Table of Content

PART I: SUMMARY

1. Timeline
2. Auction Statistics
3. Top Lots

PART II: AUCTION RESULTS

4. Christie’s
5. Phillips
6. Sotheby’s

PART III: FOCUS

7. Focus: Ultra-Contemporary
1. Nicolas Party
2. Matthew Wong
3. Lucy Bull
4. Jade Fadojutimi
5. Other Artists

8. Focus: Contemporary
1.Keith Haring
2. Yoshitomo Nara
3. Jean-Michel Basquiat

9. Focus: Post-War
1.Yayoi Kusama
2. Andy Warhol

PART I: SUMMARY

Timeline

20th Century Evening Sale
28 May 2024

20th Century Evening Sale (christies.com)

21st Century Evening Sale
28 May 2024

21st Century Evening Sale (christies.com)

20th Century Day Sale
29 May 2024

20th Century Day Sale (christies.com)

21st Century Day Sale
29 May 2024

21st Century Day Sale (christies.com)

Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale
31 May 2024

Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale: Hong Kong Auction May 2024 (phillips.com)

Modern and Contemporary Art Day Sale
1 June 2024

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale: Hong Kong Auction June 2024 (phillips.com)

The Now Evening Auction
5 April 2024

The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction
5 April 2024

Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

Auction Statistics

Top Lots

PART II: AUCTION RESULTS

Christie’s: 2oth Century Evening Sale

20th Century Evening Sale (christies.com)

Christie’s: 21st Century Evening Sale

Total
HKD 338,364,200 / USD 43,318,935
37 sold Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 78.7%

21st Century Evening Sale (christies.com)

50 Lots
3 Lots Withdrawn
10 Lots Passed
37 Lots Sold
Sell-Through Rate: 78.7%

Top Lot:
HKD 66,625,000 / USD 8,259,638
9 Lots sold for over USD 1 million
HKD 289,199,000 / USD 37,024,581
85.5% of Total

Above Estimates: 13 Lots (26%)
Within Estimates: 21 Lots (42%)
Below Estimates: 3 Lots (6%)
Withdrawn / Passed: 13 Lots (26%)

#1. Andy Warhol

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 62,800,000 – 92,800,000
HKD 66,625,000 / USD 8,529,638

Flowers (christies.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Flowers, 1965
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
82×82 inches (208.3 x 208.3 cm)
Numbered ‘PA 53.002’ (on the stretcher)

#2. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 40,000,000 – 60,000,000
HKD 48,775,000 / USD 6,244,399

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Pumpkin | Christie’s (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Pumpkin, 2013
Urethane on Fiber Reinforced Plastics, sculpture
205 (H) x 210 x 210 cm (80 3/4 x 82 5/8 x 82 5/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 2013’ (on the side)

#3. Yoshitomo Nara

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 38,000,000
HKD 29,145,000 / USD 3,765,843

Portrait of AE (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B.1959)
Portrait of AE, 2009
Acrylic on canvas in artist’s chosen frame
Image: 80.5 x 65 cm (31 3/4 x 25 5/8 inches)
Framed: 101 x 86.3 cm (39 3/4 x 34 inches)
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Portrait of AE 09 Amelia Earhart’ (on the reverse)

#4. Yoshitomo Nara

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 24,575,000 / USD 3,146,204

Rock You! (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B.1959)
Rock You!, 2006
Acrylic on wood board
162×162 cm (63 3/4 x 63 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated ‘2006’ (on the reverse)

#5. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 23,970,000 / USD 3,068,749

Buds (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Buds, 1987
Acrylic on canvas (triptych)
Each: 194×130 cm (76 3/8 x 11 3/4 inches)
Overall: 194×390 cm (76 3/8 x 153 1/2 inches)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘BUDS 1987 YAYOI KUSAMA’ (on the reverse of panel 1/3)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 1987 BUDS’ (on the reverse of panel 2/3)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘BUDS YAYOI KUSAMA 1987 Yayoi Kusama’ (on the reverse of panel 3/3)

#6. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 23,365,000 / USD 2,991,294

Fruits [EPSOB] (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Fruits [EPSOB], 2011
Acrylic on canvas
112 x 145.5 cm (44 1/8 x 57 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘EPSOB FRUITS YAYOI KUSAMA 2011’ (on the reverse)

#7. Between Heaven and Earth, 1987

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 18,000,000 – 28,000,000
HKD 19,130,000 / USD 2,449,110

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Between Heaven and Earth | Christie’s (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Between Heaven and Earth, 1987
Soft sculpture on wood (set of five)
Each: 180×180 cm (70 7/8 x 70 7/8 inches)
Signed, signed again, titled and dated ‘yayoi kusama 1987 BETWEEN HABEN AND EARTH’
(on the reverse of each panel)

#8. Keith Haring

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,800,000 – 25,800,000
HKD 18,525,000 / USD 2,371,655

Untitled (christies.com)

KEITH HARING (1958-1990)
Untitled, 1982
Vinyl paint on vinyl tarpaulin with metal grommets
69 1/4 x 71 7/8 inches (176 x 182.5 cm)
Signed and dated ‘K. Haring OCT. 1982 ⊕’ (on the reverse)

#9. Roy Lichtenstein

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,800,000 – 25,800,000
HKD 17,557,000 / USD 2,247,728

Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit (christies.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit, 1974
Acrylic, oil, and graphite on canvas
40 1/8 x 54 inches (101.9 x 137.2 cm)
Signed and dated ‘rf Lichtenstein ‘74’ (on the reverse)

#10. Liu Ye

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 9,450,000 / USD 1,209,832

Xiao Fang and Piggy (christies.com)

LIU YE (B. 1964)
Xiao Fang and Piggy, 2002
Acrylic on canvas
60×60 cm (23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed in Chinese, signed again, and dated ‘2002 Liu Ye’ (lower right)

#13. Jade Fadojutimi

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 4,284,000 / USD 548,457

JADÉ FADOJUTIMI (B. 1993), Let’s do the burger jam | Christie’s (christies.com)

JADÉ FADOJUTIMI (B. 1993)
Let’s do the burger jam, 2018
Oil on canvas
201.5 x 191 cm (79 3/8 x 75 1/4 inches)
Signed (twice), titled, and dated ‘Jadé Fadojutimi Oct ’18 ‘Let’s do the burger jam’’ (on the reverse)

Passed Lots

Untitled, 1968

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
PASSED

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Untitled | Christie’s (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Untitled, 1968
Sewn stuffed fabric, wooden stool, paint, sculpture
76.2 (H) x 60.9 x 60.9 cm (30x24x24 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 1968’ (on the back of the chair leg)

Nicolas Party

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 22,000,0000 – 28,000,000
PASSED

Still Life with a Ribbon (christies.com)

NICOLAS PARTY (B. 1980)
Still Life with a Ribbon, 2011-2012
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 150.3 cm (39 5/8 x 59 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Nicolas Party 2012’ (on the reverse)

Keith Haring

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 8,000,000
PASSED

Andy Mouse (christies.com)

KEITH HARING (1958 – 1990)
Andy Mouse, 1986
Screenprint in colors on paper, in four parts
Each: 96×96 cm (37 3/4 x 37 3/4 inches)
Edition: 2/30 plus 10 artist’s proofs
Each signed, numbered and dated ‘2/30 K. Haring 86’ (lower right)
Each additionally signed by the subject ‘Andy Warhol’ (lower left)

Lots Withdrawn

Matthew Wong

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 42,000,000 – 62,000,000
WITHDRAWN

Shangri-La (christies.com)

MATTHEW WONG (1984-2019)
Shangri-La, 2017
Oil on canvas
243.8 x 182.9 cm (96×72 inches)
Signed and dated in Chinese, and titled ‘SHANGRI-LA’ (on the reverse)

21st Century Day Sale

TOTAL
HKD 118,798,580 / USD 15,209,138
92 sold Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 91.1%

21st Century Day Sale (christies.com)

101 Lots
9 Lots Passed
92 Lots Sold
Sell-Through Rate: 91.1%

Top Lot:
HKD 14,895,000 / USD 1,906,926
2 Lots sold for over USD 1 million
HKD 289,199,000 / USD 37,024,581
85.5% of Total

Above Estimates: 13 Lots (26%)
Within Estimates: 21 Lots (42%)
Below Estimates: 3 Lots (6%)
Withdrawn / Passed: 13 Lots (26%)

Top 10 Lots

#1. George Condo

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 15,000,000
HKD 14,895,000 / USD 1,906,926

GEORGE CONDO (B. 1957), Transmutation 2 | Christie’s (christies.com)

GEORGE CONDO (B. 1957)
Transmutation 2, 2015
Oil on linen
70×65 inches (178×165 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Condo 2015’ (upper left)

#2. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 15,000,000
HKD 10,055,000 / USD 1,287,287

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Pumpkin | Christie’s (christies.com)
GUARANTEED

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Pumpkin, 1987
Acrylic on canvas
38.1 x 44.9 cm (15 x 17 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese, and dated ‘1987 Yayoi Kusama’ (on the reverse)

#3. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 5,500,000 – 8,500,000
HKD 6,930,000 / USD 887,210

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Original-Infinity Nets | Christie’s (christies.com)
GUARANTEED

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Original-Infinity Nets, 2000
Acrylic on canvas
117×91 cm (46 1/8 x 35 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 2000 ORIGINAL-INFINITY NETS’ (on the reverse)

#4. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 6,300,000 / USD 806,555

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Breaking Through the Heavenly Sky | Christie’s (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Breaking Through the Heavenly Sky, 1989
Acrylic on canvas
38 x 45.5 cm (15 x 17 7/8 inches)
Titled in Japanese, signed and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 1989’ (on the reverse)

#5. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 5,922,000 / USD 758,162

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Flowers | Christie’s (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Flowers, 1996
Acrylic on canvas
18×14 cm (7 1/8 x 5 1/2 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese, and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 1996’ (on the reverse)

#6. Alex Katz

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 4,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 5,040,000 / USD 645,244

ALEX KATZ (B. 1927), Red Dogwood I | Christie’s (christies.com)

ALEX KATZ (B. 1927)
Red Dogwood I, 2020
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches (183.4 x 244.2 cm)

#7. Yoshitomo Nara

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,500,000 – 4,500,000
HKD 4,410,000 / USD 564,588

YOSHITOMO NARA (B. 1959), The Pond Girl | Christie’s (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B. 1959)
The Pond Girl, 1995
Oil on canvas
72.7 x 60.6 cm (28 5/8 x 23 7/8 inches)
Signed with the artist’s signature, titled, and dated ‘the Pond Girl ’95’ (on the reverse)

#8. Liu Ye

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 4,032,000 / USD 516,195

LIU YE (B. 1964), Untitled | Christie’s (christies.com)

LIU YE (B. 1964)
Untitled, 1997
Acrylic and oil on canvas
120×140 cm (47 1/4 x 55 1/8 inches)
Signed in Chinese, signed again and dated ’97 liu ye’ (lower left)

#9. Yoshitomo Nara

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
HKD 3,780,000 / USD 483,933

YOSHITOMO NARA (B. 1959), Red in Blue | Christie’s (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B. 1959)
Red in Blue, 1999
Acrylic on cotton mounted on canvas
30×25 cm (11 3/4 x 9 7/8 inches)
Titled ‘Red in blue’ (on the overlap)

#10. Mr.

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 2,772,000 / USD 354,884

MR. (B. 1969), After Sadness | Christie’s (christies.com)

MR. (B. 1969)
After Sadness, 2016
Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood panel
221×180 cm (87 x 70 7/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Mr. 2016’ (on the side)

Other Selected Highlights

Yoshitomo Nara

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 2,520,000 / USD 322,622

YOSHITOMO NARA (B. 1959), Cat | Christie’s (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B. 1959)
Cat, 1993
Acrylic on canvas
40×40 cm (15 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches)
Signed with the artist’s signature, titled, and dated ‘cat ’93’ (on the reverse)

Dana Schutz

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,000,000 – 4,000,000
HKD 1,890,000 / USD 241,966

DANA SCHUTZ (B. 1976), Arrangement | Christie’s (christies.com)

DANA SCHUTZ (B. 1976)
Arrangement, 2010
Oil on canvas
72×90 inches (182.9 x 228.6 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Dana Schutz 2010’ (on the reverse)

Scott Kahn

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 800,000 – 1,200,000
HKD 1,890,000 / USD 241,966

SCOTT KAHN (B. 1946), April in Old Lyme | Christie’s (christies.com)

SCOTT KAHN (B. 1946)
April in Old Lyme, 2008
Oil on linen
30×36 inches (76.2 x 91.4 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Scott Kahn ‘08’ (lower right)

Salvo

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 500,000 – 800,000
HKD 1,386,000 / USD 177,442

SALVO (1947-2015), La Valle (The Valley) | Christie’s (christies.com)

SALVO (1947-2015)
La Valle (The Valley), 2007
Oil on canvas
80.5 x 100.7 cm (31 3/4 x 39 5/8 inches)
Signed and titled ‘Salvo “LA VALLE”’ (on the reverse)

Hernan Bas

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 800,000 – 1,200,000
HKD 1,260,000 / USD 161,311

HERNAN BAS (B. 1978), A Rising Fever | Christie’s (christies.com)

HERNAN BAS (B. 1978)
A Rising Fever, 2015
Acrylic on linen
50×40 inches (127.1 x 102.1 cm)
Signed with the artist’s initials and dated ‘HB 15’ (lower right)
Signed again with the artist’s initials, titled and dated ‘a rising Fever HB 2015’ (on the reverse)

Passed Lots

SPLENDOR OF LOVE, 2013

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,000,000 – 2,000,000
PASSED

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), SPLENDOR OF LOVE | Christie’s (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
SPLENDOR OF LOVE, 2013
Sewn stuffed fabric, paint, metal sculpture
55 (H) x 70 x 25 cm (21 5/8 x 27 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 2013 SPLENDOR OF LOVE’ (inner rim)

Phillips: Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale

TOTAL:
HKD 210,220,500 / USD 26,913,391
23 Lots sold
Sell-Through Rate: 95.8%

Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale: Hong Kong Auction May 2024 (phillips.com)

#1. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 90,000,000 – 120,000,000
HKD 98,735,000 / USD 12,640,507

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Modern & Contempo… Lot 10 May 2024 | Phillips

#2. BANKSY

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 18,000,000 – 28,000,000
HKD 36,750,000 / USD 4,704,903

Banksy – Modern & Contemporary Art Evenin… Lot 9 May 2024 | Phillips

#3. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 25,860,000 / USD 3,310,716

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary Art… Lot 12 May 2024 | Phillips

#4. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 13,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 13,760,000 / USD 1,761,618

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary Art… Lot 11 May 2024 | Phillips

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin, 2000
Acrylic on canvas
37.7 x 45.5 cm (14 7/8 x 17 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 2000 Pumpkin [in Kanji] on the reverse

#5. KAWS

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 7,500,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 5,969,000 / USD 764,179

KAWS – Modern & Contemporary Art Evening… Lot 23 May 2024 | Phillips

Phillips: Modern and Contemporary Art Day Sale

31 May 2024

#3. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 1 June 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,200,000 – 4,200,000
HKD 4,699,000 / USD 601,588

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary A… Lot 137 June 2024 | Phillips

#5. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips Hong-Kong: 1 June 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
HKD 3,556,000 / USD 455,255

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary A… Lot 138 June 2024 | Phillips

#7. Andy Warhol

Phillips Hong-Kong: 1 June 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,800,000 – 3,800,000
HKD 3,048,000 / USD 390,219

Andy Warhol – Modern & Contemporary Ar… Lot 128 June 2024 | Phillips

Sotheby’s: The Now Evening Auction

5 April 2024

The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

TOTAL
HKD 39,387,900 / USD 5,035,528

14 Lots
2 Withdrawn
2 Unsold Lots
10 Sold Lots
Sell-Through: 71.4%

#1. George Condo

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 10,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 13,518,000 / USD 1,728,203

George Condo 喬治・康多 | Green Eyed Lady 綠眼女士 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GEORGE CONDO (b. 1957)
Green Eyed Lady, 2016
Acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas
70×66 inches (177.8 x 167.6 cm)
Signed and dated 2016

#2. Rashid Johnson

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 7,620,000 / USD 974,175

Rashid Johnson 拉希德・約翰遜 | The Crowd 人群 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

RASHID JOHNSON (b. 1977)
The Crowd, 2017
White ceramic tile, black soap and wax
184.2 x 245.1 x 6.4 cm (72 1/2 x 96 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches)

#3. Lucy Bull

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 5,715,000 / USD 730,632

Lucy Bull 露西 · 布爾 | Radiator 散熱器 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

LUCY BULL (b. 1990)
Radiator, 2019
Oil on linen
128×76 cm (50 3/8 x 29 7/8 inches)
Signed and dated 19 on the reverse

#4. Claire Tabouret

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,800,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 2,540,000 / USD 324,725

Claire Tabouret 克萊爾・特伯萊 | Les Débutantes (rose bengale) 元媛舞會（孟加拉玫瑰紅） | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAIRE TABOURET (b. 1981)
Les Débutantes (rose bengale), 2014
Acrylic on canvas
230.5 x 330 cm (90 3/4 x 129 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2014 on the reverse

#5. Robert Nava

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
HKD 2,540,000 / USD 324,725

Robert Nava 羅伯特 · 納瓦 | Neon Dragon 霓虹的龍 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ROBERT NAVA (b. 1985)
Neon Dragon, 2020
Acrylic, spray paint and grease pencil on canvas
90×72 inches (228.5 x 183 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 20 on the reverse

#6. Daniel Richter

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,600,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 2,413,000 / USD 308,489

Daniel Richter 丹尼爾 · 里希特 | Plications of Come 摺疊的狂喜 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DANIEL RICHTER (b. 1962)
Plications of Come, 2019
Oil on canvas
213 x 172.5 cm (83 7/8 x 67 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2019 on the reverse

#7. Vojtěch Kovařík

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
HKD 2,032,000 / USD 259,780

Vojtěch Kovařík 沃伊泰克・科瓦里克 | Theseus Entering the Labyrinth 走進迷宮的忒修斯 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

VOJTECH KOVARIK (b.1993)
Theseus Entering the Labyrinth, 2021
Acrylic and sand on canvas
300×230 cm (118 1/8 x 90 1/2 inches)
Signed, titled and dated MMXXI on the reverse

#8. Jadé Fadojutimi

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
HKD 1,841,500 / USD 235,426

Jadé Fadojutimi 賈黛・法多朱蒂米 | Fishing For Steps 足跡的探尋 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JADE FADOJUTIMI (b. 1993)
Fishing For Steps, 2017
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 145 cm (39 5/8 x 57 1/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2017 on the reverse

Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction

5 April 2024

Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

TOTAL
HKD 634,019,500
USD 81,055,932

47 Lots
6 Withdrawn Lots
1 Unsold Lot
40 Sold Lots
Sell-Through: 97.6%

#1. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 80,000,000 – 120,000,000
HKD 95,959,000 / USD 12,267,834

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, 2017
Acrylic on canvas
220.2 x 195.3 cm (86 3/4 x 76 7/8 inches)

#2. Pablo Picasso

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 66,000,000 – 90,000,000
HKD 78,724,000 / USD 10,064,434

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Le Peintre, 1963
Oil on canvas
92×60 cm (36 1/4 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed Picasso (lower left)
Dated 8.6.63. III (on the verso)

#3. Claude Monet

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 45,000,000 – 65,000,000
HKD 61,489,000 / USD 7,861,033

Claude Monet 克勞德・莫內 | Route de Monte-Carlo 蒙特卡羅之路 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840 – 1926)
Route de Monte-Carlo, 1883
Oil on canvas
65.7 x 80.6 cm (25 7/8 x 31 3/4 inches)
Signed Claude Monet and dated 84 (lower left)

#4. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 38,000,000 – 48,000,000
HKD 41,590,000 / USD 5,317,054

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Portrait 肖像 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Portrait, 2015
Acrylic on canvas
146 x 112.8 cm (57 1/2 x 44 3/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2015 on the reverse

#5. Zao Wou-Ki

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 35,000,000 – 45,000,000
HKD 40,380,000 / USD 5,162,363

Zao Wou-Ki 趙無極 | 04.10.85 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ZAO WOU-KI (1920-2013)
04.10.85, 1985
Oil on canvas
162×130 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches)
Signed Wou-Ki in Chinese and Zao in Pinyin (lower right)
Signed ZAO WOU-KI and dated 4.10.85. (on the verso)
Executed on 4 October 1985

#6. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 38,000,000
HKD 36,145,000 / USD 4,620,941

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin 南瓜 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin, 2019
Urethane on fiberglass reinforced plastic
120x138x138 cm (47 1/4 x 54 3/8 x 54 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated 2019

#7. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 35,000,000
HKD 33,120,000 / USD 4,234,211

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | Untitled 無題 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
Untitled, 2008
Acrylic on board
231.1 x 186.7 x 12.7 cm (91 x 73 1/2 x 5 inches)
Signed and dated 2008 on the reverse

#8. Chu Teh-Chun

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 38,000,000
HKD 30,700,000 / USD 3,924,827

