s paintings now remain in the permanent collections of CAC Málaga, Malaga, Granada University Long Museum, Granada, and X Museum, Shanghai, among others.

Stanley Whitney

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
HKD 4,826,000 / USD 614,785

Stanley Whitney 史丹利・惠特尼 | Nigerian Smile 尼日利亞式微笑 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

STANLEY WHITNEY (b. 1946)
Nigerian Smile, 2012
Oil on linen
72×72 inches (183×183 cm)

Belonging to Stanley Whitney’s celebrated color grid series in which the artist explores both the visual and conceptual capabilities of color, Nigerian Smile is a dynamic and iconic example of the artist’s acclaimed practice. A rhythmic mash-up of reds, blues, oranges, and greens, the present work embodies Whitney’s career-long commitment to his own personal tenants of abstraction, guided by a longstanding process which the artist has developed over the course of the last three decades. Describing these works that appear to have a life of their own.

“I don’t have any colour theory. The colour is magic, and I want the work to be magic. I lay a colour down and that colour calls another colour, and then it’s a balancing act. You don’t want to have something dominate something else, and you want to have good transitions” 

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 3,200,000 – 4,500,000
HKD 4,064,000 / USD 517,714

Christina Quarles 克里斯蒂娜・夸爾斯 | It’s Only Night Twice a Day 僅於晚上，一日兩回 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

Jade Fadojutimi

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 2,200,000 – 3,200,000
HKD 3,810,000 / USD 485,357

Jadé Fadojutimi 賈黛・法多朱蒂米 | We All Have a Time Traveller’s Well 我們都有時間旅行者之井 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JADE FADOJUTIMI (b. 1993)
We All Have a Time Traveller’s Well, 2018
Oil on canvas
150×120 cm (59 x 47 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2018 on the reverse

Executed in 2019, We all have a Time Traveller’s Well is a rhapsodic example of Jadé Fadojutimi’s bold treatment of color and unique language of abstraction. Using layers of rhythmically applied paint in her exploration of identity and memory, Fadojutimi creates complex, immersive landscapes of brushstrokes, as epitomized by the present work. With a string of successful exhibitions, Fadojutimi’s career continues to flourish. In 2020, at 27, she became the youngest artist to enter the Tate collection, with Fadojutimi’s work being showcased at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as the Hepworth Wakefield, England this year.

The vibrational quality of Fadojutimi’s work is in full display in We all have a Time Traveller’s Well, in which rich, earthy shades of brown punctuate the soft glow of the artist’s layered shades of orange and yellow. Often thinning her oil pain with Liquin, a quick drying medium that allows her to move the paint with her brush freely and quickly across the surface of the canvas, Fadojutimi is able to give her compositions a sense of unbridled velocity. With its tenaciously curved scalloped lines, We all have a Time Traveller’s Well creates a view to another world that is both disparate and analogous to ours, communicating truth and emotion through her spontaneous aesthetic.

We all have a Time Traveller’s Well exhibits Fadojutimi’s exquisite technique, one highly resolved for an artist so young in her career. Yet the movement and chromatic splendour of the present work also evokes Fadojutimi’s innate obsession with Japanese culture and film. She is said to work late into the night in her studio in South London listening to soundtracks from Japanese anime films, video games, and Korean dramas, such as Ori and the Blind Forest, Your Lie in April and Journey. Her compositions pulsate with the energy and dynamism of such animations, her gestural abstraction and vibrant use of colour evoking a dream-like climax of cinematic drama. Emblematic of Fadojutimi’s highly intuitive visual practice, the present work embraces chance and serendipity through the artist’s exuberant, painterly abstraction.