Chu Teh-Chun 朱德群 | Le poids du devenir 力爭上游 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CHU TEH-CHUN (1920-2014)
Le poids du devenir, 2005
Oil on canvas (triptych)
195×390 cm (76 3/4 x 153 1/2 inches)
Signed CHU TEH-CHUN in Chinese and Pinyin, dated 2005 (lower right)
Titled Le poids du DEVENIR in French and Chinese
Signed CHU TEH-CHUN in Pinyin and Chinese, dated 2005 and inscribed (on the verso of each panel)

#9. Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 12,000,000 – 16,000,000
HKD 24,347,500 / USD 3,112,695

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 皮耶・奧古斯特・雷諾瓦 | Un Jardin à Sorrente 索倫托的花園 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841 – 1919)
Un Jardin à Sorrente, 1881
Oil on canvas
67×82 cm (26 3/8 x 32 1/4 inches)
Signed Renoir (lower right)

#10. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 24,000,000 – 34,000,000
HKD 24,045,000 / USD 3,074,022

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin 南瓜 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin, 2016
Tiles on FRP, glue and steel
230x230x35 cm (90 1/2 x 90 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2016 on the reverse

#11. Claude Monet

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,500,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 20,415,000 / USD 2,609,946

Claude Monet 克勞德・莫內 | Inondation à Giverny 吉維尼的湖水 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Inondation à Giverny, 1886
65 x 81.3 cm (25 5/8 x 32 inches)
Stamped with signature Claude Monet (lower right)

#12. Zeng Fanzhi

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 15,000,000
HKD 12,187,000 / USD 1,558,041

Zeng Fanzhi 曾梵志 | Mask Series 1999 no. 1 面具系列1999第一號 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ZENG FANZHI (b. 1964)
Mask Series 1999 no. 1, 1999
Oil on canvas
150×110 cm (59 x 43 3/8 inches)
Signed in Pinyin and dated 1999

#15. Andy Warhol

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
HKD 9,144,000 / USD 1,169,010

Andy Warhol 安迪 · 沃荷 | The Two Sisters (after de Chirico) 兩姊妹（隨德·基里科） | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
The Two Sisters (after de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50 1/4 x 41 3/4 inches (127.5 x 106 cm)
Signed and dated 82 on the overlap

#17. Richard Prince

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 7,493,000 / USD 957,939

Richard Prince 理查德∙普林斯 | Untitled (Cowboy) 無題（牛仔） | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949)
Untitled (Cowboy), 1999
Ektacolor photograph, in artist’s chosen frame
150.5 x 212.1 cm (59 1/4 x 83 1/2 inches)
Signed, dated 1999 and numbered 2/2 (on a label affixed to the backing board)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof

#32. George Condo

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 3,556,000 / USD 454,615

George Condo 喬治・康多 | Untitled 無題 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GEORGE CONDO (b. 1957)
Untitled, 2016
Oil and graphite on linen
90×140 inches (229×356 cm)
Signed and dated 2016

Contemporary Art Day Sale

6 April 2024

Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

#1. Yoshitomo Nara

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 18,600,000 / USD 2,377,908

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | Guitar Girl on the Ice 冰上的吉他女孩 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
Guitar Girl on the Ice, 1994
Acrylic on canvas
100.5 x 100.5 cm (39 5/8 x 39 5/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 94 on the reverse

#2. Matthew Wong

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 10,735,000 / USD 974,175

Matthew Wong 王俊傑 | Another Day 另一天 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MATTHEW WONG (1984 – 2019)
Another Day, 2018
Oil on canvas
183×178 cm (72×70 inches)
Signed and dated 2018 in Chinese, and titled in English on the reverse

#3. Lee Ufan

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,200,000
HKD 6,604,000 / USD 844,285

Lee Ufan 李禹煥 | East Winds No. 839031 東風 No. 839031 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

LEE UFAN (b. 1936)
East Winds No. 839031, 1983
Pigment on canvas
90 x 116.5 cm (35 3/8 x 45 7/8 inches)
Signed and dated 83; signed and titled on the reverse

#4. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,800,000 – 4,200,000
HKD 5,842,000 / USD 746,868

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin (AAP) 南瓜（AAP） | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin (AAP), 2001
Acrylic on canvas
22.7 x 16 cm (9 x 6 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese, and dated 2001 on the reverse

Takashi Murakami

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,200,000 – 3,500,000
HKD 2,794,000 / USD 357,198

Takashi Murakami 村上隆 | And Then x 6 (Marine Blue: The Superflat Method) 然後 x 6（海洋藍：超扁平技巧） | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

TAKASHI MURAKAMI (b. 1962)
And Then x 6 (Marine Blue: The Superflat Method)
Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame
100×100 cm (39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the overlap; variously inscribed on the stretcher

Salvo

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,000,000 – 2,000,000
HKD 1,905,000 / USD 243,544

Salvo 薩爾沃 | Il Villaggio (The Village) 村莊 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

SALVO (1947 – 2015)
Il Villaggio (The Village), 1993
Oil on canvas
130.7 x 170.8 cm (51 1/2 x 67 1/4 inches)
Signed, dated 93, and inscribed on the reverse

Andy Warhol

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
HKD 1,270,000 / USD 162,363

Andy Warhol 安迪 · 沃荷 | Roll Over Mouse 滾動鼠 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Roll Over Mouse, 1983
Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas
1114 inches (28.1 x 35.5 cm)
Signed and dated 83 on the overlap

Andy Warhol

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 700,000 – 1,200,000
HKD 1,143,000 / USD 146,126

Andy Warhol 安迪 · 沃荷 | Bighorn Ram (Endangered Species) 大角羊（瀕危物種） | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Bighorn Ram (Endangered Species), 1983
Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board
38×38 inches (96.5 x 96.5 cm)
Signed, numbered 36/150 and embossed with printer’s stamp
Stamped with the artist’s publication stamp and publisher stamp on the reverse

PART II: FOCUS

Focus: Ultra-Contemporary

BANKSY

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 18,000,000 – 28,000,000
HKD 36,750,000 / USD 4,704,903

Banksy – Modern & Contemporary Art Evenin… Lot 9 May 2024 | Phillips

The present lot The Leopard and Lamb by Banksy is a captivating portrayal that seamlessly integrates the biblical symbolism with the artist’s contemporary socio-political commentary. Exhibited at Banksy’s renowned Walled-Off Hotel in Bethlehem, situated close to the separation wall, and captures a moment of harmony. The work depicts a leopard lying peacefully beside a lamb, invoking the prophetic imagery from Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat.” This visual metaphor not only enriches the biblical reference of natural enemies in serene coexistence but also subtly critiques war and conflict, urging a reflection on the universal hope of peace.

Born in Bristol, UK, Banksy’s identity remains shrouded in mystery, enhancing the enigmatic appeal of his work. Emerging from the graffiti scene in the early 1990s, Banksy’s distinctive stenciling technique has been pivotal to contemporary art. Notably, the Walled-Off Hotel encapsulates a blend of art, politics, and tourism, engaging its guests with original artworks by Banksy. The hotel also houses a museum which commemorates the centennial of British control over Palestine, highlighting the prolonged period of turmoil and conflict that ensued. The hotel also supports local culture through an exhibition space for Palestinian artists. In building this hotel, the artist is once again proactively reflecting his consistent anti-war theme throughout his career. This project aims to potentially map and eliminate conflicts between the two countries, and to enhance and promote the development and tourism in the region.

The composition, set against a stark background filled with signature graffiti, draws the viewer’s focus immediately to the central figures, encapsulated with a golden frame that adds an element of sanctity and preciousness. Lying together in tranquil pose, the seemingly predator and prey serve as a powerful allegory of reconciliation and cohabitation. The visual composition is stark and powerful, with the lustrous frame that elevates the symbolic gravity of the scene. Banksy’s use of a muted palette and the soft contrast between the sleek fur of the leopard and the soft wool of the lamb enhances the painting’s dreamlike and poignant quality, suggesting that such peace could be both a vision and an attainable reality.

Banksy’s oeuvre as a highly renowned street artist is punctuated with a variety of unique framed works, each distinct in its thematic exploration and execution. Unlike his art on the streets, these framed pieces allow the artist to delve deeper into the nuances of his subjects, offering a more controlled and refined commentary. The rarity of such works adds to their allure and significance, making them highly celebrated objects. The present lot also stands as a testament to this important aspect of his practice, showcasing not only his artistic versatility but also his act of engaging with the complex, philosophical and social issues within the confines of the canvas and frame. Similar to the present lot as a unique work, Phillips had previously offered Forgive Us Our Trespassing, featuring a young boy in a pose of prayer, set against a backdrop of imposing stained glass, merging themes of innocence with institutional critique. Additionally, the Banksquiat series pays homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, confronting issues of identity, fame, as well as the themes of injustice in society. Like the present lot, these works showcase the artist’s adeptness at harnessing art as a tool for social commentary, while also engaging with the broader narratives of art history and its contemporary implications.

1. Nicolas Party

Still Life with a Ribbon, 2011-2012

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 22,000,0000 – 28,000,000
PASSED

Still Life with a Ribbon (christies.com)

NICOLAS PARTY (B. 1980)
Still Life with a Ribbon, 2011-2012
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 150.3 cm (39 5/8 x 59 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Nicolas Party 2012’ (on the reverse)

Exhibited at the artist’s first major solo exhibition with The Modern Institute in 2013, Nicolas Party’s Still Life with Ribbon (2011–12) was among a group of still lifes in oil the artist painted during his formative period. Capturing the artist’s early interest in the anthropomorphised attributes of objects, the present work presages Party’s virtuoso investigation of color, material, and art history through the traditional still life genre with his contemporary neo-surrealist twist. Against the cobalt backdrop, three pears lined beside one another like performers atop a stage, calibrating a whimsical vivacity with their volumetric, curvaceous appeals. Setting behind tropes of unnatural, man-made objects in cylinder shapes, these three stylised organic forms—rendered in velvet red, green, and porcelain white—are magnified and have an enticing sculptural presence, akin to figures. Pear, as a humble fruit that serves as a motif in Flemish vanitas paintings and was pondered by numerous modern masters like Cézanne, Picasso, and O’Keeffe, was depicted purely based on Party’s memory instead of real objects. An atypical still life, Still Life with Ribbon encapsulates Party’s distinctive visual idiom that conflates art-historical tropes—from the centuries-old vanitas tradition to Morandi’s austere still life and Matisse’s sharp, luminous vision.

 In Still Life with Ribbon, Party turned one of the pears into a petrified entity, evoking an eerie feeling permeated in one of the ‘stone age pictures’ René Magritte created in the 1950s. Party’s still life carries a similar love of paradox as Magritte’s pictorial landscape, where the artist arrested the live form in the state of petrification.

Rene Magritte, Memory of a Voyage, 1951 © 2024 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

“I guess the word ‘still life’ (or ‘nature morte’) is a good example of what art tries to achieve: merging two opposite notions into one object,’ Party explains, ‘life is not still and nature is not dead, but maybe a painting can be.”

Wearing his learning lightly, Party adeptly bestows his contemporary tableaux to convey the sensation of suspense and paradox of this genre in Still Life with Ribbon, with its mysterious yet vividly defined forms.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta, 1938. Museum of Modern Art, New York ©2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence 

With the medium oil lends the present work tactility and volume, Party mindfully fashions his pictorial plane in a perplexing milieu where the objects are placed against an entirely flat background devoid of any depth or perspective. Paring down superfluous details using elemental color and simplified form—a compositional tactic that is perhaps informed by his experience in 3D animation and mural art—Party forms an ambiguous space where viewers are forced to focus on the form, color, and composition. Such an approach also spared his still life from interpretation in the manner of memento mori. The pears, with their rich art historical connotations in both Eastern and Western cultures as a symbol of immortality, abundance, and Christ’s love, seem to halt in a perennial state in their disturbing dimensions. Party’s distilled and almost artificial forms conjure a suspension of time instead of an inevitable decline, the present work, standing as a contemporary still life outside of time and space, is at once recognizable yet utterly unreal.

2. Matthew Wong

Shangri-La, 2017

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 42,000,000 – 62,000,000

Shangri-La (christies.com)

MATTHEW WONG (1984-2019)
Shangri-La, 2017
Oil on canvas
243.8 x 182.9 cm (96×72 inches)
Signed and dated in Chinese, and titled ‘SHANGRI-LA’ (on the reverse)

An ethereal, atmospheric vista teeming with Matthew Wong’s spirited, richly palpable mark-making, Shangri-La is a momentous painting by the artist at the crest of his career. Towering at eight-feet high and six-feet across, it is one of the few known monumental canvases Wong painted in 2017, shortly after his resettlement in Edmonton. The expansive and offbeat composition—portrayed in a striking and lofty foreshortening reminiscent of modernist spatial abstraction—is cascaded with vigorous patchworks of luscious and vibrant shades. Cliffs, uphill mountains, and fertile yet riotous greenery are rendered in flamboyant, dense dots and dashes, calling to mind Seurat’s brilliant pointillism, Derain’s agitated Fauvist brushwork, and Kusama’s hypnotic patterning.

Adorned by a divine milky waterfall, the otherworldly scenery shares the name of the fabled, isolated utopia located high in the mountains of Tibet pictured in Lost Horizon, a film that was adapted from the famous novel of the same title by James Hilton in 1933. By referencing the mythical promised land known as Shangri-La, Wong alters the genre of painting, forming an extravagant picture that is at once historical and avant-garde; imaginative and nostalgic.

Born in Toronto in 1984, Wong lived and worked between Canada, United States, and Hong Kong. Held a degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan and obtained an MFA in photography from the City University of Hong Kong, Wong is a bi-cultural, self-taught artist who embraced the fluidity of transnational contemporary culture and art histories that radically informed his practice. Setting apart from most of his landscape works like The West (2017; Dallas Museum of Art), which often depicted a clear horizon evocative of cinematic perspective, Shangri-la is a contemporary rendition of Chinese literati painting in every sense. The verticality of the present work is reminiscent of Shitao’s landscape paintings, for its shifting vantage points and its embodiment of personal emotional resonance towards nature. The glistening pattern and material depiction, directed with cloisonné clarity, is a lyrical revelation of negative space through clutters of abstract forms. One is plunged into a brilliant and disorienting world with paths unseen yet known. A lone, nearly camouflaged figure Wong mindfully plotted in the scene—like the tiny wanderers in Qing Dynasty landscape painting—not only established a point of entrance for the viewer to be part of the fabric of his imagined world, but also invoked the painter’s personal experience with escape and withdrawal from society. In Shangri-La, Wong subtly yet ingeniously elucidates this striking moment of contemplation and deliberation, enticing the viewer to know and be known in the realm of his paradise.

David Hockney, Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, 1980. Los Angeles County Museum of Art © David Hockney Photo: Richard Schmidt

Working intuitively without preparatory sketching, Wong passed brush between both hands as he brought his mental landscape to life. As a result, like many of his paintings, the present work is saturated with vertiginous shifts in distance and tone. Before teeming his landscape with intense marks and patterning, Wong painted gestural abstraction during the first few years of his short six-year career and practiced ink. As a daily ritual, the artist would pour ink onto pages of cheap sketchbooks, hoping that something interesting would appear in random marks and splashes. The wistful, visionary quality of Shangri-La contributes to this idea of art as a revelation—a way of delving into a potential realm beyond our own. As Wong once expressed, ‘I would like my paintings to have something in them so people across the spectrum can find things they identify with. I do believe that there is an inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life, and on a broader level, I feel my work speaks to this quality in addition to being a reflection of my thoughts, fascinations and impulses’ (M. Wong, quoted in M. Vogel, ‘Matthew Wong Reflects on the Melancholy of Life’, Art of Choice, November 2018).

Vincent van Gogh, Arbres dans le jardin de l’asile, 1889. Christie’s New York, 13 May 2019. Sold for USD 40,000,000.

The present work was shown at the Galerie Frank Elbaz in 2017, a year before Wong’s first solo exhibition in New York at Karma, which gained the artist much critical acclaim and volatile market responses. It evinces Wong’s painterly virtuosity and his confidence in handling such an instinctive visual vocabulary that is uniquely his own. Beyond its impressive scale, Shangri-La exists between worlds in a manner that is both surreal and familiar. Its singular synergy of color and form typifies the visionary marriage of form and emotion Wong continued to foster throughout his tragically short career. Last year, the Dallas Museum of Art mounted the first retrospective of the artist Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances posthumously. ‘It presents him not as a prodigy but as a talented artist who had only just begun to find his footing and as a Canadian of the Asian diaspora who had started to discover his place within the world…’ art critic Alex Greenberger commented, ‘It views Wong not just as a modernism aficionado but as a curious art lover whose inquiry transcended the Western canon’ (A. Greenberger, ‘A Must-See Matthew Wong Retrospective Reveals New Sides of an Artist Whose Story Is Still Emerging’, ARTnews, July 28, 2023). Wong’s works are held in esteemed institutions such as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Art Gallery of Ontario, and a much anticipated two-artist exhibition, Matthew Wong/Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort, was unveiled recently at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Poignantly, the forever young artist once wrote of the Dutch master, ‘I see myself in him. The impossibility of belonging in this world’ (M. Wong, quoted in Exhibition Matthew Wong/ Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum).

Another Day, 2018

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 10,735,000 / USD 974,175

Matthew Wong 王俊傑 | Another Day 另一天 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MATTHEW WONG (1984 – 2019)
Another Day, 2018
Oil on canvas
183×178 cm (72×70 inches)
Signed and dated 2018 in Chinese, and titled in English on the reverse

Masterfully realized and exuding a wistful charm, Another Day epitomizes the stark beauty of the critically acclaimed, self-taught artist Matthew Wong. A center-piece of Wong’s first solo exhibition at Karma Gallery, New York City, in 2018, Another Day weaves together a rhapsody of color, animating the ethereal worlds of the artist’s mind and conveying the spiritual and ephemeral qualities of natural landscapes.

Wong’s distinctive striped rendering of the sky, an exceedingly rare motif to come to auction, captures the effect of natural light as the sun rises at dawn, the horizontal bands of yellow, pink and midnight blue creating a dazzling visual experience that extends beyond the picture plane. Weaving together a rhapsody of sunlit hues into a tranquil expanse, motionless save a single figure floating inside a hot air balloon, the present work engenders a wavering and rhythmic pulsation which evokes the perceptual sensation of watching the light change at the beginning of the day. Inspiring an intense and fleeting visceral response, Another Day is an extraordinary consolidation and extension of traditional landscape painting, expressing its vivacity by immersing the viewer in the artist’s uniquely poignant imagination.

An intensely evocative painting that recalls Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley’s captivating compositional dynamism and chromatic intensity, Another Day emparts a sheer kaleidoscopic sensorial effect akin to a rising sun. Making use of the tactile medium of oil, Wong drags wide bands of saturated colour across the canvas in thin and thick bands to create a graphic flatness in the sky and ground.

Each strip suggests a horizon by capturing the effects of natural light with varying degrees of separation between shades. Yet the rhythmic staccato of horizontal lines creates a visual cadence which seemingly shifts and bends with every shift of perspective, imparting a sense of roving immensity to the scene. The mossy green of the foreground is contrasted against the cerulean blue of the emerging sun’s rays cascading off the early morning dew, the midnight blue of the rapidly receding night giving way to the radiating bands of encroaching morning light. The narrative quality of Another Day is unique in that the solitary figure traverses not the ground or rivers typical of Wong’s imaginative landscapes, but the sky. Riding a red air balloon, we are captivated by the journey this lone traveler is embarking on, leaving an impression of both esoteric and terrestrial journeys.

The lone figure, a significant motif in Wong’s work that suggests his musings on the loneliness of contemporary life, highlights how “despite their ebullient palette, [Matthew Wong’s paintings] are frequently tinged with a melancholic yearning.” (Eric Sutphin, “Matthew Wong,” Art in America, June 2018 (online)). As John Yau remarked, “In these largely unpopulated paintings, Wong invited the viewer to be a solitary observer or sojourner. He never indicated what awaits us at the end of our journey” (J. Yau, “The Last Works of Matthew Wong,” Hyperallergic, December 2019). This lone figure can be read as a surrogate for the artist working his way through the landscape of art; Wong is at once immersed within the painting and is in dialogue with it. Summoning art historical precedents such as the solitary wanderers of Casper David Freidrich’s Romantic landscapes and the dreamlike qualities of Van Gogh, Another Day is a poignant archetype of Wong’s earnest yet sublimely graceful practice.

3. Lucy Bull

Radiator, 2019

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 5,715,000 / USD 730,632

Lucy Bull 露西 · 布爾 | Radiator 散熱器 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

LUCY BULL (b. 1990)
Radiator, 2019
Oil on linen
128×76 cm (50 3/8 x 29 7/8 inches)
Signed and dated 19 on the reverse

Dazzling in its chromatic complexity and imbuing a transcendental psychedelic effect, Radiator presents a magnificent vista of variegated abstraction in saturated hues, a testament to Lucy Bull’s captivating painterly finesse. Offering glimpses into the illusory and unconscious realms, Radiator ripples in moody hues of blood red, acid yellow and electric blue to produce an atmospheric abyss of surging forms. Lush shapes of undefined lines slip and recede into kaleidoscopic gradations of color, coalescing within one disorientating and meditative plane of experience. Impressive in its gestural power, the present work delivers a theatrical play of chance and control, culminating in a spectacular harmony of vivid color. A highlight of the young artist’s enigmatic oeuvre, Radiator brilliantly exemplifies the mysticism of Lucy Bull’s distinctly contemporary practice as it draws the viewer into a cosmic illusion of painterly transfiguration.

Bull’s esoteric paintings balance the chromatic vibrancy of color field paintings by the likes of Alma Thomas, Helen Frankenthaler, or Sam Gilliam with gestural markings that recall the Surrealist landscapes of Max Ernst, who developed the technique of grattage to record the grain of textured objects between layers of paint. Bull’s accumulations of marks evade rational logic, yet fragments of abstract forms emerge from the artist’s loose brushwork, inviting the viewer into a visceral experience.

“I want to titillate the senses. I want to draw people closer. I think people aren’t used to paying much prolonged attention to paintings on walls, and I want to allow people to have more of a sensory experience. I want to draw them in so that there is the opportunity for things to open up and for them to wander.”

Tessellations of scratched markings give way to underlying layers of paint, which Bull accumulates in daubed and gauzy veils; meanwhile, streaming gradations of color seamlessly flow into each other, allowing orange and blue smears to bleed into scattered yellow smudges. By harmoniously teetering between the material realities of its pigment and surface and the subjective experiences it elicits, Radiator accesses the sensitive liminality between conscious and subconscious states of being. Titillating, immersive and mystical, Radiator reveals a hard fought-negotiation between paint and painter, precision and abandon, opening up a limitless number of associations and fleeting perceptual experiences. With her recently closed solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai, the young LA-based artist has distinguished herself as a contemporary paragon of abstract art, captivating audiences with a cosmic oeuvre of paintings, each of which crystallises a new glimpse into the illusory and unconscious unknown.

4. Jadé Fadojutimi

Let’s do the burger jam, 2018

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
HKD 4,284,000 / USD 548,457

JADÉ FADOJUTIMI (B. 1993), Let’s do the burger jam | Christie’s (christies.com)

JADÉ FADOJUTIMI (B. 1993)
Let’s do the burger jam, 2018
Oil on canvas
201.5 x 191 cm (79 3/8 x 75 1/4 inches)
Signed (twice), titled, and dated ‘Jadé Fadojutimi Oct ’18 ‘Let’s do the burger jam’’ (on the reverse)

Fishing For Steps, 2017

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
HKD 1,841,500 / USD 235,426

Jadé Fadojutimi 賈黛・法多朱蒂米 | Fishing For Steps 足跡的探尋 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JADE FADOJUTIMI (b. 1993)
Fishing For Steps, 2017
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 145 cm (39 5/8 x 57 1/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2017 on the reverse

A rhapsody of color in hues of lavender blue, moss green and canary yellow, the mesmerizing Fishing For Steps exemplifies the dynamism and vibrancy for which Jadé Fadojutimi has become critically acclaimed. Painted during the final year of her MA program at the Royal College of Art, Fishing For Steps sees luscious strokes of pigment converge and coalesce is an explosive iteration of the artist’s intuitive practice. Embracing chance and chaos, Fadojutimi transforms the canvas into a complex emotional landscape which explores themes of identity, self-knowledge and unresolved emotion. Before Fadojutimi saw her thirtieth birthday she became the youngest artist in the collection of the Tate, London, which features her explosive painting, I Present Your Royal Highness (2018), with examples of her work now residing in prestigious museum collections, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, amongst others.

A mesmerizing landmark from her artistic journey, the richly saturated canvas of Fishing For Steps pulses with gesture and movement as loose, translucent washes collide with thick blows of impasto. Culminating in a vivacious symphony of color, Fadojutimi’s lively and powerful mark making dances across the canvas in a dynamism that recalls the work of Jackson Pollock or Joan Mitchell. Building up thin layers of pigment with rhythmic caresses before intuitively scraping and scratching the painting’s luminous surface, Fadojutimi is able to give her compositions a sense of unbridled velocity. Shimmering washes of yellow and blue evoke the ethereal light of stained glass windows or early morning sunlight, while buoyant strokes of deep green recall the earthy shades found in nature. Colors and shapes bloom and recede, with the darkest shades being punctuated by jolts of red, creating a view to another world that is both disparate and analogous to ours, communicating truth and emotion through her spontaneous aesthetic.

Known for her color-saturated compositions, Fadojutimi’s gestural application of color flows between abstraction and figuration to conjure a host of different moods and sensations. Fishing For Steps feels at once familiar and unfamiliar, invoking flashes of naturalistic imagery and alien landscapes in its obscured invocation of reality, our perception of the work forced to twist and bend with each stroke. Exploring notions of identity, emotion, imagination and play, Fadojutimi’s work bursts with pulsating dynamism, her exuberant brushwork recalling images of wild gardens and expansive seas. Fishing For Steps exhibits Fadojutimi’s exquisite technique, one highly resolved for an artist so young in her career. Fadojutimi is a Londoner through and through; born in 1993, she graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2015 and received her MA from the Royal College of Art, where she won the Hine Painting Prize, in 2017. Though her background is British Nigerian, Fadojutimi cites Japan as the culture that catalyzed her artistic style and continues to inspire her. She was a huge fan of Anime as a child, which she says helped her find an outlet for her own intense emotions, with the artist now visiting Japan multiple times a year for inspiration. Fadojutimi 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. Her compositions pulsate with the energy and dynamism of such animations, her gestural abstraction and vibrant use of color evoking a dream-like climax of cinematic drama. Fadojutimi’s singular approach to abstraction marks a testament to the artist’s capacity to push boundaries and reinvent the tenets of contemporary painting, placing her as one of the most exciting painters working today.

5. Other Artists

Rashid Johnson

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 7,620,000 / USD 974,175

Rashid Johnson 拉希德・約翰遜 | The Crowd 人群 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

RASHID JOHNSON (b. 1977)
The Crowd, 2017
White ceramic tile, black soap and wax
184.2 x 245.1 x 6.4 cm (72 1/2 x 96 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches)

“I think about most things that I make as quite topographic. So you imagine a landscape, the different materials in it, then just begin to translate them. Making a painting using a thousand different cuts brings that paint to life. Inside of this exists maybe 300 abstract micro-paintings. And then stepping back, just one large macro.”

Robert Nava

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
HKD 2,540,000 / USD 324,725

Robert Nava 羅伯特 · 納瓦 | Neon Dragon 霓虹的龍 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ROBERT NAVA (b. 1985)
Neon Dragon, 2020
Acrylic, spray paint and grease pencil on canvas
90×72 inches (228.5 x 183 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 20 on the reverse

Neon Dragon (2020) is a powerful example of Robert Nava’s signature energetic, raw approach to image making, in which he employs a variety of materials from spray paint to acrylics and grease pencil. In Neon Dragon, the fiery dragon emerges from an expanse of blues, rendered in Nava’s distinctive graphic language which consciously rejects rigid painterly conventions.

Neon Dragon epitomizes Nava’s slapdash process, distinctive graphic lexicon and gleeful celebration of electric colours, consciously destabilising any rigid painterly conventions that the artist would have encountered as an MFA student at Yale University. In the vein of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut and echoing the short lived but influential development in American figurative painting of the 1970s, when the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York put on its notorious “Bad” Painting exhibition, bringing together a group of artists deliberately subverting recent styles of painting and rejecting conventional attitudes in iconography and technique, Nava’s visual language is purposefully crude and irreverent. Before starting to paint, Nava spends hours meticulously sketching out the forms he wants to paint on his large-scale canvases. After exhausting his sketchbook, the artist attacks the canvas with unbridled confidence.

“And even looking at a Renaissance painting, I would be looking for error, like mistakes were more alive to me. By drawing things ‘incorrectly,’ I found more things to do in that realm. So that’s why I find it more interesting and why I draw and paint like this. It’s been like that since probably 2007 or 2008, but now it’s getting really refined, and I know what I want to do more.”

Born in East Chicago, Robert Nava is an exciting young talent whose work can be found in major collections including the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida, amongst others.

Claire Tabouret

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,800,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 2,540,000 / USD 324,725

Claire Tabouret 克萊爾・特伯萊 | Les Débutantes (rose bengale) 元媛舞會（孟加拉玫瑰紅） | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAIRE TABOURET (b. 1981)
Les Débutantes (rose bengale), 2014
Acrylic on canvas
230.5 x 330 cm (90 3/4 x 129 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2014 on the reverse

A monumental and captivating work from Claire Tabouret’s iconic series of the same title, Les Débutantes (Rose Bengale) exudes an enigmatic theatricality in its exploration of youth and false appearances.

Nine débutantes emerge from a black mass of draped fabric to pose, stoic and inscrutable, for their portraits as a luminous neon purple seeps through the rippling inky blackness of their gowns. Inspired by the photographs of the Debutante Ball, a formal rite of passage which marks the coming of age of the young women presented, this series infuses an uncanny ambiguity to these relics of high society. Subtitled Rose Bengale, so named for the electric rose colour used as the background which frames the pale, expressionless faces of these debutantes, the present work is a fascinating reflection of the relationship between individual and society.

Weaving together a tapestry of evocations and echoes glossed from old photographs, magazines and history books, Tabouret’s inscrutable portraits capture a layered, impressionist portrayal of youth.

Daniel Richter

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,600,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 2,413,000 / USD 308,489

Daniel Richter 丹尼爾 · 里希特 | Plications of Come 摺疊的狂喜 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DANIEL RICHTER (b. 1962)
Plications of Come, 2019
Oil on canvas
213 x 172.5 cm (83 7/8 x 67 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2019 on the reverse

Propulsive and enigmatic, bold in color and form, Plications of Come (2019) is exemplary of Daniel Richter’s unique large-scale exploration of the human form. Plications of Come vibrates with a palpable energy, with Richter’s signature amorphous figures appearing to both merge and pull away from each other. The vertical lines which slice through the background are an uncommon feature amongst Richter’s works, forming corrugations that perhaps refer to the “plications” of the title. Through a painterly language that deals in both absurdity and surrealism, Richter’s lurid shapes and tumultuous fields of electric colour suffuse the present work with a sense of apocalyptic ambiguity, capturing the fear and anxiety that characterise the contemporary zeitgeist. Captivating in its form and vibrant color, Plications of Come was prominently featured in Richter’s fourth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, H.P. (JAH ALLO) in Los Angeles (29 June – 17 August 2019).

Embodying the new methodology that Richter adopted in 2015, the present work eschews preconceived narrative structure and instead embraces a distinct impulsiveness, combining abstraction with figuration. Richter describes this departure; “I wanted to get away from a certain kind of narration and from the theatre stage and from the burden of already knowing what I’m about to do”, Richter says of the series. “When I started in the 90’s, I was mainly interested in the idea of how chaotic or crammed a painting can be: to the point that it collapses. And then I also had an interest in doing something that I would call image related. Image in relation to ideology and the production of ideology and clichés.” (Daniel Richter, quoted in “Press Release: Daniel Richter: pUnser die Zukunft”, Grimm Gallery, New York, 2019).

Continuing the lineage of post-war German painting, Berlin-born Richter has become one of the foremost German artists of his generation. In 2023, the artist was honoured with a retrospective-style exhibition at Kunsthalle Tübingen (6 May – 3 October), exploring Richter’s three decade-long interrogation of the human figure and the relationship between man, body and society. Additionally, the artist’s solo exhibition, Stupor, recently concluded at Thaddaeus Ropac (10 October – 7 December 2023), featuring the artist’s trademark biomorphic forms, twisting and bending amongst bold expanses of colour. Today, examples of Richter’s work can be found in prominent institutions around the world, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Denver Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, among others.

Vojtěch Kovařík

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
HKD 2,032,000 / USD 259,780

Vojtěch Kovařík 沃伊泰克・科瓦里克 | Theseus Entering the Labyrinth 走進迷宮的忒修斯 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

VOJTECH KOVARIK (b.1993)
Theseus Entering the Labyrinth, 2021
Acrylic and sand on canvas
300×230 cm (118 1/8 x 90 1/2 inches)
Signed, titled and dated MMXXI on the reverse

Seducing the viewer with bold, sculptural lines and an exuberant palette, Vojtěch Kovařík’s Theseus entered the Labyrinth (2021) is a boldly modern representation of the Greek mythological figure. Summoned in an elegant fluidity of curves, the present work is a standout of the young Czech artist’s body of work. Executed on a monumental scale, the larger than life figure of Theseus is bathed in a luminous, otherworldly light, capturing the artist’s fascination with the figures of the ancient world. Theseus, the heroic figure who, according to legend, was the founder of Athens from Greek mythology. The most infamous myth around Theseus is his slaying of the Minotaur, a creature who is half man and half bull. Theseus, as is the subject of the present work, is able to traverse the monster’s maze by carrying a thread of gold given to him by the daughter of his enemy. This thread of gold, along with the hero’s sword, glistens with a hazy light in the present work, with Kovařík reimagining the scene in his distinctive idiom, blowing the figure up to heroic proportions.

When asked about his inspirations, Kovařík describes “Movies, music, heroes, monsters and animals, Greek mythology, film noir posters, mistakes, everyday life, the perfection of the human body (especially eyes, muscles, and fingers), and certainly works of other emerging artists inspire me the most” (V. Kovařík, quoted in Format Team, “Spotlight on Vojtěch Kovařík,” Format Magazine, September 5, 2018). With his larger than life proportions, Kovařík examines the stereotypes of masculine power and bravado that dominate ancient legend. This process of exaggeration, in which the artist’s figures are barely contained within the frame, infuses a humour and pathos to his compositions; their heroic postures becoming distinctly frail and introspective. Possessing a sculptural physicality informed by the artist’s formal training in sculpture, the smooth, marbled skin of the figure resembles a Henry Moore, an effect heightened by the artist’s use of a handmade spraying device, which creates an almost stone-like texture, resembling “the patina of a statue” (V. Kovařík, quoted in S. Bogojev, ‘Inside a Hidden Garden: A Conversation with Vojtêch Kovařík’, Juxtapoz, 26 February 2020). The statuesque figure of the present work emotes through gestures taken from classical sculpture, recalling ancient Greek statues. Reconstructing these figures which have become, over the course of millennia, integral to European and Western identity, Kovařík’s giant, masculine characters are reduced to caricatures.

Born and raised in the Czech Republic, Kovařík was inspired by the national socialist art strategies prevalent throughout the bloc before the collapse of the USSR. Adopting the principles of simplicity, striking use of color, exaggeration and clarity, Kovařík examines the traditions of socialist iconography by dismantling the power structures inherent to image making. In humanizing the Herculean figures of the ancient world that are so distant, Kovařík narrates the dilemmas of contemporary life, taking his place within a long tradition of contemporary artists who have mined the legends of antiquity: from Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly to Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. When combined with influences gleaned from his Czech upbringing, from Brutalism to Soviet-era posters, Theseus entered the Labyrinth is a compendium of archetypes, a painting of uncommon grace and elegance which typifies the very best of the young artist’s oeuvre.

Focus: Contemporary Art

1. Keith Haring

Untitled, 1982

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,800,000 – 25,800,000
HKD 18,525,000 / USD 2,371,655

Untitled (christies.com)

KEITH HARING (1958-1990)
Untitled, 1982
Vinyl paint on vinyl tarpaulin with metal grommets
69 1/4 x 71 7/8 inches (176 x 182.5 cm)
Signed and dated ‘K. Haring OCT. 1982 ⊕’ (on the reverse)

Andy Mouse, 1986

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 8,000,000
PASSED

Andy Mouse (christies.com)

KEITH HARING (1958 – 1990)
Andy Mouse, 1986
Screenprint in colors on paper, in four parts
Each: 96×96 cm (37 3/4 x 37 3/4 inches)
Edition: 2/30 plus 10 artist’s proofs
Each signed, numbered and dated ‘2/30 K. Haring 86’ (lower right)
Each additionally signed by the subject ‘Andy Warhol’ (lower left)

Keith Haring’s Andy Mouse series is a 20th-century pop art mastery that epitomizes the American identity and celebrates the blossomed friendship between two art giants—Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. The series consists of four large-scale screen prints with densely packed compositions, each camouflaging Andy Warhol as Mickey Mouse, the American spirit of joy and imagination. The spiky hair, firmly pressed lips, and fashionable sunglasses are reminiscent of Warhol in his Self-Portrait (1986; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) with Haring’s playful addition of Mickey Mouse’s iconic shorts, gigantic ears, and disproportionate boots. Hand-signed by both artists at the bottom edge of each panel, the quadrant is the first and only collaborative work between the artists, cherishing their shared ideology that forever changed the contemporary art scene.

Andy Warhol and Keith Haring at the Palladium, July 26, 1985. Photo by Ron Galella

New York City in the late 1970s was by no means graceful; the city’s fiscal crisis made it a dangerous nest for criminal activities and outlaws, yet the robust underground art scene attracted many young creative individuals who were seeking achievements outside the elitist art system. In 1978, Haring dropped out of college in Pittsburgh and moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts. His dynamic visual vocabulary immediately vibrated with the New York graffiti cityscape and robust punk subculture. Beginning in 1980, Haring transformed the New York subway stations into his playground as he covered countless empty advertisement billboards with his expressive, rapid rhythmic lines using white chalk. It was in the middle of surging crowds and the roaring noise of the New York subway that Haring refined his iconic symbols—radiant babies, barking dogs, dancing crowds, and crawling infants—a pictorial language far more powerful than spoken words. Warhol, on the other hand, has already achieved commercial success through his revolutionary pictorial testimony, such as the Dollar Sign and Quadrant Mickey Mouse. Warhol’s philology on American consumerism and the spontaneous energy of the New York graffiti landscape further fueled Haring’s imagination and artistic belief to create art truly accessible to the public.

Andy Warhol, Quadrant Mickey Mouse, 1981. Christie’s New York, May 13, 2015, lot20B. Sold for USD 4,533,000
© 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licen

2. Yoshitomo Nara

Portrait of AE, 2009

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 38,000,000
HKD 29,415,000 / USD 3,765,843

Portrait of AE (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B.1959)
Portrait of AE, 2009
Acrylic on canvas in artist’s chosen frame
Image: 80.5 x 65 cm (31 3/4 x 25 5/8 inches)
Framed: 101 x 86.3 cm (39 3/4 x 34 inches)
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Portrait of AE 09 Amelia Earhart’ (on the reverse)

Portrait of AE by Yoshitomo Nara glows in the dark like a piece of lustrous jade shrouded in mystery. Created in 2009, the painting presents the iconic ‘big-headed girl’, a symbol of the artist’s fully developed approach to portraiture since 2005. The eyes of the girl, sparkling like stars in the night sky, pull the viewer into a spiritual realm of the unknown. Never confined by space or time, this ever-changing world is where the sacred temple belonging to every child can be found. Here, one oscillates between two polarized emotions—joy and hope versus fragility and fear. The figure portrayed is Amelia Mary Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Later, during her attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world, she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Since then, Earhart has become an icon in pop culture and mass media. As such, this painting stands as a rare example in which Nara portrays an identifiable individual. Earhart appears here as a young girl wearing a flight helmet. Her signature round face shows no signs of ageing and carries a Mona Lisa-like, mysterious smile. Her eyes gleam through the dark like stars as if telling a story not only about the legendary American heroine, but also about childhood that connects us all. Universal yet specific, this exceptional painting speaks to the heart of the viewers, transcending all cultural backgrounds and age groups.

Nara was born in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture in 1959. Not far from his hometown was a US military base during the postwar period. Thanks to the military broadcast radio, he grew up listening to American music. This early access to American pop culture and the ‘American dream’ deeply informed his later creation. His portraits since the beginning of the 1990s often have a distinctive, oxymoronic twist. In the words of Michael Darling, ‘[t]he beauty of Nara’s work lies in its very multiplicity and deft manipulation of our predisposition to distrust images. He sneaks into our midst under the guise of cuteness, only to ply us with much darker visions of the world.’ A household name in the United States, Earhart has captivated generations of people with her great accomplishment and subsequent disappearance. In this regard, her story resonates greatly with Nara’s approach to painting: a singular image that reverberates through the myriad layers of emotional tension. Indeed, Nara’s artistic world is characterised by parallel entities: light and darkness, fascination and fear. If Balthus’ depictions of young girls that merges the magical, the classical, and the serene can be described as typifying the so-called ‘strange figuration’, then Nara’s Portrait of AE, in the words of the Japanese critic Matsui Midori, is an attempt that ‘give[s] priority to the emotional truth of the dream-vision.’ (M. Midori, ‘Art for Myself and Others: Yoshitomo Nara’s Popular Imagination’, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, Exh. Cat. Asia Society Museum, 2010, p. 13). Nara’s deceptively simple paintings may seem childish at first glance, but his unparalleled techniques in brushwork is substantiated by rich emotional texture, which in turn ‘enhances the style’s poetic concentration and its capacity to incur the viewer’s imaginative projection.’ (M. Midori, ‘A Gaze from Outside: Merits of the Minor in Yoshitomo Nara’s Painting’, in exh. cat. Nara Yoshitomo: I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me, Japan, 2001, p. 168)

Balthus, Thérèse, 1938. Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, Madrid © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

As early as 1996, Nara began experimenting with sculptures. As a medium, it also honed his sensibility to the volumetric relationship between light and shadow in his figural painting. In Portrait of AE, Nara juxtaposes the young girl’s face against an emphatically dark background in order to bring out her radiance. The result is so powerful that her angelic face appears to be ‘coming out of the pastel background buoyed up by luminous shadows’ (M. Midori, Ibid.)—to the extent that his work may be likened to the highly dramatic portraits of the soul painted by Baroque masters. In around 2005, Nara abandoned his formulaic method to painting and turned to a more naturalistic approach. More details of colours, light, and shadow are injected to the eyes of his figures. When asked about this conceptual shift, the artist explained, ‘[t]hey say human eyes are the mirror of the soul, and I used to draw them too carelessly. Say, to express the anger, I just drew some triangular eyes. I drew obviously-angry eyes, projected my anger there, and somehow released my pent-up emotions. [Afterwards] I became more interested in expressing complex feelings in a more complex way.’ (Y. Nara, quoted in ‘An Interview with Yoshitomo Nara’, Asymptote Journal, Hideo Furukawa, moderated by Sayuri Okamoto, November 2013).

Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Clara Serena Rubens, c.1616. Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna.
Photo: © LIECHTENSTEIN, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna/SCALA, Florence.

Prior to Portrait of AE, Nara already mastered this kaleidoscopic approach to painting eyes. This exceptional work, in particular, attest to his bravura in the medium as well as his meticulous attention to the minute differences in paint and brushwork, all of which highlights the clarity in the young girl’s deep yet luminous eyes. The key to this mesmerising effect is repeated painting until the pigment becomes one with the canvas. This creates a stark contrast to the surface-bound quality in his earlier works. In the past decade, Nara has slowed down and let the light and shadow come out in his work. These details turn his paintings into a meditative and reflexive whole that generates a profound feeling of immediacy. Earlier motifs such as cigarettes, knifes, and torches are gone—instead, his paintings become pure poetic explorations of lines and colours charged with the most intense of emotions. ‘When I work this way there’s a lot more of a conversation that I have with the image, or with the person who’s depicted in the image. That’s really me having a conversation with myself. It allows me to draw out parts of myself that I’m not even aware are there’ (Y. Nara, quoted in ‘Japanese artist has a taste for Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 9 March 2015).

Looking at Portrait of AE, one gets lost in Earhart’s penetrating gaze. There seems to be no escape for us, as we are led straight to her vision of fairy tales and dreamscape. Yet such a vision remains unattainable, conveying a sense of lament rooted in reality. As the philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto said, the gaze pertains to the ‘function of another unconscious eye’; it is an all-seeing eye that remains at a distance, ‘as if it were recollected vision’ (T. Yoshitomo quoted in Nara Yoshitomo: I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me, Japan, 2001, p. 171). Be it a dreamy vision or the ‘function of another unconscious eye’, Earhart’s gaze in Portrait of AE, powerful like the universe, bespeaks a surrealist dream that belongs not only to children but also grown-ups. As the art historian Kristin Chambers said, ‘[t]hrough the faces of his subjects, Nara invites us to linger, to leave our rules at the door and enter the more fluid and uninhibited world of children’ (K. Chambers quoted in, Yoshitomo Nara; Nothing Ever Happens, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, 2004, p. 26).

Rock You!, 2006

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 24,575,000 / USD 3,146,204

Rock You! (christies.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (B.1959)
Rock You!, 2006
Acrylic on wood board
162×162 cm (63 3/4 x 63 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated ‘2006’ (on the reverse)

As the composition brimming with bright orange paint meets the rock and roll slogan ‘ROCK YOU!’, Yoshitomo Nara’s Rock You! delivers a rhythmic visual impact that is direct and striking for the viewer. One of the few large-scale billboard paintings from the artist’s oeuvre, Rock You! depicts Nara’s iconic slant-eyed girl, who is wearing bandage on her forehead and an emerald green dress. Her resolute face emanates a mix of rebellion and innocence that is instantly captivating. Created in 2006, Rock You! marks an important milestone in Nara’s post-millennium work—the use of ready-made materials in his paintings. In the same year, the work debuted in the legendary exhibition Yoshitomo Nara + Graf: A-Z held in Aomori, the artist’s hometown. It was organized by Nara and the architectural and design group graf, in collaboration with the Yoshii Shuzō Brick Warehouse. It remains Nara’s largest culture jamming to date, and it signified the convergence between Nara’s art and the local community and the fan frenzy that followed (more than 13,000 volunteers were mobilized for the planning and production of the exhibition).

Rock You! exemplifies Nara’s painting style of creating emotional resonance with simple and direct imagery and text, and it showcases the artist’s command of ready-made materials such as the billboard and wood. The large areas of single-color paints highlight the texture of raw wood, while the artist’s subtle layering of different color blocks lends richness to the composition, instilling a sense of depth into what looks like a super flat composition. In addition, the layout of text and images reveals the artist’s ingenious perception of depth in graphic design. For Nara, the interplay between image and text is central to his visual vocabulary, and handwritten-style text often appears in his paintings. The neatly arranged, almost typographic characters in Rock You! are rarely seen among his works. It brings to mind American artist Ed Ruscha’s painting series that combines typography inspired by comic strips with iconic imagery. Yet, unlike Ruscha, Nara largely draws his inspiration from the aesthetics of the album covers that he encountered growing up. Raised in a rural village in Japan near a U.S. military base, he listened to a wide array of Western music on broadcast. The artist once said, ‘The song playing on the radio stunned me… My whole precocious self was shaken to core!’（Y. Nara, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, New York, 2010, p.258）During his formative years, Nara was obsessed with music and collecting albums. Album covers were an opening for him to become immersed in visual aesthetics, and they formed an important foundation for his artistic language in the future. The artist named his monthly feature for Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techō ‘In My Teens, I Studied Art through Record Jackets’. In 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a retrospective exhibition for Nara, which featured a special wall mounted with 350 vinyl records from the artist’s private collection that resembled a large collage . It demonstrates the deep connection between Nara’s artistic language and the spirit of popular culture.

Ed Ruscha, OOF, 1962. Museum of Modern Art, New York © Ed Ruscha

The composition of this painting not only embodies the precision of graphic design aesthetics, but it also encapsulates some fundamental ideals that the artistic pursues through his art. Since the 1970s, Nara has been an avid lover of non-mainstream music. Compared to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones which were immensely popular at the time, he was more fascinated by punk music and its anti-commercial, anti-establishment ideologies.

“That song lit a fire in my raw teenage emotions. It was the Ramones! And then the Sex Pistols, and The Clash, and Bob Marley… They gave me an answer to how I’d live my life from then on.”

Apart from punk music from the West, Nara also loved the work of Japanese musician Kiyoshiro Imawano. The zeitgeist embodied in the music became essential nourishment for Nara’s artistic creation. The rebellious little girl in Rock You! may be a reflection of Nara himself, and she is also ‘a symbolic representation of the dominant feelings of Japanese youth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, characterized by a sense of uncertainty about the future, vulnerability and a yearning for innocence preserved in the inner child.’ (M. Matsui, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, New York, 2010, p.13.)

Poster of Ramones and Meyce show at Seattle’s Olympia Hotel, March 6, 1977. Photo: Bill Waterson / Alamy Stock Photo

For the artist, ‘punk’ is not only a subculture but also a complete rejection of conformity. As one of the leading artists of Japan’s Neo Pop movement that celebrates subculture, Nara’s art resonates more deeply with the inner emotions of people than Pop Art which emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1950s. Art historian Miwako Tezuka explained, ‘While Nara’s images are intentionally devoid of symbolic meaning, the words fill in the gaps in the minds of his audience with poetry, sounds, and even the exalted feeling during live performances. They are mnemonic devices surrounding a single image and can be woven together selectively by each individual…’ (M. Tezuka, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, New York, 2010, p.95.) Rock You! is a perfect illumination of this empathetic power—the girl’s closed lips are rendered as a thin red line, and it meets the impassioned phrase in front of her that resounds like lyrics from a punk rock song, expressing the unspoken thoughts and unvoiced feelings of young listeners. Nara’s art focuses on the viewer rather than the artist, and the emotions and empathy that it evokes are a manifestation of art for the people. Rock You! is a seminal work from Nara’s artistic exploration, as it is a beacon of hope for the young, lost rebels that live within many of us.

I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, 2017

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 80,000,000 – 120,000,000
HKD 95,959,000 / USD 12,267,834

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, 2017
Acrylic on canvas
220.2 x 195.3 cm (86 3/4 x 76 7/8 inches)

A personal favorite of the artist that was chosen as the cover image of the definitive 2020 monograph, Yoshitomo Nara’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight presents a monumental, arresting and tender vision – a paradigm of the artist’s mature painterly practice. Painted in 2017, the present work was selected as the principle image of two of the artist’s most recent surveys; the first being Nara’s first international retrospective – held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, before travelling to the YUZ Museum in Shanghai, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Kunsthall Rotterdam – and the second held at the Aomori Museum of Art in Nara’s hometown. Ranking amongst the most important works by the artist to have ever appeared at auction, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is a defining masterpiece, encapsulating the artist’s career-long examination of the self and signature ability to capture the sentiment of each generation.

Enigmatic and ethereal, the present work returns to Nara’s iconic portraits of doe-eyed girls with a singular tenderness, evincing a sentiment which ultimately led to the work becoming a centerpiece of the artist’s most recent Museum retrospectives. Larger than life, Nara’s heroine emerges from a background bearing the singular shade of chartreuse, while her hair and clothes reveal softly iridescent kaleidoscopes of autumnal hues. The chromatic complexity of the painting exudes an absorbing golden glow reminiscent of the shimmering surfaces of Gustav Klimt, the layers of prismatic color appearing to both reveal and mirror the complexity of the deeply enthralling, seemingly luminous, figure and, most particularly, her eyes. Impeccably rendered and capturing the complexities of the artist’s signature protagonists, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is a museum quality work, with two 2017 works of comparable gravity now residing within the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Returning to his most recognizable motif with a more meditative and introspective aesthetic, the present work exemplifies Nara’s mature painterly practice. It was in 2012 that Nara began to soften the mischievous and hostile expression of his figures following the Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011. The utter devastation of the Earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Disaster brought Nara a closer spiritual connection to his home in the North of Japan, bringing the artist back to some of the seminal influences in his life. The childlike figure of the present work draws attention to the act of memory and its impact on present emotional states in that she embodies something of the artist’s own formative memories. The influence of music on the artist is well-established, being a vital component of both his working practice and the emotive spirit behind his art. Albums, and the memories associated with them, frequently inspire the tone, theme or mood of a particular work, with the present work taking its name from the formative 1974 album I WANT TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHTS TONIGHT by Richard and Linda Thompson. As the curator of Nara’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art describes, “Some works draw on the mood of an album, such as Richard and Linda Thompson’s I WANT TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHTS TONIGHT (1974). The album cover’s yellow-green palette with fiery red title letters spelled out on wet glass translates into Nara’s serene 2017 wide-eyed portrait, which clearly nods to the album with the same title.” (Mika Yoshitake, quoted in Arthur Nguyen, “Yoshitomo Nara: A Conversation with Curator Mika Yoshitake”, LACMA Unframed, 10 March 2021). Radiating with childlike wonder, the celestial gaze of the present work pierces the viewer with a sense of intimacy that belies its expansive scale, conveying an emotional naivety informed by the artist’s own formative memories.

Exemplifying Nara’s mature painterly accomplishments, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight reveals a patience in its making that belies the emotional complexity behind its creation. Exhibiting a formal harmony and sensitivity of colour and brushwork, the figure’s face takes on an almost aqueous quality as it is made and unmade by the traces of Nara’s brush. The delicate presence of the figure, her extremities made permeable under Nara’s intricate brushwork, communicates the artist’s own vulnerability. This emotional evolution which occurred in Nara’s work following the 2011 Earthquake was accompanied by a maturation of the artist’s formal techniques; where rounded edges and childlike colors, seen in such works as The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991), once defined his portraits of big-headed girls, he now plays with their contours by diluting his signature bold outlines.

THE PRESENT WORK, INSTALLATION VIEW, AOMORI, AOMORI MUSEUM OF ART, YOSHITOMO NARA: THE BEGINNING PLACE, OCTOBER 2023 – FEBRUARY 2024 / ARTWORK ©YOSHITOMO NARA

Retaining the material traces of its creation, we are able to glimpse traces of orbs, freckles, and swathes hidden beneath many layers of paint on the surface of the present work, a tonal richness which is only visible when one intimately engages with the work. The surface of the canvas makes up only a part of what comprises the work as a whole, there being a stark contrast between the final composition and the innumerable layer that comprise it. Behind the pastel colors of the figure’s skin and the rich, autumnal shades of her clothing and hair, there are layers of electric magenta and green which Nara then paints over with softer colors. Sharing a image of the present work in the artist’s studio on his Instagram, this richness of color is on full display: a field of bright magentas, blues, burnt umber and warm yellows are later altered with pale pinks, olive greens, and velvety browns that he applies with greater movement until a final coherent version appears. In its final form, these shades are only seen in shimmering traces that delicately emerge on the work’s surface in between the soothing yellows, greens and auburns. A masterful work and a high point of this mature series that explores the effects of color, Nara’s overpainting achieves a tonal depth which belies the flatness of the oil paint itself, producing complex values of tones, hues, highlights, and saturations.

From his earliest works influenced by German Neo- Expressionism, to the bold rebel girls of the early 1990s with their strong contour lines and sparse backgrounds, to the ethereal, sentimental gazes of his most recent series, we are now able to see the full arc of Nara’s big-headed girls. These figures, variously shy, aggressive, pensive, fragile and strong, have become amongst the most beloved imagery of the last thirty years, displaying a range of emotions that defy their ostensible kawaii countenance. A culmination of Nara’s career to date, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is an enchanting and joyous testament to Nara’s idiosyncratic artistic vernacular. A beguiling masterwork, Nara’s protagonist illuminates something universally relatable with her tender and transfixing gaze, epitomizing the unparalleled emotionality and captivating sincerity that situates Nara as Japan’s most internationally acclaimed living painter.

Untitled, 2008

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 35,000,000
HKD 33,120,000 / USD 4,234,211

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | Untitled 無題 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
Untitled, 2008
Acrylic on board
231.1 x 186.7 x 12.7 cm (91 x 73 1/2 x 5 inches)
Signed and dated 2008 on the reverse

Whimsical, rebellious and exuding a defiant naivety, Untitled from 2008 is an instantly arresting example of Yoshitomo Nara’s celebrated billboard paintings. Returning to auction for the first time in over a decade, the boldly rendered figure of the artist’s quintessential large-headed protagonist grips a guitar, her strikingly cherubic face snarling as she plays. Despite the guitar being an indispensable visual component of Nara’s oeuvre, only eight works from the acclaimed series of billboard paintings feature the artist’s heroine holding a guitar, with the present work’s twin composition, 1, 2, 3, 4! It’s Everything! (Aomori Version), belonging to the artist’s own collection entrusted to the Aomori Museum of Art. Epitomizing the very best of Nara’s oeuvre at a moment where institutional recognition of his work is at an all-time high, there being two museum retrospectives being held this year alone, the transfixing Untitled is testament to the unparalleled emotional resonance and unbridled angst that situates Nara as Japan’s most internationally acclaimed living painter.

Making its debut at the artist’s solo show at Blum and Poe Los Angeles in 2008, Untitled is a quintessential example of the artist’s beloved Ramona girl. Named in homage to the New York Punk band the Ramones, the Ramona epitomizes Nara’s use of the ‘minor’ child as a vehicle for oppositional and subversive allegory, be it the potential of music to influence and interrupt the world of a child, or the insight that such a child’s naivety can provide in a corrupted world. Confronted by the glowering scrutiny of the little punk rocker in her saccharinely sweet green dress, the little Ramona’s penetrating gaze speaks to our own discontents and aggressions against an imperfect world. The lonesome performer of the present work is concurrently innocent and violent, docile and unruly, illustrating the radical potential of subversive and anarchic youth, with Nara subverting the meaning of a familiar image, creating a dichotomy between visual expectation and reality. As Nara describes, “these works were born not from confronting the other, but from confronting [his] own self.” (Yoshitomo Nara quoted in, Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles 2020 (online)).

For Nara, music is a vital component of both his working practice and the emotive spirit behind his art. As a young artist in the 1980s, Nara gravitated toward the anti-establishment ethos of punk music, with lyrics from bands like The Clash and the Sex Pistols appearing throughout his artwork. A major theme explored in the historic retrospective being held in the artist’s home town at the Aomori Museum of Art this year is the nascent influence of music on the young artist’s career. Recreating the “Rock Cafe” opened in 1977 in Hirosaki that was frequented by Nara as a teenager to drink coffee and listen to rock music, this exhibition traces the lineage of what would become some of the artist’s most prolific painterly motifs. Growing up in rural Japan, it was album covers that provided Nara with an introduction to visual art that would go on to inform much of his work. In 2020, an entire room was dedicated to Nara’s expansive collection of over 350 vinyl records at the artist’s retrospective held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

YOSHITOMO NARA (RIGHT) AND FRIENDS IN FRONT OF ROCK CAFE 33 1/3 (HIROSAKI), 1977 © YOSHITOMO NARA

Visual elements such as guitars, microphones, and speakers are indispensable components of Nara’s oeuvre, with the incorporation of these elements allowing his work to resonate with other music fans, as well as sharing his own impulse for creation. An intimate part of his creative process, Nara would work “alone in his studio, usually late at night, with punk rock screaming from speakers. He chain-smokes as he concentrates on channeling all of his past ghosts and present emotions into the deceptively simple face of his current subject” (Kristin Chambers, Nothing Ever Happens, Cleveland 2004. p.26). Set against a wash of white, Nara creates an intimate state of solitude in Untitled, the archetypal child emerging, proud and independent, with her guitar as a symbol of individuality and silently expressed emotion. Characteristic of Nara’s unique artistic vernacular, these distinctly reduced backgrounds reveal an infinite space for self-reflection, with Nara’s universally recognisable figures representing the inner child and associated angst. In this content, the guitar becomes a symbol of creativity, a deeply personal and allegorical representation of the artist himself.

When Untitled first debuted in 2008, it appeared alongside an Americana, prairie-style wagon made of wood, representing a key stage within Nara’s creative career after the millennium. Beginning to collaborate with architecture and design collective graf on creating a series of small huts within exhibition spaces during the 2000s, Nara also began to work on a series of large size billboard paintings, which are essentially acrylic on wooden panels that can be shown outside of a gallery wall setting. According to the artist, this format of stepping away from typical white cube gallery spaces is fundamentally a challenge to the viewer’s experience. Favoring such objects as wood, signboard and cardboard during this period, the present work exemplifies Nara’s skill in conquering a vast surface of readymade materials whilst maintaining his own signatory aesthetics. Against the blush of the child’s cheeks the visible grain of the large wood panels surface, with almond-shaped kernels in the material reflecting the sharply delineated slope of her eyes. Flawlessly executed and instantly beguiling, Untitled is a testament to Yoshitomo Nara’s idiosyncratic artistic vernacular and universally relatable imagery. Nara’s heroine, with her snarling expression and defiant playing of her guitar, confronts imperceptible adversaries to reveal our own rebellious nature within. With Nara’s institutional recognition at an all-time high, the last three years have see major museum retrospectives at the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, Aomori Museum of Art in Japan, as well as the travelling exhibition at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden, and Hayward Gallery-Southbank Centre, London.

Guitar Girl on the Ice, 1994

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 18,600,000 / USD 2,377,908

Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 | Guitar Girl on the Ice 冰上的吉他女孩 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959)
Guitar Girl on the Ice, 1994
Acrylic on canvas
100.5 x 100.5 cm (39 5/8 x 39 5/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 94 on the reverse

Executed in 1994, Guitar Girl on the Ice is an exquisite example of Yoshitomo Nara’s seminal subject matter: the captivating, lone, childlike figure. Open-eyed and beckoning, this rosy-cheeked, infantile figure clutches a guitar atop a block of pristine blue ice – at once vulnerable and forceful, subversive and comforting, the present work captures the enchanting emotional appeal of Nara’s enigmatic oeuvre. Amongst the earliest works by the artist depicting a solitary figure holding a guitar, the present work marks a critical shift in Nara’s technique from the rough-hewn neo-expressionist style of his early works, towards the refined contour lines and delicate layering of pigment of the artist’s later works. Emerging to auction for the first time, the virtually unseen and exceedingly rare Guitar Girl on the Ice has remained in the same family collection for over twenty years.

Acting as a prologue to Nara’s landmark solo exhibition at SCAI the Bathhouse in Tokyo the following year, paintings from 1994 now reside in significant public institutions, including The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (as entrusted from a Private Collection) and the Aomori Museum of Art. It was in 1994 that Nara, with the help of gallerist Jörg Johnen, relocated to Cologne following his graduation from the esteemed Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. This move allowed the artist to begin working on large-scale canvases. A major theme of the artist’s historic retrospective being held at the Aomori Museum of Art this year is the artist’s love of music. This monumental exhibition held in the artist’s hometown includes a recreation of Jail House 33, a significant place in Nara’s early years. Opened in 1977, this “Rock Cafe” was frequented by Nara as a teenager to drink coffee and listen to rock music, influencing not only what would become some of the artist’s most prolific painterly motifs, but also his decision to perform as part of his own band. For Nara, music is a vital component of both his working practice and the emotive spirit behind his art, a relationship that was similarly explored as part of the artist’s retrospective held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020, in which an entire room was dedicated to his collection of over 350 vinyl records.