Scott Kahn

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 2,000,000
HKD 2,794,000 / USD 355,928

Scott Kahn 斯科特 · 卡恩 | Queen’s Park 皇后公園 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

SCOTT KAHN (b. 1946)
Queen’s Park, 1998
oil on linen
30×36 inches (76.2 x 91.4 cm)
Signed and dated ’98 

Exuding a quiet vitality, Queen’s Park from 1998 is a masterful and enchanting example of Scott Kahn’s ingenious synthesis of hyper-realistic painting and surrealistic landscapes. Among the most renowned names in contemporary American art, Kahn has built a unique artistic and expressive language, his chimerical and autumnal compositions radiating a sense of tranquillity and calm which is instantly arresting. Striking with its rhythmic cadence of dense brushwork, stylistic precision and tonal vibrancy, Queen’s Park is an archetypal example of the remarkable, almost supernatural, universe which the artist has been consistently developing since the mid-1980s. The present work was exhibited in 2021 at Harper’s Chelsea 534 + Harper’s Apartment in New York as part of the most comprehensive presentation of Kahn’s oeuvre to date, providing the public a broad overview of his unique approach to combining naturalistic painting with surrealist flourishes.

At once ghostly and tranquil, Queen’s Park is a symphony of calming greens, blues and earthy tones in which Kahn explores the recurring themes of rest and relaxation. Executed with fastidious precision – every ripple in the silent pool, every blade of grass, every sweeping cloud in the sky is rendered in sensuous detail – Queen’s Park expertly blends the interior world of the imagination with the natural landscape. The crisp greens of the trees and the rich yellow-green of the rolling hills are articulated with staccato-like brushstrokes by Kahn, who was deeply influenced by the compositions of Vincent van Gogh and the ingenious aesthetic of René Magritte. Unlike his contemporaries from the New York school who were practitioners of Abstract Expressionism, Kahn’s compositions investigate magical realism following the footsteps of the Modernists. Carefully constructed in a flattened perspective, Queen’s Park expresses a subtle sentiment of solitude and tranquillity, capturing intangible and fleeting emotions.

 

Contemporary Day Auction
Hong-Kong, 6 April 2023

Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

Total Revenues:
HKD 147,494,700 / USD 18,789,373
# Lots: 112
# Lots sold: 90
Sell-Through Rate: 80%
———-

Above Estimates: 29 Lots (26%)
Within Estimates: 51 Lots (46%)
Below Estimates: 10 Lots (9%)
Unsold: 22 Lots (20%)

 

#1. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 17,390,000 / USD 2,215,315

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Bird 鳥 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Bird, 1989
Acrylic on canvas
38.3 x 46 cm (15 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches)
Signed in English, titled in Japanese and dated 1989 on the reverse

Illuminated in pure shades of white and yellow, the gently balanced bird of the work’s title imbues the present work with an enigmatic quality, relating the piece with the wider world outside of the confines of the canvas. How long the bird will stay, we cannot know, but for now one can marvel at Kusama’s bold evocation of universal infinity.

#2. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 4,200,000 – 6,000,000
HKD 11,945,000 / USD 1,521,675

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | Rock You | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
Rock You, 2006
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
109.5 x 71.5 cm (43 1/8 x 28 1/8 inches)

The bold illustration of Japanese painter Yoshitomo Nara’s iconic young rebels and boundary-pushing text, Rock You from 2006 is an audacious illustration of the power that comes with marching to your own beat. Embodying Nara’s characteristic large-headed girls with emphatically large eyes and ambiguous emotional depths, Rock You brings together a conglomeration of the artist’s distinctive influences; rock and punk music, children’s books, traditional Japanese figurative works and the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Much of the artist’s oeuvre depicts children in various emotional states to explore themes of isolation, rebellion and spirituality. Extensively exhibited, the mischievous, empathetic and whimsical charm of Rock You weaves together Nara’s distinctive humor and unconventional portraiture into a powerfully evocative work, one which is a consummate example of the artist’s celebrated works on paper.

#3. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 9,000,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 11,340,000 / USD 1,444,604

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | 1,2,3… | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
1,2,3…, 2006
Acrylic on wood board
115×172 cm (45 1/4 x 67 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2006 on the reverse

To talk about Yoshitomo Nara, one cannot dismiss his passion for rock music. Since his youth in the late 1970s, Nara has been tremendously influenced by the essence of punk culture and underground rock music; they have not only contributed to his particular frame of mind growing up, but also seeped deeply into the backbones of his distinctive artistic practice. Beneath the adorable presence of children and animals is a rebellious attitude that sets him apart from the group of Neo Pop artists from the 1990s in Japan, making him one of the most popular Japanese contemporary artists of all time. Extensively exhibited, the large scale 1,2,3… (2006) is an exceptional example of Yoshitomo Nara’s celebrated billboard paintings and marks the first instance of what has become one of the artist’s most recognizable motifs; the little drummer girl. The work is not only the perfect testament to Nara’s love for rock music, but more importantly, it also represents a key stage within the artist’s creative career after the millennium, when he began to collaborate with architecture and design collective graf on creating a series of small huts within exhibition spaces, exploring beyond both the surface of canvas and small-scale drawings.

Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 2,200,000 – 3,200,000
HKD 6,985,000 / USD 889,820

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin 南瓜 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin, 1997
Acrylic on canvas
22 x 27.3 cm (8 5/8 x 10 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 1997 on the reverse

Executed in the artist’s signature black and yellow color palette, Pumpkin exudes a luminous quality, the bright yellow cutting through the shadowy blackness. Pulsating with the fervency of Kusama’s practise, the composition radiates with carefully applied dots which run down the centre of the bulbous pumpkin’s skin, the largest dots appearing at the most pronounced points of the vegetable as smaller dots disappear into its creases. Each glisteningly black circle shines and vibrates, with each meticulously crafted row of striated dots slithering fluidly down the body of the pumpkin. Recalling the artist’s large Infinity Room installations, the pattern that repeats on the surface of the pumpkin allows Kusama to create the appearance of depth whilst only utilizing two colors.

Javier Calleja

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
HKD 4,699,000 / USD 598,606

Javier Calleja 哈維爾・卡勒加 | Right Direction 對的方向 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JAVIER CALLEJA (b. 1978)
Right Direction, 2019
Acrylic on canvas
161.4 x 130 cm (63 1/2 x 51 1/8 inches)

Executed in 2019, Right Direction is a signature depiction of Javier Calleja’s portraits of wide-eyed and adorable boys with emphatic phrases emblazoned on their t-shirts. Imbued with ingenuity and a keen sense of humour, the present work was created following a string of successes for the artist, having had his first solo exhibition in Asia the year prior at the Aisho/Nanzuka Gallery in Hong Kong, with Right Direction having been featured at Calleja’s solo exhibition at Dio Horia Gallery in Athens in 2019. Often baring a satirical edge, Right Direction exemplifies overly simplified figuration, the expansive passages of the figure’s hair, t-shirt and over-sized eyes transforming into vibrant, abstract shapes before the viewer’s eyes. On the surface of the present work, a bleach blond haired boy with enlarged, bright blue eyes looks off to the right to the space beyond the canvas, a cheeky expression on his child-like face. The figure’s brown t-shirt is in soothing contrast against the warm neutral tone of the background, recalling the colour field painting of Mark Rothko. The present painting is titled after the slogan scrawled across the boy’s t-shirt, “Right Direction”. Capturing a moment of childhood wonder, this figure’s uncertain smile and glassy, emphatic eyes are simultaneously mischievous and innocent.

Anna Weyant

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 600,000 – 950,000
HKD 952,500 / USD 121,339

Anna Weyant 安娜・維揚特 | Charlotte 夏洛特 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANNA WEYANT (b. 1995)
Charlotte, 2019
Oil on panel
18×18 inches (45.7 x 45.7 cm)
Signed and dated 2019 on the reverse

Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
HKD 3,429,000 / USD 436,821

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Infinity Nets (ZYA) 無限網 (ZYA) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Infinity Nets (ZYA), 1999
Acrylic on canvas
45.5 x 38.4 cm (17 7/8 x 15 1/8 inches)
Signed in English, titled in English and Japanese, and dated 1999 on the reverse

Adrian Ghenie

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 2,200,000 – 3,200,000
HKD 2,794,000 / USD 355,928

Adrian Ghenie 亞德里安・格尼 | Pie Fight (Study) 餡餅大戰（習作） | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ADRIAN GHENIE (b. 1977)
Pie Fight (Study), 2012
Oil on canvas
48.3 x 62.2 cm (19 x 24 1/2 inches)
Signed and dated 2012 on the reverse