YOSHITOMO NARA, 2020. PHOTO CREDIT: RYOICHI KAWAJIRI.

Gazing out at the viewer atop a pedestal of ice, the central figure of the present work holds an acoustic guitar at her side, perhaps waiting for the right time to begin playing. Visual elements such as guitars, microphones, and speakers are indispensable components of Nara’s oeuvre, with the incorporation of these elements allowing his work to resonate with other music fans, as well as sharing his own impulse for creation. An intimate part of his creative process, Nara would work “alone in his studio, usually late at night, with punk rock screaming from speakers. He chain-smokes as he concentrates on channelling all of his past ghosts and present emotions into the deceptively simple face of his current subject” (Kristin Chambers, Nothing Ever Happens, Cleveland 2004. p.26). Growing up in rural Japan, album covers provided Nara with an introduction to visual art that would go on to inform much of his work. Set against a cavernous space of pearlescent luminosity, Nara creates an intimate state of solitude in Guitar Girl on the Ice, the archetypal child emerging, proud and independent, with her guitar as a symbol of individuality and silently expressed emotion. The setting of his young, solitary children against simple bare backgrounds would come to dominate Nara’s distinctive oeuvre, building a universally resonant visual lexicon that quickly gained a worldwide following.

George Condo

Green Eyed Lady, 2016

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 10,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 13,518,000 / USD 1,728,203

George Condo 喬治・康多 | Green Eyed Lady 綠眼女士 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GEORGE CONDO (b. 1957)
Green Eyed Lady, 2016
Acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas
70×66 inches (177.8 x 167.6 cm)
Signed and dated 2016

Conjuring conflicting psychological states of passion and rage, Green Eyed Lady from 2016 dances with frenetic, textural energy, a paradigm of George Condo’s knife-edge dance between the enticing and the grotesque. Within the fractured realm of the present work, abstraction and figuration collide with thrilling velocity before the viewer’s eyes; the moment one picks out a form, it slips back into the delirium of the whole. Teeth, eyes and hair collide and fragment, manipulating our ability to read the image before us. Extraordinary for its vibrant coloration, compositional intricacy, and rich surface of expressionistic brushwork, Green Eyed Lady is a paradigm of Condo’s remarkable ability to synthesize diverse influences into a singular and deeply compelling visual language. Steeped in the traditions of Cubism and the legacy of Picasso yet altered through Pop culture idioms, Green Eyed Lady demonstrates George Condo’s extraordinary command of image, color and composition.

Painted in 2016, the present work is a remarkable example of the artist’s celebrated Drawing Paintings (2009-present), so called because they marked a shift away from the oil paint that Condo had used up to that point towards a multi-media approach consisting of acrylic, charcoal and pastel. These intriguing works continue to draw on techniques and styles of his Modernist predecessors while exploring what he has called ‘abstract figuration’. Between the melee of exaggerated features and fragmented, abstract planes, flashes of the artist’s most important motifs are clearly discernible: Old Master portraits, his own brand of ‘psychological Cubism,’ cartoon references, and a commitment to constantly pushing the boundaries that separate figurative and non-representational painting. Evocatively recalling Pablo Picasso’s masterful Cubist facture through a visage which slowly melds, morphs and dissolves into a geometric being, Green Eyed Lady is a masterful example of Condo’s self-termed mode of ‘psychological cubism.’ Where Picasso radically shattered the picture plane to explore multiple viewpoints in the same moment, Condo ruptures his compositions to reveal the multifaceted and kaleidoscopic complexities of human emotion.

“And I guess that was the other thing I got from Picasso. It’s the idea of Cubism—but rather than seeing and depicting this coffee cup, say, from four different angles at the same time, I’m seeing a personality from multiple angles at once. Instead of space being my subject, I’m painting all of someone’s emotional potentialities at once, and that’s what I’d call Psychological Cubism.” 

Dividing the highly stylized and multitudinous ‘subject’ of the present work into multiple planes of experience, Green Eyed Lady is Jazz-like in its recapitulation of the human form. Blurring the traditional delineations between drawing and painting, finished and unfinished, flat two-dimensionality and sculptural depth, the present work builds upon years of refining and maturing his iconic figurative style. Isolating the eyes, teeth and ears against a mottled blue background, Condo’s application of red, orange, green and blue pigment seems to convulse from within the pictorial frame. Bringing together elements of beauty and the macabre with expressionistic brushwork in a kaleidoscopic sweep of colors, Green Eyed Lady invites the viewer on a journey into the depths of the human psyche and the creative process.

Untitled, 2016

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 3,556,000 / USD 454,615

George Condo 喬治・康多 | Untitled 無題 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GEORGE CONDO (b. 1957)
Untitled, 2016
Oil and graphite on linen
90×140 inches (229×356 cm)
Signed and dated 2016

A profoundly rich optical puzzle intersected by overlapping forms and expressive charcoal lines, Untitled embodies the irrefutable beauty, conceptual gravitas, and unparalleled technical finesse which characterize the very best of George Condo’s celebrated oeuvre. Executed in 2016, the present work presents a mesmerizing landscape of architectural figuration and compelling materiality which stands at the apex of the artist’s continued series of Drawing Paintings. Deftly combining the processes of painting and drawing into a single, gestural plane, these captivating works blur the boundary between figurative and non-representational painting with graceful ease. Exhibiting a rich textural surface and a sensual, pearlescent luminosity, Untitled revels in the unforeseen beauty and alluring, hedonistic entropy of Condo’s improvisational genius. Fusing the tactile with the visual, the present work’s lush impasto and bold, expressive lines presents an enigmatic and fractured tableau of delicate chaos. Drawing and painting a dizzying assemblage of forms and figures that collide and fragment, the viewer catches glimpses of recognizable human features; an arm, teeth, curvaceous hips and breasts, and ogling eyes which emerge only to be subsumed again beneath the mass of quivering bodies. A captivating large-scale composition, Untitled embodies Condo’s knife-edge dance between the enticing and the grotesque, sanctifying his place as one of the leading painters of his generation.

Charged with emotional intensity and psychological depth, Transparent Figures features a crowd of faint yet striking figures interwoven together in a kaleidoscopic composition. Within a Cubist topography, sensuous lines and lush passages of flat color overlap into a densely layered web of unrestrained abstraction, infused with a sense of rhythm and polyphony that stems from Condo’s spontaneous, gestural improvisations. Throughout the work, bodies are fragmented into disjointed planes of color along the same innovative vein as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. For Condo, it is the imaginary potential of portraits that defines the genre for him; as such, the artist tends to paint from his own mental snapshot or emotional reaction, rather than from life. The artist’s frenzied brushwork is anchored by sharp, fragmented lines evoking an enormous range of human emotions that collide into a riot of forms that bridge the gap between an emotional state and an imagined physical reality.

PABLO PICASSO, THE CHARNEL HOUSE, PARIS, 1945, OIL AND CHARCOAL ON CANVAS, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, MRS. SAM A. LEWISOHN BEQUEST (BY EXCHANGE), AND MRS. MARYA BERNAD © 2024 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Pushing the boundaries of his ever-evolving exploration of the human form and his unique ability to push the sculptural, three-dimensional form within the confines of a two-dimensional canvas, Condo ruptures the composition of the present work to reveal the multifaceted complexities of human emotion. Condo has established himself in the canon of Western art history as a master puppeteer of the human psyche, presenting to his audience forms that delight and repulse, amuse and sadden, welcome and alienate. Untitled captures the best of Condo’s unravelling and subsequent reassembly of various pictorial languages, which has cemented him as one of today’s most clever and cutting-edge contemporary painters.

Other Artists

KAWS

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 7,500,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 5,969,000 / USD 764,179

KAWS – Modern & Contemporary Art Evening… Lot 23 May 2024 | Phillips

One of the most incredible aspects of KAWS’s career and practices is his adventurousness: there is no method of making art that he is not willing to explore, giving him a vast range of tools and influences throughout his rich career. It began with graffiti on the streets of New York as a child, which continued with an illustration degree at its School of Visual Arts, integrating his own designs into the billboards and advertisements of the city. Collaborations with photographers, fashion designers, and toy manufacturers have let him cannibalize multiple forms of established media, injecting his morbid-yet-friendly aesthetic in a similarly disruptive manner and unsettling their cultural dominance in a similar manner to Warhol. In the exhibition PAY THE DEBT TO NATURE at Galerie Perrotin, it is portrayed as ‘a man captured and manhandled by Nature, which has reclaimed its rights’, yet just as the title suggests, the ‘debts to Nature’ is rendered as faceless and depthless cutouts, filled by single and unmoderated colors. Aside from a jagged, similarly monotone tree branch bending down on said man, the landscape and objects around them have little suggestion of the real world: amorphous blobs and stalagmitic downward spikes fill the black background.

By mixing this abstract free play with vaguely cartoon figures, KAWS shows us the shared freedoms of popular animation and high art, without being bound by either label. Both can defy standard realism and figuration to show us incredible new creative visions but can also become trapped and stale through mass-reproduction, academic sermonizing, and overfamiliarity. KAWS allows us to see their potential again: ‘This is not a simple mixing of the cartoon figure with the abstract, but a blurring of the two, bringing to light the abstract nature of cartoons, as well as the figural possibilities of abstraction’. His uncontainable oeuvre, constantly introducing new mediums and methods rather than keeping to the familiar, only heightens this effect.

KAWS’s signature graffiti tag on a MetLife billboard, 1995. Artwork: © KAWS

In this way, his painting continues to introduce revelatory new sights and connections, while carrying over a practice from the outset of his career. As his early graffiti work introduced unexpected colors, patterns, and characters into familiar commercial environments, his painting -executed with the same precise wildness- strands mass-media figures, broken down and recolored, in the world of the art gallery, where they can inspire and provoke again. For all his prestige, success, and global ubiquity, KAWS is still finding ways to make art feel exciting and new.

Liu Ye

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
HKD 9,450,000 / USD 1,209,832

Xiao Fang and Piggy (christies.com)

LIU YE (B. 1964)
Xiao Fang and Piggy, 2002
Acrylic on canvas
60×60 cm (23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed in Chinese, signed again, and dated ‘2002 Liu Ye’ (lower right)

One of the five paintings Liu Ye created with the piglet motif between 1999 and 2002, Xiao Fang and Piggy is an exemplar of the artist’s humorous and multivalent visual language. Forging an ambiguous, unrealistic visual language of his own that is at once cartoonish and naïve, Liu breaks away from the collective practice of his generation of contemporary Chinese art. Liu’s pictorial world is loaded with personal motifs and cultural mythologies as the artist strives to convey multi-layered content using distilled and concise visual lexicons. Against the fleshy pink background stands the protagonist, Xiao Fang who is cradling a piglet with a slipped breast—a posture that calls to mind the iconic religious motif of Madonna and Child—only with a baffling twist of a classical mythology into an erotic reverie.

Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, ca.1489. The National Museum in Krakow, Poland.

In the present work, the luminous palette and delicate layers of paint handling are teamed with the caricatured protagonist and humorous motif of the slipped breast—a scene reminiscent of an earlier work Madonna with Naughty Child (2000) by the artist, in which young soldier-angels are depicted playing their musical instruments in an otherworldly panorama. Here, the visual boldly proposes a biological nurturing scene between the two but also unlocks a multitude of interpretations. The piglet, on the one hand, could be recalling an early childhood memory of the Pig Monster ‘Zhu Bajie’ from the novel Journey to the West that Liu’s grandma used to read him almost every day as a bedtime story. On the other hand, the pig is an auspicious animal that embodies wealth, abundance, and prosperity in broader Chinese culture. In Xiao Fang and Piggy, Liu subtly blends childhood memory apropos of the wider cultural milieu.

Deeply influenced by literature as a child, Liu grew up in a literati family where his father was an author of children’s books and his mother was a language teacher. From his father’s hidden chest of banned books, the future artist took a liking to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a venerated classic of the postmodern era. Juvenile female figures eventually became an inspiration to Liu Ye, and a recurring subject for his paintings since the early 2000s. The girl in the present work carries an adolescent look, her facial features—lightly illustrated in a few strokes—are in the fashion of the immortal Miffy. Such character, in allegory to Lolita’s protagonist, entices the viewer into an enthralling, paradoxical world with its evocative, sensual appearance.

Leonardo da Vinci,  Madonna and Child (Madonna Litta), 1490. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. 

Richard Prince

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 7,493,000 / USD 957,939

Richard Prince 理查德∙普林斯 | Untitled (Cowboy) 無題（牛仔） | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949)
Untitled (Cowboy), 1999
Ektacolor photograph, in artist’s chosen frame
150.5 x 212.1 cm (59 1/4 x 83 1/2 inches)
Signed, dated 1999 and numbered 2/2 (on a label affixed to the backing board)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof

Utterly cinematic in both composition and scale, the present work belongs to Richard Prince’s Cowboy series, a body of work that today is perhaps the most well-known and critically acclaimed of the artist’s career. Executed in 1999, this monumentally scaled photograph presents in panoramic scale a extravagant scene of Americana: lit by the orange sunlight radiating through the cavernous space between two towering canyons, a group of cowboys are captured forging their way across a crystal-clear stream. Stunning in its quixotic vision of the American frontier, the dramatically defined silhouettes of the three lone figures are dwarfed by the grandeur of their environment—the light shines ecclesiastically through the gaping mountain gulfs, casting a sumptuously hazy amber glow on the vista that contrasts with the rich ochre ground. Appropriating and cropping images from advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes, it has been the image of the cowboy which has captured Prince’s attention so vividly for the entirety of his forty-year career. By re-appropriating images from Marlboro advertisements and presenting them unbranded, blown-up to spectacularly monumental scale, Prince not only challenges the nature of photography and its authorship but, more importantly, deconstructs and interrogates the romanticized images that shape American identity. Arresting, iconic and instantly recognizable, works from the series now reside in major public institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The image of a group of quintessential Marlboro men, astride their horses, lapping heroically across an icy blue stream, is unassailably Romantic, operating within a largely invented code of masculine idealism and pioneering Americanism that dates back to the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, where the American cowboy’s true historical origins are culturally marginal, rural, and predominantly Mexican, the western expansion of English-speaking traders and settlers gave way to a blurring of cultural traditions. Mythologized, glamorized and proliferated by Hollywood films and advertising campaigns, the stereotype of ideal masculinity in the form of the strong and lonesome cowboy became a carefully marketed icon readily available for consumption in the American collective imagination.

In 1974 Prince was working the nightshift for Time-Life magazines and clipping editorials to assist the staff writers’ research. He found himself drawn to the leftover advertisements and the familiarity of their imagery which we often take for granted. He began re-photographing the found advertisements through his own inquisitorial lens and removing taglines and slogans so only the aesthetic splendour of the images remained. Prince’s engagement with advertising and consumer culture was symptomatic of a larger art world trend, embodied by the ‘New Image’ movement of which he was a part. Emerging out of New York City in the late 1970s, New Image art embraced and cultivated a revitalized cultural unity between mass media and fine art. Among his contemporaries in what is now known as the Pictures Generation – Cindy Sherman, Richard Longo, Jack Goldstein and Sherrie Levine – Prince was and continues to be the most engaged with the power of advertisement.

The Marlboro cowboys have been the most persistent source of inspiration throughout Prince’s remarkably varied artistic output. The Marlboro Man campaign became one of the world’s most successful advertising ploys, running nationally from 1955 until 1999, the year that the present work was produced. Images of cowboys and the American wilderness helped Marlboro become the largest tobacco brand in the world in 1972, a position it’s retained ever since. As the quintessential American folk hero and the premier icon of American identity, the universality of the cowboy makes him the perfect vehicle for Prince’s oppositional photographic practice. In the present work, Prince has cropped the image to entirely isolate the protagonists in the expansive American plains. The artist re-photographed magazine ads featuring the Marlboro cowboy and stripped any particularizing elements that contextualized the image as an advertisement—logos, slogans, and cigarette packages were eliminated, leaving the image pure in its symbolic power. Re-envisioned by Prince, the cowboy is unveiled as both powerfully seductive and profoundly inauthentic. His relation to these image-readymades vacillates between Warholian fascination with pop-culture and criticism of the myths they propagate.

“I started taking pictures of the cowboys. You don’t see them out in public anymore — you can’t ride down a highway and see them on a billboard. But at ‘Time Life’, I was working with seven or eight magazines, and Marlboro had ads in almost all of them. Every week, I’d see one and be like, ‘Oh, that’s mine. Thank you.’ It’s sort of like beachcombing.”

RICHARD PRINCE, UNTITLED (COWBOY), 1989. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK © RICHARD PRINCE. IMAGE: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK/ART RESOURCE/SCALA, FLORENCE

Nestled beneath an expanse of crystal blue sky, arid, burnt orange ranges and snow-capped mountains, the lone rangers of the present work forge onward in an epic spectacle that both fetishizes the heroism of its protagonists while toppling the very mechanisms that proliferate the myth. Reveling in the magnificent grandeur of the image, the world of the gun-slinging lone-ranger, which came to be synonymous with the American Dream, was already disappearing when Prince first began working on the series; the allure of both cigarettes and the great American frontier was fading in popular imagination. Re-photographed and scrutinized by Prince’s incisive lens onto American culture in the very same year images of the Marlboro Man disappeared from production, the finely tuned construct of the cowboy as a nostalgic and rugged projection of American masculinity is dismantled, and yet remains extraordinarily powerful and utterly seductive.

Focus: Post-War

1. Yayoi Kusama

Buds, 1987

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 23,970,000 / USD 3,068,749

Buds (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Buds, 1987
Acrylic on canvas (triptych)
Each: 194×130 cm (76 3/8 x 11 3/4 inches)
Overall: 194×390 cm (76 3/8 x 153 1/2 inches)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘BUDS 1987 YAYOI KUSAMA’ (on the reverse of panel 1/3)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 1987 BUDS’ (on the reverse of panel 2/3)
Signed, titled, and dated ‘BUDS YAYOI KUSAMA 1987 Yayoi Kusama’ (on the reverse of panel 3/3)

Titled Buds, Yayoi Kusama breathed life into the organic, tadpole-like forms in the present work with hope and vitality. When observed up close, these pulsating forms represent the purest forms of life, evocative of swimming tadpoles or pullulating seeds, as curator Bhupendra Karia once observed them ‘as if her polka-dots [are] sprouting, or eggs [are] hatching into tadpoles’(R. Taylor, ‘Experiments in Sculptures and Painting 1980s and 1990s’, in F. Morris (ed.), Yayoi Kusama, London, 2012, p. 131). Sharing an identical composition with another piece titled Imagery of Human Being (1987), the present work evokes fecundity and growth—as each seed represents an innate equal possibility that invokes the justice of the origin of life where chances prevail. Though different by default, these original life forms coexist peacefully within the same realm, expressing inaudibly Kusama’s yearning hope for a ‘new Garden of Eden’. As we step back, the organic forms give a microscopic image of vivacity—a cosmic wonder where individual life grows and regenerates while remaining interconnected in the universe. While Kusama often explores the process of self-obliteration through laboriously painting the same pattern until herself ‘was reduced and returned to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space’  (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman and U. Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, New York 2000, p. 36), this particular composition diverges by illuminating the stage post-obliteration—a stage of life depicted in its nascent origin, insinuating the beginning of life.

Buds was painted in 1987, a pivotal year where Kusama had her first retrospective exhibition held in her homeland at Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan. After a decade of being hailed as ‘The Queen of Scandal’, it was the year where Kusama triumphed by the public with renewed perspective of her art practice. Around that few years the artist expanded her creative endevours beyond the realm of visual arts and ventured into literatures—seven novels were released between 1983-1990, demarcating a phase brimming with an abundance of ideas, thoughts, and productiveness, all of which casts a light on the formation of this new seed-like motif. It is one that alludes to her celebrated nets and polka dots, yet more tangible and associable. The present work earned its inclusion in the retrospective of the artist held in 1992 at the Sogetsu Art Museum in Tokyo, as well as the blockbuster solo exhibition co-organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Japan Foundation at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in 1999.

Joan Miro, La Poétesse, 1940/1959. Centre Pompidou, Paris © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2024. Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Audrey Laurans

Expanding upon her artistic practice in the late 1970s, Kusama employs acrylic in the present work, a soluble medium characterised by its fast-drying qualities which allows the artist to materialize her ideas with greater immediacy. The flatness the medium created also speaks to Kusama’s foundational training in nihonga. The overpopulated composition as well foretold the emergence of the Superflat movement championed by Murakami in the 1990s. Executed in simple lines and monochromatic colors, Buds translated an unspoken volume with their unassuming forms. By proliferating the most original form of life on her canvas, it insinuates subtly the concept of nurturing motherhood, traditionally associated with the female figure as the carrier of life. This approach can be seen as homage to the core practice of Georgia O’Keeffe, who is renowned for her tantalizing and sensual forms of nature. The influence of O’Keeffe on Kusama’s artistic development is profound and can be traced back to 1955, with Kusama recognizing O’Keeffe as ‘My First and Greatest Benefactor’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2011, P. 157). Both O’Keeffe and Kusama uncovers emblems of femininity in nature, exploring the multitudes of the female body and the correlation between female and nature.

With their unique resemblance to living organisms, the organic subjects present themselves as a collective portrait—a vignette of humanhood observed from afar. The grouping of these subjects, some more densely clustered while others appear dispersed, creates an undulating sense of rhythmic flow and movement on the canvas, fostering a fluid composition that harkens back to Kusama’s iconic infinity nets. Rather than being isolated, they intertwine and interact, forming a cohesive visual flow across three panels. This interconnectedness highlights the intricate and inseparable connection among the lives in the world, while at the same time examining the humility of each individual within the universe. ‘How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions, I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among millions’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011, P.23). As an allegory of life and hope, Buds represented Kusama’s unadulterated belief in the cathartic powers of art, both for herself and the viewers. Through skillfully crystallizing the abstract ideas of self-obliteration and healing with recognizable organic forms, the present work captures a rare image of a palpable motif that inhabits the pictorial space with a ferocious vigor interacting through its illusionary sense of movement, offering a transcendental, relatable, and immersive experience to audiences alike.

Fruits [EPSOB], 2011

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 23,365,000 / USD 2,991,294

Fruits [EPSOB] (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Fruits [EPSOB], 2011
Acrylic on canvas
112 x 145.5 cm (44 1/8 x 57 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘EPSOB FRUITS YAYOI KUSAMA 2011’ (on the reverse)

Painted in 2011, Fruits (EPSOB) unites Yayoi Kusama’s celebrated laborious, monochromatic Nets composition with her unparalleled interrogation of figuration. Profuse with luminous pigments and organic forms that are at once majestic and captivating, the nearly five-feet wide canvas also evidenced the artist’s newfound maturity at the turn of the millennium on the subject matter that she has been exploring since the 1970s. Freeing from gravity, the fruits camouflaged in Kusama’s nets and dots are levitating and pulsating above the utensil, calling to mind the rhythmic movement created by Matisse’s dancers; while the cherries, oscillating in the background, allude to shooting stars in the cosmos. Orchestrating the flow of energy and movement with her trademark motif, Kusama proposes an unorthodox way to perceive the world that is uniquely her own. The fruits are arranged in a way that creates a sense of movement and energy, as if they are dancing within the bowl and exuberated to the rhythmic background with the floating cherries. Through conflating abstract forms with quotidian objects, Kusama’s Fruit (EPSOB) creates a world of wonders in one of the most classical genres.

Left: Yayoi Kusama, Onion, 1948. Artist Collection. © YAYOI KUSAMA / Right: Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Fruit Dish, 1879-80. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Kusama began her career as an artist in the early 1960s in New York, a seedbed that fostered the Pop art movement centered with iconic figures like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, yet Kusama paved a completely different path. Her aesthetics of representational objects, though similarly inspired by imageries from everyday life and carrying a similar flattening and graphical quality as the mass-inspired Pop, are innately different from the concept and execution of them. Her figurative works are instead closely tied to her early training in nihonga—a reinvented style of traditional Japanese painting that absorbs its techniques and materials. In 1948, Kusama studied nihonga at Kyoto City Senior High School of Art. She was greatly influenced by the master Gyoshu Hayami and created one of her earliest still lifes—Onions (1948). It demonstrates her early, unconventional understanding of spatial arrangement. In the 19th century, art historian Ernest Fenollosa succinctly summarized five aspects of nihonga: ‘do not pursue realism like photograph; no shadow; there is a koroku (outline); the colour tone is not deep; the expression is concise.’ Kusama’s still life integrates some of these logics yet rectifies them in her own way. By the time she returned to Japan in 1973, Kusama started to develop prints that incorporate nets and dots as a scheme to illustrate different ordinary themes. Her highly stylized way of portraying still life and the arrangement of objects in the picture plane incidentally share a similar aesthetic with the Rinpa School, a historical school of Japanese painting dating back to the Edo period. Known for its highly patterned and two-dimensional approach to depicting nature subject matters in vivid colour, Notably, Rinpa masters often depict their subjects without contours, a technique called mokkotsu (‘boneless’) where the physicality of an entity can be traced only through color instead of line. By doing so, she elevates the printmaking process to a form of art that transcends mere reproduction, offering a deeper exploration of her artistic vision. Such technique lends tactility to the objects while unfolding a realm of undefined space in between. Kusama’s Fruits (EPSOB), on the other hand, uses nets as her medium to explore the undefined space between objects, while her application of vivid palette brings out the intrinsic properties of the objects themselves.

Like the post-impressionist Paul Cezanne, Kusama utilizes still objects as a means to explore the relationship between form, space and color. Both Kusama’s and Cezanne’s works introduced new understandings of still life, shattered the conventions of traditional representation and paved the way for a more subjective and individualized approach to depicting the world around us. As for Kusama, she explores new avenues for traditional art, specifically nihonga, which resulted in an unparalleled and innovative perspective on still life. Through her meticulous application of brushstrokes, a sense of depth and dimension are established on the canvas. Kusama painterly skill with nets and dots, combined with her self-obliteration concept, adding another layer to her works—evoking a sense of infinity and transcendence.

The concept of ‘self-obliteration’ that threads through Kusama’s oeuvre is an oath of life where the negative and positive becoming one. It conveys the artist’s desire to dissolve the boundaries between the self and the universe, inviting viewers to contemplate their own existence and place within the infinite cosmos. Kusama’s artistic skill and concept of self-obliteration, intertwined with her mastery of nets and dots, allow her to triumphantly conquer the concept of infinity and create artworks that are both visually stunning and philosophically profound. Through the process of eliminating physical matter with ‘dots’ and ‘nets’, Kusama constructs a concept of perpetual repetition and reproduction that she consistently adheres to. Fruits (EPSOB) brims with dynamic lines and traces that are not deliberately pursued for their representational means, but rather serve as symbols of her innermost states. By embodying the process of dissolving the self and object, she returns to the natural state of the universe. Through her mysterious and persistent artistic creation process, she creates a visual variation that is reminiscent of the brilliance of the universe or the origin of life. 

INFINITY NETS (ZGHEB), 2007

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 25,860,000 / USD 3,310,716

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary Art… Lot 12 May 2024 | Phillips

Pumpkin, 2000

Phillips Hong-Kong: 31 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 13,000,000 – 20,000,000
HKD 13,760,000 / USD 1,761,618

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary Art… Lot 11 May 2024 | Phillips

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin, 2000
Acrylic on canvas
37.7 x 45.5 cm (14 7/8 x 17 7/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 2000 Pumpkin [in Kanji] on the reverse

The present lot stands as a quintessential representation of Kusama’s mature practice. The work captures the viewer’s attention at the first glance with its stark, vibrant, and contrasting colors as well as the hypnotic patterns. Rendered in an almost surreal shade of yellow, the background and the polka dots are in a striking deep black, contrasting life and oblivion.

Most notably, the present lot encapsulates three most desirable Kusama elements: pumpkin as a subject, filled with polka dots, and rendered in an infinity-net background. The polka dots here are more than decorative, they are one of the mediums through which Kusama explores the concept of infinity. As the dots expand over and beyond the pumpkin’s form, they suggest a continuity that extends beyond the tangible world into the infinite. Kusama’s use of the pumpkin—a humble, earthy vegetable often associated with growth and harvest—further imbues the painting with themes of life cycles, rebirth, and connectivity with nature.

The crisp texture of the present lot, achieved through layers of thickly applied acrylic, adds a tactile dimension to the subject. The interactivity of her art and the command of her works upon viewers transcend the physical and emotional, which makes Kusama’s works ever so transformative. The pumpkin motif, as a result, acts as a portal through which one can explore the deeper questions of existence, reflecting Kusama’s lifelong fascination with the cosmic and the personal, the infinite, and the intimate.

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, Yayoi Kusama, 2016. Artwork: © YAYOI KUSAMA

Following her voluntary admission into a psychiatric institution in the 1970s, the Center for international Contemporary Arts Retrospective in 1989 marked Kusama’s return to the international art stage. This was also the same decade in which she created a variety of pumpkin works. In 2000, when the present lot was created, she not only received the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize as well as the Foreign Minister’s Commendation in Japan, but also participated in the Biennale of Sydney in where she presented inflatable works at the Customs House. Kusama’s influence on contemporary art extends far beyond her iconic elements. Spanning over seven decades, her career has seen a constant innovation in pushing the boundaries of what art can be and do. Her commitment to art has never wavered, despite the hardships she encountered in her personal life, and her art certainly seeks to serve both as her connection to the world and her escape from it.

Pumpkin, 2019

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 28,000,000 – 38,000,000
HKD 36,145,000 / USD 4,620,941

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin 南瓜 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin, 2019
Urethane on fiberglass reinforced plastic
120x138x138 cm (47 1/4 x 54 3/8 x 54 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated 2019

Voluptuous, idiosyncratic, and exuding a fierce vitality, Pumpkin (2019) is an archetypal example of Yayoi Kusama’s highly coveted fiberglass reinforced plastic pumpkins. Rendered in Kusama’s signature palette of yellow and black, the meticulously executed pumpkin sculpture measures a meter tall and a meter wide. One of the most admired and universally recognizable images of contemporary art today, Kusama’s pumpkins are central to the artist’s widely celebrated oeuvre, examples of which can be found in private collections and significant institutions around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC and the Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan. Few subjects are as central to the artist’s widely commemorated oeuvre as the kabocha is to Kusama, whose profound connection to the pumpkin memorializes early childhood experiences visiting her family’s seed nursery, and can be traced back to a burgeoning, meditative practice of painting pumpkins during her early artist residency in Kyoto. Feisty and universally adored, these pumpkins are an embodiment of optimism, serenity and joy – an artistic and symbolic motif which the artist repeatedly returned to for “spiritual balance”, inspiration and motivation (Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Infinity Net, Tate Publishing, London, 2011, p.76).

YAYOI KUSAMA, PUMPKIN, 2022 ©YAYOI KUSAMA（PHOTO : TADASU YAMAMOTO）/ BENESSE ART SITE NAOSHIMA, JAPAN

Cast in a luminous shade of yellow on a monumental scale, the dynamic patterns of black undulated dots of the present work induce a rhythmic, enthralling and lively optical sensation. Strategically and expertly placing larger dots towards the center of the curvaceous pumpkin while smaller dots slither towards the top and bottom of the gourd and gather towards the creases of the pumpkin’s skin, our eyes are drawn to the pumpkin’s stems. Here Kusama reverses the color patterning between the stem and the body of the pumpkin, and carefully endows the top of the pumpkin’s upward-turned stem with numerous small dots, leaving no element of the pumpkin without an intricate, repetitive design. Weaving an intricate balance between the matured pumpkin’s organic form, and the profoundly delicate and seemingly boundless idiosyncratic ribbons of dots, Pumpkin is the paradigm of the artist’s unequivocally consummate and impeccable oeuvre. The pumpkin is perhaps the most beloved of Kusama’s motifs, owing to their grounding and spiritually-balanced energy that Kusama recognized even in childhood. Recalling this period, Kusama notes that the practice of painting pumpkins instilled a meditative-like quality to her days, and the diligence and devotion to which she painted pumpkins during this time made a lifelong impression on her to maintain the subject throughout the rest of her career.

Kusama began to incorporate pumpkins into her dot-motif paintings, prints, drawings and installations, including the environmental installation Mirror Room (Pumpkin) displayed in 1991. The room was subsequently featured as the centerpiece in her exhibition at the Japanese Pavilion in the 1993 Venice Biennale, during which she presided over the room in polka-dotted magician garb and handed smaller takeaway pumpkins to visitors. Exhibition-goers were wonderstruck as they walked into a room covered from floor to ceiling in swaths of yellow and black polka-dots that seemed to stretch and proliferate into infinity as the result of a mirrored-cube placed at the center of the installation. For Kusama, the practice of covering objects in polka dots arose equally as a means of self-stabilizing, meditative repetition, as much as the production of profoundly exploratory experiences that could radically upend a distinction between objectivity and reality. Her ubiquitous polka-dot and pumpkin motifs forged a wholly unique aesthetic that articulated a rigorous, all-consuming language of repetition, accumulation and atomization that proffered an effervescent foray into the tenuous bounds between nothingness and infinity, selfhood and self-obliteration. The pumpkin, like polka-dots, became a form of self-portraiture that would continue to feature prominently in her works.

Exuding a sense of peace, serenity and vitality, Pumpkin imparts a feeling of abundance and triumph, much like the sense of harvest that the vegetable itself implies. For Kusama, bringing together the pumpkin and the polka-dot motif is as much a meditative practice of repetition as it is one that concerns the philosophical practice of disintegrating the bounds between finitude and infinitude that is profoundly personal to the artist as well. Kusama’s acute ability to weave deeply imaginative and interpersonal devotion towards pumpkins with a profound contemplation of her own experience cements her as one of the twentieth and twenty-first century’s most iconic artists, whose pumpkin sculptures are the exemplar of the artist’s luminescent career.

Pumpkin, 2016

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 24,000,000 – 34,000,000
HKD 24,045,000 / USD 3,074,022

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin 南瓜 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin, 2016
Tiles on FRP, glue and steel
230x230x35 cm (90 1/2 x 90 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2016 on the reverse

A monumentally arresting work of radiating brilliance, Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin manifests Yayoi Kusama’s paradigmatic pumpkin motif in an exceptional form that straddles two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture. A towering vision standing at over two meters tall, Kusama transforms the humble gourd into a mesmerizing jewel. Delicately encrusted in thousands of glistening tiles that blaze with a kaleidoscopic solar intensity, the present work is an exceedingly rare iteration of the artist’s most quintessential subject. Bringing together the artist’s signature pattern and favourite shape, Pumpkin is a treasure of museum-quality – indeed making its debut at the artist’s extensive retrospective at The National Art Center, Japan, in 2017 – which magnificently encapsulates Kusama’s dexterous skill and meticulous technique, as well as the singular vision that drives her legendary career. Distinguished from other iterations for its mosaic surface, it is the first from Kusama’s tiled-relief series of pumpkin sculptures to ever come to auction.

An effulgent tribute to the artist’s painstaking dedication and emblematic craftsmanship, the sculpture is utterly absorbing for its dazzling optical illusion and monumental presence. The prismatic patterns of shining tiles which illuminate the surface of the pearlescent black pumpkin recreate the tessellated net patterning that has characterized Kusama’s work for decades. Here, Kusama’s signature Infinity Nets are replaced by stunningly bright and dazzling ceramic pieces, yet the resultant whole maintains her obsessive and mesmerizing evocation of infinity, as the multitude of tiny squares rhythmically expand across the monumental undulating surface uninterruptedly. Bridging the artist’s celebrated pumpkin paintings and her freestanding sculptures, the present work encapsulates all of the artist’s major motifs in tessellated vibrancy. The mirrored surfaces of the mosaic tiles, much like Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, are continually receptive to changes in light and environment, suggesting the never-ending expanse of the universe, a profound concept that forms the theoretical basis for her artistic practice and epitomizes her inimitable style. The shifting purples, blue and blacks of the pumpkins body is contrasted with the bold yellow polka dots which wrap around the pumpkins form. Set against an electric red Infinity Net, itself formed through thousands of tiles, the curvaceous form of the pumpkin emerges with a dazzlingly visual narrative that recalls the hypnotic illusions of Op Art.

Similarly, the hearty, earthy pumpkin represents Kusama’s quintessential subject matter. An intensely personal and autobiographical shape for the artist, it has become a kind of self-portrait for the artist. Explaining the appeal of the Japanese pumpkin, or kabocha, Kusama has said, “I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual balance”(Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011, p. 76). A fascination that has extended from her earliest childhood, these pumpkins provided the initial inspiration for her signature pattern, the expanse of dots developing as a stylized version of the kabocha’s natural markings. Kusama has pursued the motif across myriad colours, scales, and media, and spent decades following it to the extreme logic exemplified here. Despite the commonality of Kusama’s most fertile subject, which the artist believes does “not do not inspire much respect” (Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, London 2011), Kusama elevates the Pumpkin to the status of a holy relic – a rich, dynamic, and deeply introspective work of resplendent brilliance.

YAYOI KUSAMA, ROOM (PUMPKIN), 1991. COLLECTION OF HARA MUSEUM CONTEMPORARY ART, JAPAN © YAYOI KUSAMA

Instilled with a dynamic energy that animates the entire work through its pattern of glittering ceramic tiles in electric hues, Pumpkin exudes a fierce vitality and abundance. A particularly distinctive creation straddling the realms of painting and sculpture, the present work is utterly absorbing for its dazzling optical illusion and monumental presence. Characterized by her ability to express the dialectic relationship between infinite and finite space, Kusama’s meditative practice of repetition is at once profoundly personal, and universally admired. Weaving together deeply imaginative iconography with a mediative exactitude, Kusama’s pumpkins are a consummate example of the career of one of the twenty-first century’s most iconic artists.

Portrait, 2015

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 38,000,000 – 48,000,000
HKD 41,590,000 / USD 5,317,054

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Portrait 肖像 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Portrait, 2015
Acrylic on canvas
146 x 112.8 cm (57 1/2 x 44 3/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2015 on the reverse

An exuberant and singularly iconic work, Yayoi Kusama’s Self-Portrait from 2015 epitomizes the cosmic ascent of one the 21st century’s most distinguished artists. Rare, unique and historically significant, Self-Portrait was the first work to be displayed upon entering the artist’s celebrated 2022 exhibition at M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Kusama’s largest and most prestigious retrospective to date. Although hung first, Self-Portrait stood alone as the emotional crescendo of the artist’s seven decade career. Among a small number of self-portraits by the artist, Kusama is instantly recognizable by her blunt bobbed hair, dissolving into the expansive universe and infinite space of her eponymous patterning. Immersed by her most characteristic motifs – from polka dots, Infinity Nets, pumpkins and tubular forms – Self-Portrait is the first yellow and black frontal portrait in acrylic, the artist’s chosen medium since the 1980s, to ever have been offered at auction.

Executed in the artist’s signature black and yellow colour palette, a visual echo of her Pumpkin paintings and sculptures, Self-Portrait exudes a luminous quality, the bright yellow of the figure’s surface cutting through the shadowy blackness of Kusama’s all-over scaled tessellations. An iconic iteration of another of the artist’s instantly recognisable motifs, the surrounding net patterning is so dexterously rendered that the canvas hums with a rhythmic intensity. The distinctive texture of Kusama’s polka-dots flow and recede hypnotically, submerging the figure’s face and torso beneath the ever expanding and almost limitless multiplicity of the artist’s practise. Kusama’s career-long investigation into cosmic infinity and painterly preoccupation with the push and pull between pictorial and cosmic space can be acutely felt in the present work. Repetition, she explains, allows for a kind of release: “I make them and make them and keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this ‘obliteration’ (Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, London 2011, p. 47).

RIGHT: YAYOI KUSAMA, SELF-PORTRAIT, 1950. COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST © YAYOI KUSAMA. LEFT: YAYOI KUSAMA AT THE AGE OF TEN IN 1939. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Despite their rarity, there are numerous examples that corroborate the significance of self-portraiture with the artist’s oeuvre. Even those works which do not depict the artist can ultimately be described as about Kusama, with her depictions and installation of pumpkins widely seen as functioning as both an allegory and a form of self-portraiture for the artist. In a formal studio photograph from around 1939, Kusama, aged about ten, faces the camera holding a bouquet of dahlias, each flower as large as her head. Born in Nagano in 1929 to a family of seedling merchants, Kusama has frequently spoken of and imitated through her art the permeable boundary between the artist’s self and her surroundings, an expression similarly conveyed in the 1950 work Self-Portrait. Amongst the earliest works to carry the title, Kusama portrays her face as a pink dot in the center of the canvas, surrounded by wavering, petal-like motifs – a pair of lips the only discernible human feature. In depicting herself as a sunflower in this early work, Kusama was establishing a view that the body is not fixed to a particular form, that it can be transformed and remade in various guises. During her time in New York City in the 1960s, as she was creating her breakthrough series of Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation sculptures, Kusama’s portraiture and self-presentation expanded upon her signature philosophical notion of self-obliteration, as these works were often titled. Underlining her expansive vision of the universe shown in the Infinity and Accumulation series, Kusama began to fashion a private subjectivity whilst promoting a public image, a persona which has become one the most instantly recognizable in the world.

FRIDA KAHLO, SELF-PORTRAIT WITH THORN NECKLACE AND HUMMINGBIRD, 1940 / COLLECTION OF THE HARRY RANSOM CENTER, TEXAS © 2024 BANCO DE MÉXICO DIEGO RIVERA FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST, MEXICO, D.F. / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Frequently the title of a Kusama work does not include a first-person pronoun but rather a generic third person, such as ‘girl’ or ‘woman’, with these subjects often functioning or alluding to extensions, guises, or avatars of the artist. The archetypal figures in these paintings seem to be protected by flora and fauna-linking them back to the childhood photograph of Kusama surrounded by flowers, or engulfed and consumed by natural forces. Like Narcissus transformed into a garden of tiny flowers, Kusama disappears into another aspect of her manifold selves. Frontal images early in her career depict the point of merging between her vanished self and the object she became, most notably the flower. In later portraits, this would become a clearer transformation into a humanoid cat or monkey face. In recent years, a distinctive modality has emerged in the artist’s self-portraits that depict the artist squarely from the front, stoical yet bearing an emotional intensity. These works act as a symbolic substitute for the artist’s famed visage, hairstyle, and clothing as a composition of the artist’s signature motifs, such as polka dots, Infinity Nets, pumpkins and the tubular forms found in the artist’s earliest Accumulation sculptures. The present work typifies this late series of self-portraits, with Kusama shown submerging within the iconography and visual universe of her own work, becoming one with herself, the universe and her own artistic history over the last seven decades.

Self-portraiture is, of course, a well-established genre in art. In the visual lexicon of the last century, however, Kusama’s self-portraits find their equal with the most archetypal examples, which include those by artists who self-consciously portrayed themselves as revolutionaries resetting the course of the progress of art. Whilst Andy Warhol’s Marilyns, Elizabeth Taylors, self-portraits may be the most notorious of this kind, Kusama finds a closer comparison with Frida Khalo and Vincent van Gogh in terms of autographic and spiritual significance. What sets Kusama’s self-portraits apart is that there is a strong sense that the self is present but on the verge of disappearing and transforming into another being, all at once. As psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchel describes, “Kusama’s artworks show the oscillation, or even simultaneity, of her insistent, excessive presence either as herself as only an image of herself (often a photograph) or as some other object or image-an animal or a plant-and her obliteration of herself as a person” (Juliet Mitchell, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Flower’, in Frances Morris, Ed. Yayoi Kusama, London 2012, pp. 192-197).

YAYOI KUSAMA WITH HER WORKS ‘RED STRIPES’ AND ‘BLUE SPOTS’ IN 1965 / PHOTO © MARIANNE DOMMISSE
ARTWORK © YAYOI KUSAMA

A glorious paradigm of Kusama’s legendary creative journey, Self-Portrait is magnificently emblematic of her radical, transformative and accomplished oeuvre. Embodying the iconic, charismatic and highly personal motifs which have become synonymous with the artist herself, Self-Portrait is a testament to decades of astonishing dedication to creation, technique, and a singular artistic vision. Vibrating with luminous energy, the Kusama of the present work is an amalgamation of the most-beloved pumpkin, the radical connectivity of the Infinity Nets series and the accumulated and expansive polka-dot pattern, submerging and emerging from a cosmic vision of her own making. Weaving together deeply imaginative iconography with a mediative exactitude, Kusama’s Self-Portrait is a consummate pinnacle of the career of one of the twenty-first century’s most iconic artists.

Pumpkin (AAP), 2001

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,800,000 – 4,200,000
HKD 5,842,000 / USD 746,868

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin (AAP) 南瓜（AAP） | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Pumpkin (AAP), 2001
Acrylic on canvas
22.7 x 16 cm (9 x 6 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese, and dated 2001 on the reverse

“I adore pumpkins. As my spiritual home since childhood, and with their infinite spirituality, they contribute to the peace of mankind across the world and to the celebration of humanity. And by doing so, they make me feel at peace.”

2. Andy Warhol

Dollar Sign, 1981

Phillips Hong-Kong: 1 June 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,800,000 – 3,800,000
HKD 3,048,000 / USD 390,219

Andy Warhol – Modern & Contemporary Ar… Lot 128 June 2024 | Phillips

Flowers, 1965

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 62,800,000 – 92,800,000
HKD 66,625,000 / USD 8,529,638

Flowers (christies.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Flowers, 1965
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
82×82 inches (208.3 x 208.3 cm)
Numbered ‘PA 53.002’ (on the stretcher)

With its huge central bloom ablaze in glorious yellow, the present work is a rare and spectacular Flowers painting by Andy Warhol. It is exceptional among the series, standing as the larger of just two examples of this single-flower composition. One of a group of seven monumental Flowers canvases Warhol made in 1965, it marks the climax of his initial phase creating these works. At 2 x 2 meters, it rivals the visual grandeur of the abstract Color Field painting that was in vogue in New York at the time. Its figurative content, however—transformed by Warhol from a found photograph to a bold and luminous icon in silkscreen and paint—is alive with significance, touching on visual languages from patterned 1960s décor to art-historical still life painting. Emblematic of a key moment in Warhol’s practice, the work was included in his seminal 1965 survey at the ICA Philadelphia—his first museum show, whose opening was famously mobbed by legions of fans—and also in his major posthumous retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1989, which travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hayward Gallery, London and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Warhol’s Flowers series began following a suggestion by the curator Henry Geldzahler, who paid a visit to the artist’s Factory studio in mid-1964. ‘… I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death’, recalled Geldzahler. ‘I said, “Andy, maybe it’s enough death now.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “ Well, how about this?” I opened a magazine to four flowers’ (H. Geldzahler quoted in T. Scherman and D. Dalton, Andy Warhol: His Controversial Life, Art and Colourful Times, London 2010, p. 225). The magazine in question was the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography, in which a spread by editor Patricia Caulfield demonstrated the effects of different Kodak color processes on a photograph of hibiscus flowers. Warhol heavily manipulated this found image to create the ensuing silkscreen series. Working collages show how he cropped it to a square composition—the original depicted seven flowers, contrary to Geldzahler’s memory—repositioned one of the blooms and duplicated the better-defined stamens. He had his assistant Billy Name run the design through the Factory’s new Photostat copier multiple times to flatten its definition, before sending it to his screen-maker to be enlarged into screens of different sizes. This complex process resulted in a striking image of petals starkly silhouetted against a dark, grassy background.

Warhol used these screens to create Flowers canvases varying from just 5 x 5 inches to mural-sized. The flowers were filled in with a variety of different colors, and the backgrounds variously painted green or left black-and-white. The largest early examples are wide-format compositions showing two flowers, effectively halving the four-flower image. Warhol made two such works in 1964 using a single 82 x 160-inch screen, which was later possibly damaged or rejected as too cumbersome. His large Flowers of 1965 were instead made from pairs of 82 x 82-inch and slightly smaller 72 x 72-inch screens. Uniquely among this group, the present painting was created from a single 82 x 82-inch screen. Warhol painted both the green background and the yellow flowers by hand, using a red masking film known as Rubylith to stencil their shapes, before finally applying black ink through the screen. The resulting surface features visible brushstrokes that contrast with the more mechanical layer of stenciled black, which sits gently off-register against the flowers’ outlines.

Warhol debuted the Flowers series in his first exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in November 1964. The show was a triumph for Warhol, who had set his sights on the prestigious gallery early in his career. ‘They are like cut-out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet’s lily-pond’, enthused David Bourdon. ‘… The flower paintings are very beautiful. The artist is a mechanical Renaissance man, a genius’ (D. Bourdon, ‘Art: Andy Warhol’, The Village Voice, 3 December 1964, Vol. X, No. 7, p. 11). The Flowers were next shown in May 1965, when Warhol staged his first European exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. There they were seen by the young American art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who later recalled the encounter as life-changing. ‘They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense’, Schjeldahl said. For him, the Flowers seamlessly resolved the formal debates around abstraction, flatness and surface that were dominating contemporary discussions of painting. ‘… That’s why we reach for the word “genius.” Genius is what goes, “That’s not a problem.” He sees clearly. He just does it’ (P. Schjeldahl quoted in T. Scherman and D. Dalton, ibid., p. 227). Years later, Schjeldahl would open his review of Warhol’s posthumous retrospective at MoMA in 1989—which featured the present painting—with the lament that ‘There aren’t enough Flowers’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Warhol’, in Hot Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988 – 2018, New York 2019, p. 8).

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888. The National Gallery, London.

The present work had a still more memorable outing as part of Warhol’s legendary first museum retrospective, which opened to the public at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, on 8 October 1965. Following a boisterous preview the night before, curator Samuel Green—who had organized a major publicity drive for the exhibition—had taken the precaution of removing most of the paintings from the walls, leaving only a handful of works including some Flowers and grocery-carton sculptures. Over one thousand visitors crowded into the galleries for two hours before the arrival of Warhol and his associates, including actress and ‘It’ girl Edie Sedgwick, who had become part of the Factory entourage earlier that year. They were mobbed for autographs. ‘Escorted by campus police, the Warhol party swept back to the front room where they scrambled up a corner stairway’, recounted David Bourdon. ‘“We want Andy,” the crowd chanted. “Well now I’ve seen Andy Warhol,” one boy crooned, while another screamed, “Get his clothing!”’ (D. Bourdon, ‘Help!’, The Village Voice, 14 October 1965, Vol. X, No. 52, p. 13). The group eventually escaped when a security team broke through the boarded-up ceiling above. A remarkable photograph from the scene captures Sedgwick high up the staircase, trailing the long sleeves of her pink Rudi Gernreich dress over the heads of the crowd. The present painting, with its distinctive single bloom, can be seen on the wall behind.

With its exceptional composition and spectacular scale, the present painting distils the complexities of Warhol’s vision into a luminous, unforgettable image. The work is at once an appealing picture of a flower and a bold composition of pure shape and colour: a subversive riff on a decorative motif, and a floral firework thrown into the art-historical canon. In 1965, visiting Paris for the Sonnabend exhibition, Warhol declared that he was giving up painting to focus on making movies. While that never came to pass, the Flowers remain testament to a vital moment of change, transition and growth in his work. The present work’s yellow petals glow with an almost solar radiance, capturing the blossoming of Warhol’s Pop practice into brilliant new life.

The Two Sisters (after de Chirico), 1982

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
HKD 9,144,000 / USD 1,169,010

Andy Warhol 安迪 · 沃荷 | The Two Sisters (after de Chirico) 兩姊妹（隨德·基里科） | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
The Two Sisters (after de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50 1/4 x 41 3/4 inches (127.5 x 106 cm)
Signed and dated 82 on the overlap

Mapped out as a shimmering vision of mechanically repetitive, technicolor frames, the iconic The Two Sisters (after de Chirico) orchestrates a collision of two of the greatest artistic minds of the Twentieth Century: Andy Warhol and Giorgio de Chirico. Enacting an astute philosophical contemplation on the power of image-making within the modern age, this work forms part of a series which saw Warhol return to ‘art’ as a subject. Warhol thus shifted the role of the artist from the position of sole creator to one of keen observer and cultural arbiter. As a technically daring and visually stunning embodiment of this claim, The Two Sisters (after de Chirico) holds a poignant place in the history of twentieth-century image making. Here, Warhol repeats and re-imagines de Chirico’s Oreste e Pilade (1962) four times in striking swathes of brilliant reds, greens, blues, and yellows. As a part of Warhol’s magnificent Art from Art series, the present work appropriates de Chirico’s metaphysical mannequin heads, only to reframe them in a distinctly Warholian aesthetic of bold colours and simplified black accents.

Vertical strands of acidic yellow, greens and blues clash with horizontal reds and turquoises marking the mechanical linearity of Warhol’s silkscreen technique. Instantly attributable to the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, here the image is defamiliarised through impersonal repetition, as if it has been cut from a longer string of prints, or perhaps the negative of a film. By the time the present work was produced, Warhol had already achieved fame and fortune for his stylised silkscreen paintings of the 1960s and ’70s, which transformed images into high-art icons. He endlessly and obsessively repeated the likeness of celebrities, Pop culture icons, and the mass media images over and over again, and in so doing, re-enacted the kind of mechanical reproduction of images that were splashed across the covers of newspapers and television screens. This modus operandi took on another dimension when Warhol began appropriating images not only from contemporary mass culture, but also from the Old Masters and modern giants of the historical art world itself. Warhol first reproduced an iconic art historic image after Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was exhibited in New York in 1963 for the first time, certifying that artworks are also party to the fame that fascinated Warhol endlessly. However it was not until the early 1980s that he returned to this theme, taking into his visual repertoire Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, as well as works by Lucas Cranach The Elder, Raphael, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch.

“[de Chirico] viewed repetition as a way of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common… The difference? What he repeated regularly, year after year, I repeat the same day in the same painting.”

One of the key influences of Warhol’s artistic style is the media. The artist is particularly interested in the way in which images and stories are sensationalized and commodified, transforming everyday events into headline news. He recognized their ability to make or break a person’s reputation and used this idea to create his own brand of art. It was this fascination with the tabloids that led Warhol to create this body of work after de Chirico. In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited a de Chirico retrospective, inspiring Warhol to appropriate the work of this Modern Italian master, and producing his own set of After de Chirico paintings that were shown at the Campidoglio in Rome later that year. Similar to Warhol, de Chirico also had the tendency to repeat certain figures and fictions across his body of work – such as mannequins, trains, and empty cityscapes with elongated shadows. In his late years, de Chirico notoriously proceeded to replicate his own masterpieces in full. Oreste e Pilade was itself duplicated by de Chirco as Les Masques in 1973, and then by Warhol via the present work only ten years later in 1982. Both used repetition as a means to explore the relationship between art and mass production, questioning the uniqueness of the artwork in an age of mechanical reproduction. What’s more, both artists were known for their use of bright, bold colors. If Warhol’s Pop Art was characterized by its bright, eye-catching hues, de Chirico’s compositions often featured vivid shades of blue, red, and yellow which are mirrored in the present composition.

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, ORESTE E PILADE, 1962 © 2024 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / SIAE, ROME

Warhol’s artistic piracy crops de Chirico’s original painting and selectively plucks out certain elements from it, so that they become further emphasized in The Two Sisters (After de Chirico). The blues, reds, greens, and yellows that are carefully contained within the lines of de Chirico’s mannequin heads are given further vibrancy and dynamism by Warhol, who takes this colour combination and aggressively silkscreens it across the entire canvas, disobeying all lines and logic. Moreover, this painting confers a new meaning to the subject represented by de Chirico. The mannequin, a lifeless figure crafted from wood or plaster, has long captured the imagination of artists across a variety of mediums. In the realm of surrealist art, the mannequin takes on a specific significance, serving as a symbol of the uncanny, and the enigmatic. Many artists such as André Masson, Salvador Dali as well as Hans Bellmer sought to explore the boundaries between reality and the imaginary, the animate and the inanimate through their representation of the mannequin. However, in light of the Pop Art movement, the mannequin as a perfect, unblemished surface constitutes a symbol for the mechanization and dehumanization of modern society, as well as mass production. In this way, Warhol reunites the theme of the mannequin with its commercial nature.

In 1989, two years after his death, the last quarter of the Twentieth Century would come to be known as the ‘Age of Warhol’, with Robert Rosenblum claiming Warhol was not only a part of art history, but that he should be remembered as art history – a bold statement that confirms The Two Sisters (After de Chirico)’s status as an icon of art history itself. The present work is both a celebration of de Chirico’s artistic legacy and a fervent expression of Pop Art, evoking an artistic lineage between two artistic greats in the final years of the artist’s life, establishing his legacy as a titan of twentieth century image making.

3. Other Artists

Roy Lichtenstein

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 15,800,000 – 25,800,000
HKD 17,557,000 / USD 2,247,728

Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit (christies.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit, 1974
Acrylic, oil, and graphite on canvas
40 1/8 x 54 inches (101.9 x 137.2 cm)
Signed and dated ‘rf Lichtenstein ‘74’ (on the reverse)

A superlative example from Roy Lichtenstein’s definitive Still Life series, Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit highlights the bold perceptual and art-historical play that characterizes the artist’s lauded career. Painted in 1974, the present work depicts a scene familiar to the rigorous tradition of nature morte—fruits pointedly arranged and presented atop a table. Lichtenstein’s innovative refashioning of this venerated historical genre is revealed in his use of vivid, high-keyed colors and commercial painting style. Epitomized in Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit, Lichtenstein’s transformation of mundane household items into larger-than-life icons of contemporary culture imbues his images with a dazzling sense of whimsy and irony.

In the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s pictorial fascination was deeply influenced by America’s post-war pulp culture. The consumer boom born out of this climate inspired the artist to seek source material from his immediate environment—mass media messaging. Along with his contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein was acutely aware of the power of such images to arrest our attention. In the following decade, Lichtenstein extended this focus on commercial image production to encompass the great ‘isms’ of art history; he shifts away from commenting on the very nature of painting to instead different styles of painting. During the definitive period of the 1970s, he delves into the time-honoured European artform of still life painting. Although originating in 16th century Europe, this style of painting has continued to fascinate and provoke artists throughout history to reimagine the possibilities of depicting slivers of mundane life. From Realism as with Courbet, to Expressionism with Soutine, then Cubism with Picasso, up until today with ultra-contemporary artists such as Hilary Pecis. Reconstructed with the polished precision of commercial image production, Lichtenstein’s Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit proclaims the artist’s position at the forefront of the Pop Art movement. His convergence of high art—the historically important subject of the still life—with low art—mass culture imagery—imbues the present work’s nondescript fruits with unprecedented prominence.

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. III, with Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black, 1929 ©2024 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust 

In the present work, Lichtenstein’s musings on the tradition of the nature morte play out on a larger-than-life scale; each piece of fruit stands out as an individual entity as it rests inconspicuously atop a nondescript table devoid of any representational perspective or depth. According to the artist’s signature Pop Art style, everything is simplified, flattened, and foreshortened. The present work captures the virtuosic flourishing of Lichtenstein’s technique during this exploratory period. The charged spaces between each element are filled with palpable tension, creating a sense of heightened drama within the composition. Lichtenstein’s deliberate choice to eliminate any semblance of traditional perspective reinforces the artificiality of the image, underscoring the influence of mass-produced imagery on our perception of reality. The present work’s still life objects are no longer fragile ephemeral objects but bold contemporary icons. Reduced to a set of basic circular geometries, the components of Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit are signified purely through shape and colour, stripped of all textural idiosyncrasies and spatial contours. His evocation of canonical neo-plastic vocabulary à la Piet Mondrian is evident in the image’s radically reduced formal qualities—each element is rendered with perfect contours and uniform planes of primary colour. Apple, Grapes, Grapefruit is a strong testament to Lichtenstein’s intuitive understanding of the hieroglyphic simplifications of advertising art.

Paul Cézanne, Nature morte de pêches et poires, 1885-1887

Focus: Modern Art and Impressionism

Pablo Picasso

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 66,000,000 – 90,000,000
HKD 78,724,000 / USD 10,064,434

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Le Peintre, 1963
Oil on canvas
92×60 cm (36 1/4 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed Picasso (lower left)
Dated 8.6.63. III (on the verso)

Brimming with painterly verve, Le Peintre is both an exuberant homage to the craft Picasso devoted his life to and a reflective exploration of his identity as an artist. Recently included in the prestigious Fondation Beyeler exhibition Picasso. Artist and the Model: Last Paintings, the present work portrays one of the great motifs that dominated Picasso’s late œuvre – that of the artist at work. In Le Peintre, Picasso captures the moment of artistic inspiration, expressing the energy of the act of painting through strong, gestural brushstrokes, which delineate the figure of the painter; his face is held close to the canvas in an intense moment of concentration as he brandishes the paintbrush before him. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Picasso threw himself into the theme of the artist at work, producing several canvases that vary between works in which the painter is the sole subject and those in which there is an accompanying model. Although the theme had already been visited by Picasso in his early work – in paintings such as Le Peintre et son modèle of 1926 (Musée Picasso, Paris) or the one of 1928 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) – it was not until the 1960s that the subject acquired a fundamental importance in his art. In 1963, he painted more than fifty works on this subject, revealing his obsession with the study of the vocation of an artist.

THE PRESENT WORK WAS EXHIBITED AT FONDATION BEYELER, BASEL, PICASSO. ARTIST AND THE MODEL: LAST PAINTINGS, 2023.

In the present work, however, Picasso eliminates the presence of a model and instead shifts the focus entirely upon the artist. Although not explicitly identified as a self-portrait, the subject of Le Peintre can be read as autobiographical. As in other works in his painter series, Picasso clothes the figure in a blue striped Breton shirt, resembling those he often wore, to reinforce this connection. Picasso also splits the painter’s face in two, duplicating the profile to examine the multiple elements of the painter’s identity. With his yellow hat, palette of primary colors, youthful and naïve expression and stylish goatee, Picasso creates a lively character full of personality.

Beyond a youthful self-portrait, however, this work epitomizes Picasso’s obsession with and admiration for Van Gogh. The 1960s was the period in Picasso’s career when he seems to have been thinking particularly of Van Gogh. He was so fixated on the post-impressionist artist that he carried in his wallet for years the original news article detailing Van Gogh’s self-mutilation of his ear. The present work can be interpreted as a tribute to Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat series from 1887. Picasso’s application of chiaroscuro, the richness and spontaneity of his brushwork, and use of emblems such as the yellow hat are distinctly reminiscent of Van Gogh; it is as though in channelling the spirit of the artist, Picasso was himself rejuvenated in his late years.

If Van Gogh was Picasso’s patron saint, the Old Masters were his apostles. For him, carrying the painterly mantle of the Old Masters became increasingly important and during the 1960s he devoted a decade to the reinterpretation of the great masters of the past; painting works inspired by Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt van Rijn, El Greco and Francisco Goya. This focus on the Old Masters was a pointed affirmation of his place in the revered lineage of the great figures within art historical canon.

In its allusions to the traditions of the past and its dynamic execution, Le Peintre is a poignant commentary upon Picasso’s awareness of the rich artistic history behind him and a testament to his unending drive for creative innovation.

This conflation of identities anticipates the musketeer series that would dominate the artist’s work later that decade and provides insight into how Picasso viewed the different aspects of his own personality. Throughout his oeuvre, Picasso’s male figures are the embodiment of masculine power, always rendered with an intensity which convey the bravura of the artist himself. In the present work, through the iconography of the artist at his easel, Picasso reflects on the complexity of his sentiments regarding his role as an artist. “I have less and less time and I have more and more to say” commented Picasso in his last decade (Picasso, quoted in Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso Laureatus, Lausanne & Paris, 1971, p. 166), and the freedom and spontaneity of his late work, together with the recourse to archetypal figures and symbols is visual evidence of this.

PICASSO IN HIS STUDIO IN MOUGINS IN THE 1960S (THE PRESENT WORK SHOWN IN THE BACKGROUND).

Having gone through so many phases of stylistic and technical experimentation, Picasso now pared down his style to paint monumental oils in quick, spontaneous brushstrokes. Lustrous passages of color cover the whole canvas endowing the figure with a startlingly vivid presence. The richness and choice of teal blue color was distinctive of Picasso’s late period and pre-empted several works of 1964- 1965 which featured similar, unique shades of blue. Rather than ponder the details of human anatomy and perspective, Picasso now isolated those elements of his subject that fascinated and preoccupied him and depicted them with an extraordinary sense of wit entirely of his own. The seemingly limitless energy that characterizes so much of his work is extant in this final burst of creativity, as well as a conscious decision to allow himself total liberty with both style and subject matter.

THE PRESENT WORK WAS EXHIBITED AT GEMEENTEMUSEUM DEN HAAG, THE HAGUE, PICASSO IN DEN HAAG, 2007-2008.

Picasso spent his last decade in a creative world of his own making. At the sprawling villa, Mas de Notre Dame de Vie, in Mougins the artist had complete freedom to work and explore new subjects. Perched high atop the village of Mougins with a view of the Bay of Cannes, the picturesque estate allowed the artist an uninterrupted tranquility in which to paint. It was here that Picasso deepened his study of the Old Masters and here that he looked towards Van Gogh as his greatest source of inspiration. His wife and great muse Jacqueline Roque organized their lives around Picasso’s needs and ensured a daily routine undisturbed by external forces. The idyllic setting and unwavering support from Jacqueline resulted in one of the most prolific periods of the artist’s career Le Peintre is a rare example of a late work signed by the artist, that has never been at auction before and is thus, fresh to the market. Today, paintings from this more colorful period of Picasso’s work from the 1960s have become increasingly desirable internationally, particularly with modern and contemporary collectors.

Claude Monet

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 45,000,000 – 65,000,000
HKD 61,489,000 / USD 7,861,033

Claude Monet 克勞德・莫內 | Route de Monte-Carlo 蒙特卡羅之路 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840 – 1926)
Route de Monte-Carlo, 1883
Oil on canvas
65.7 x 80.6 cm (25 7/8 x 31 3/4 inches)
Signed Claude Monet and dated 84 (lower left)

Route de Monte Carlo represents the triumphant apex of Claude Monet’s seminal series of works produced as part of his excursion to the Mediterranean in 1883 and 1884. Monet had a lifelong commitment to painting en plein air as he explored how atmospheric conditions affect light and color. In December 1883, Monet was near completion of six large interior panels at the apartment of his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, when he realized his extreme frustration with this project because he felt that his creativity was being stifled by the indoor surroundings. He then impulsively departed to the Mediterranean with fellow Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This trip proved to be immensely liberating for Monet, as the unfamiliar landscape of the Riviera offered the painter limitless inspirations that sparked new pictorial imagination.

Route de Monte Carlo was one of the first two works executed by Monet on the shores of Monte Carlo, capturing his first glimpse and fascination with the region. The other work would be Pres Monte Carlo, painted from a spot along the same route, but facing towards the sea rather than the mountains. Route de Monte Carlo was created during the height of impressionism, manifesting Monet’s lifelong commitment to painting en plein air as he explored how atmospheric conditions affect light and colors. Monet captured the beauty of the exotic scenery with quick brushstrokes and an extensive color palette, particularly that of a pastel tone, conveying the dazzling light under the midday sun in Côte d’Azur. The cohesiveness of the composition is assured through chromatic complementaries: the sun-drenched path to Monte Carlo contrasts with the purplish shadow cast on the sandy surface, while the sunlit townscape in the background contrasts with the shaded foliage in the foreground. Rendered with sumptuous impasto, the intensive interplay of colour heightens the dramatic effects in this otherwise idyllic vista.

Route de Monte Carlo is Monet’s first experimentation with the Mediterranean light and colors, setting precedents for a seminal group of canvases of the same subject in the following years. Shortly after this 1883 excursion with Renoir, Monet returned to the Riviera in early 1884, this time in solitude, to explore Bordighera, Monte Carlo and Menton in depth. Monet’s satisfaction with the present work is evident as he revisited the same composition, referencing some key elements in a series of works he executed during the 1884 sojourn. Most notably, Vue de Bordighera (Collection of Hammer Museum Los Angeles) depicts the same townscape now nestled in a jumble of vegetation, while Le Corniche de Monaco (Collection of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) closely echoes with the present work for its sunlit sandy path that anchored a magnificent vantage point. By depicting similar compositions at varied times of day, from multiple angles, Monet here presages the sequential practice, such as Haystacks and the Rouen Cathedral, for which he is perhaps best known. The present work is a superior example of the remarkable affinity between Monet’s ardent Impressionist ideals and the scintillating light of the Côte d’Azur. Catalyzing further artistic ventures in the region and beyond, the pictorial innovations present in Route de Monte Carlo testify to the invigorating changes and enduring impact of this Mediterranean excursion on Monet’s oeuvre.

Withdrawn / Passed Lots

NICOLAS PARTY (B. 1980)
Still Life with a Ribbon, 2011-2012

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 22,000,0000 – 28,000,000
PASSED

Still Life with a Ribbon (christies.com)

NICOLAS PARTY (B. 1980)
Still Life with a Ribbon, 2011-2012
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 150.3 cm (39 5/8 x 59 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Nicolas Party 2012’ (on the reverse)

Exhibited at the artist’s first major solo exhibition with The Modern Institute in 2013, Nicolas Party’s Still Life with Ribbon (2011–12) was among a group of still lifes in oil the artist painted during his formative period. Capturing the artist’s early interest in the anthropomorphised attributes of objects, the present work presages Party’s virtuoso investigation of color, material, and art history through the traditional still life genre with his contemporary neo-surrealist twist. Against the cobalt backdrop, three pears lined beside one another like performers atop a stage, calibrating a whimsical vivacity with their volumetric, curvaceous appeals. Setting behind tropes of unnatural, man-made objects in cylinder shapes, these three stylised organic forms—rendered in velvet red, green, and porcelain white—are magnified and have an enticing sculptural presence, akin to figures. Pear, as a humble fruit that serves as a motif in Flemish vanitas paintings and was pondered by numerous modern masters like Cézanne, Picasso, and O’Keeffe, was depicted purely based on Party’s memory instead of real objects. An atypical still life, Still Life with Ribbon encapsulates Party’s distinctive visual idiom that conflates art-historical tropes—from the centuries-old vanitas tradition to Morandi’s austere still life and Matisse’s sharp, luminous vision.

 In Still Life with Ribbon, Party turned one of the pears into a petrified entity, evoking an eerie feeling permeated in one of the ‘stone age pictures’ René Magritte created in the 1950s. Party’s still life carries a similar love of paradox as Magritte’s pictorial landscape, where the artist arrested the live form in the state of petrification.

Rene Magritte, Memory of a Voyage, 1951 © 2024 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

“I guess the word ‘still life’ (or ‘nature morte’) is a good example of what art tries to achieve: merging two opposite notions into one object,’ Party explains, ‘life is not still and nature is not dead, but maybe a painting can be.”

Wearing his learning lightly, Party adeptly bestows his contemporary tableaux to convey the sensation of suspense and paradox of this genre in Still Life with Ribbon, with its mysterious yet vividly defined forms.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta, 1938. Museum of Modern Art, New York ©2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence 

With the medium oil lends the present work tactility and volume, Party mindfully fashions his pictorial plane in a perplexing milieu where the objects are placed against an entirely flat background devoid of any depth or perspective. Paring down superfluous details using elemental color and simplified form—a compositional tactic that is perhaps informed by his experience in 3D animation and mural art—Party forms an ambiguous space where viewers are forced to focus on the form, color, and composition. Such an approach also spared his still life from interpretation in the manner of memento mori. The pears, with their rich art historical connotations in both Eastern and Western cultures as a symbol of immortality, abundance, and Christ’s love, seem to halt in a perennial state in their disturbing dimensions. Party’s distilled and almost artificial forms conjure a suspension of time instead of an inevitable decline, the present work, standing as a contemporary still life outside of time and space, is at once recognizable yet utterly unreal.

NICOLAS PARTY (b. 1980)
Still Life, 2017

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
PASSED

Nicolas Party 尼古拉 · 帕爾蒂 | Still Life 靜物 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

NICOLAS PARTY (b. 1980)
Still Life, 2017
Soft pastel on linen
140×130 cm (55 1/8 x 51 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated 2017 on the reverse

Fresh from a string of critically acclaimed exhibitions, including New York’s Frick Collection and the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Nicolas Party has cemented his place amongst the most exciting contemporary artists working today. A captivating example of Party’s masterful investigation of color, material and art history, Still Life invigorates the traditional still life genre with its neo-surrealist depiction of ten, stalked organic forms. Shaded into an enticing sculptural presence with the artist’s acclaimed use of pastel, these stylized forms and plump, curvaceous shapes radiate in shades of fiery red, purple, mauve, yellow and brown. Directing his idiosyncratic choice of medium towards these uncanny depictions, the rhythmic, conical and curvilinear shapes of Still Life are almost anthropomorphic in their staging atop a pale orange surface against an Yves Klein blue backdrop. Executed on an expansive scale, Still Life was exhibited at the artist’s first solo exhibition with Karma in 2017, its colorful, architectural forms at once playful, mysterious and instantly recognizable.

Weaving together art-historical references, from the allegorical intensity of 16th and 17th century vanitas painting to the austerity of Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes, the present work’s architectural shapes and textured use of color imbue a sense of dynamism that contrasts with the static conventions of the genre. In Still Life, Party situates the composition in a typically enigmatic milieu – the various shaped objects sit against an entirely flat background, completely devoid of any context, depth, or perspective. Drawing the viewer into this ambiguous space, Party’s choice of subject imbues the work with an enigmatic and symbolic resonance. The pumpkin, a symbol of abundance, prosperity and good fortune, is associated with the harvest season, and is a rare subject to appear in the artist’s compositions. Similarly, the pear, symbolizing immortality to the Chinese, abundance to the Greeks and Roman, and Christ’s love in Renaissance religious paintings, was a motif frequently used by Flemish vanitas painters of the Renaissance. Imbuing each object with an animated sense of individual character, an effect emphasized by the magnified scale of the present work, “his paintings of fruit and forests anthropomorphize their subjects, which are visibly susceptible to the abuses of time.” (Annie Godfrey Larmon, “Nicolas Party”, Artforum, December 2017). 

GIORGIO MORANDO, STILL LIFE, 1938 / DIGITAL IMAGE, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK/SCALA, FLORENCE
© 2024 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / SIAE, ROME

Setting a stage upon which his objects sit at the center, like performers atop a stage, Party’s attention to composition is indebted to Giorgio Morandi. Foregoing the austere renderings of his predecessor, Party’s saturated use of fantastical jewel tones and theatrical application produces an effect that feels vividly contemporary. Often associated with softness and femininity, pastel has traditionally been used to conjure evanescent, saturated effects of light and colour: take Degas’ ballet dancers or the floral displays of Odilon Redon. In Party’s hands, the medium becomes graphic, well-defined and sculptural. Deeply pigmented and possessing a seductive corporeality, the provocative postures of the ten stylized objects are exaggerated by the artist’s use of shade and volume, accentuating their sensuous lines. Nestled amongst the upright figures of the rotund and curvaceous gourds lie suggestively outstretched objects, a surrealist reimaging of the art-historic reclining nude. This visceral sensuality is in tacit communion with the artist’s chosen medium, the infamously volatile and challenging pigment imparting a physically to the present work. Favoring pastel for its immediacy and spontaneity, Party employs the medium as a painter as opposed to a draughtsman, massaging the pigment between his fingers to model forms into three-dimensional relief. As the artist describes, “I love pastels so much. I came to them because at one point I was doing oils, and my main problem was that I couldn’t stop editing the painting. Oils allow you to endlessly retouch.” (Nicolas Party, quoted in T. Loos, “Artist Nicolas Party Revives the Language of Pastel”, Cultured Magazine, 17 March 2019).

Exemplifying the unique qualities afforded by the softness of pastel and the precision with which the artist employs the medium, Still Life is an arresting and seductive work from Nicolas Party’s highly acclaimed oeuvre. In dialogue with the art-historical binaries of representation and abstraction, the present work exists in the tantalizing liminal space between the real and the imagined, the past and the present, encapsulating what the artist describes as art’s capacity to “allow humans to feel time very differently from how our body tells us to feel it. Nature always reminds us that our body will disappear soon; that life is a very brief moment. This is not the case in a still life” (Nicolas Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ibid.).

María Berrío

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 4,500,000 – 6,500,000
WITHDRAWN

María Berrío 瑪莉亞・貝利奧 | Between the Orchids and the Wheat 蘭花與小麥之間 | The Now Evening Auction | Contemporary Art | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MARIA BERRIO (b. 1982)
Between the Orchids and the Wheat, 2020
Collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas
213×267 cm (83 7/8 x 105 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated 2020 on the reverse

“This painting is one of the most recent pieces that I created for the exhibition and it was inspired by the flower markets that I used to visit when I was a kid but at the same time it talks a little bit about at this moment in history and this idea of the simple moments we are kind of not able to share because of the pandemic.”

Across the delicate, lush surface of Between the Orchids and the Wheat, María Berrío weaves a complex tapestry of multiple histories, alluding to anecdotes both personal and universal, timely and timeless. Making its debut at the Norton Museum of Art exhibition María Berrío: Esperando mientras la noche florece (Waiting for the Night to Bloom) in 2021, Between the Orchids and the Wheat is the largest work by the artist to come to auction and a testament to Berrío’s celebrated collage technique. Berrío’s large-scale works such as the present offer an allegorical prism through which she explores her childhood memories in Colombia and experiences with global diaspora and migration. Inspired by the artist’s memories of the flower markets in Bogota she saw as a child, Between the Orchids and the Wheats blends biography with a sense of the imagined.

The chromatic wonderlands of Berrío’s compositions often imagine spaces of safety in which humans and nature live in harmony, infusing everyday realities with a magical, emotional surrealism. Resembling a monumental woven tapestry or stained-glass window, the heightened attention to detail and multifaceted surface of Between the Orchids and the Wheat creates an overall impression of flatness, with the artist moving between representation and ornamental abstraction. Recalling Byzantine and Japanese motifs, as well as the pale splendour of Gustav Klimt, the present work is mesmerising, pertinent work by the artist.

Before beginning her compositions, Berrío has a theme and an outline before choosing the scale of her canvas. Sketching first with charcoal, Berrío applies innumerable layers of Japanese paper to achieve a final, delicate opacity of colour and texture. The casual interactions of the work, the familiarity of gesture and setting, are a composite of many details and moments filtered through the artist’s memories. Berrío’s work is a mediation on the impact of migration as seen through the prism of her own experience. Growing up in Bogotá with her two brothers, Berrío spent much of her childhood on a family farm in a landscape of mountains, animals and flowers, early memories and childhood impressions which have gone on to inform much of her work: “It becomes a little bit like magical realism,” Berrío describes, as Colombia is “filtered through my memory, it’s filtered through my childhood. I think if I lived there, I would see things as they are and maybe it would be a little bit more raw” (María Berrío, quoted in Adrian Horton, “Like magical realism’: María Berrío on her surreal collages”, The Guardian, 20 June 2020). Taking its title from the beautiful orchids the artist saw at the flower markets of Bogota, and wheat, a more functional, less ostentatious plant, Berrío situates her scene of three women sharing a moment of quiet together as demonstrating the beauty of everyday life – the orchid, and the wheat. Surrounded by beautiful flowers, these women are brought into communion by Berrío’s intricate patterning, the result of the artist’s lengthy process in which the surface of the composition is built up with torn layers of delicate Japanese paper and refined with washes of watercolour.

GUSTAV KLIMT, THE VIRGIN, 1913. / NATIONAL GALLERY (NARODNI GALERI), PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
PHOTO AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/SCALA FLORENCE

Enlisting the narrative dimensions of poetry, folklore, and personal experience to a delicately paper-collaged canvas of mystical domesticity, Berrío’s Between the Orchids and the Wheat resounds as a portrait of feminine empowerment and spirituality. Capturing a beguiling interplay of fantasy and reality, the present work unravels as a scene from an otherworldly tale that welcomes the viewer’s curious spectatorship. Drawn in by the soft and vulnerable intimacy of the three female figures, we are invited into the prismatic and embellished world that Berrío has lovingly crafted with precious scraps of paper, torn and reassembled into a devotional portrait of sensuous beauty.

Adrian Ghenie

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
WITHDRAWN

Adrian Ghenie 亞德里安・格尼 | Elvis 艾維斯 | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ADRIAN GHENIE (b. 1977)
Elvis, 2009
Oil on canvas
40.6 x 31 cm (16 x 12 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2009 on the reverse

A masterful examination of history, entertainment and memory, Adrian Ghenie’s compelling and intensely atmospheric Elvis captures the young King of Rock and Roll, his eyes shut in a moment of abandon, his mouth gently open as he sings. Rendered in the hallmark style of Ghenie’s masterful visual practice, the boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present, figuration and abstraction blend and blur into a brooding dreamlike haze. Possessing a coalition of heavily laboured medium, fluid brushwork, and exuberant tracts of dragged paint, the work epitomises the gestural violence of Ghenie’s painterly practice, a style reminiscent of Francis Bacon; the portrait is built up in the traditional sense and then deliberately and literally de-faced, with the paint broadly swept down the canvas. The work is transformed from the purely figurative into a darkly brooding exploration of identity and representation that bridges the autographic with 20th century cultural iconography. Ghenie’s father adored Elvis and impersonated the Jail House Rock singer throughout the 1960s, paying tribute to the first global pop icon. Belong to a series of works inspired by the musical titan which made their debut at Tim Van Laere Gallery in 2009, Elvis intimate scale and dreamlike quality presents an image that is at once compelling and uncanny, the spectral presence of the singer revealing the feebleness and inconsistencies of our own memory. Following on from the artist’s acclaimed Pie Fight series, this series marks a critical shift in the artist’s oeuvre away from the black-and-white grisaille of his earlier breakthrough works towards a freer use of color and scraped textural surface.

FRANCIS BACON, HEAD IN GREY, 1955 WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS © THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON.

Ghenie is an ardent researcher of the history of the 20th century, being preoccupied with unearthing forgotten narratives, marginal events and seemingly insignificant details, intertwining images of historical figures such as Lenin and Hitler with the collective bodies of anonymous, defaced people. Born in Romania in 1977, Ghenie grew up under Nicolae Ceausescu’s repressive communist regime. As exemplified by the present work, the artist’s internationally acclaimed visceral pictorial language and psychologically charged paintings address some of contemporary history’s darkest chapters to metaphorically explore themes of malevolence, history, memory and the very fallibility of human nature. Manifesting a collusion of identity, philosophical, social and historical reflection, Elvis is one of a series of portraits of Elvis Presley produced by the artist in 2009, all of which explore the dichotomy between the public persona and the private individual. Arguably the first great icon on a global scale, Elvis represents the ultimate man-turned-cultural icon, a figure who is intensely known and yet fundamentally enigmatic, his level of fame able to reach beyond the Iron Curtain to penetrate Ghenie’s household in Romania. When compared to the other works in the series in which the ageing star is depicted in infamous white jumpsuit and ostentatious jewelry, Elvis depicts the singer at the beginning of his career. Dramatically closing in on just the face framed in an intimate scale, Ghenie captures the icon in a moment of rapture, the king now brought down to earth. The Elvis portrayed in the present work is seen from the other side of the curtain; a distorted portrait closer to a man as opposed to a god. Whilst the figure of Elvis functions as a signifier of fame and, to an extent, tragedy, he also bears personal significance to the artist. Marking the beginning of Ghenie’s interest in self-portraiture, the artist posed as Elvis for the larger portrait in the series. This autographic turn is further complicated by the artist’s resemblance to his father, who himself performed as the singer. Fractured and dwindling, the colors fade in and out with paint running down the canvas as though the image might simply wash away.

Interweaving complicated personal and historical narratives, Elvis visualizes the intricate space of personal and collective memory. In the artist’s words: “On one hand […] I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light. On the other hand, I do not refrain from resorting to all kinds of idioms, such as the surrealist principle of association or the abstract experiments which foreground texture and surface” (Adrian Ghenie, quoted in Magda Radu, “Adrian Ghenie: Rise & Fall”, Flash Art, November-December 2009, p. 49). 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. Seamlessly merging the the squeegee scrape reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s post-photographic abstraction with the psychological intensity and corporeal manipulation seen in a Bacon self-portrait, Elvis exemplifies how the surface of Ghenie’s paintings conceptually and physically interweaves elements gleaned from the “texture” of history with memory to produce a work that blurs the boundary between the real and the imagined.