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Phillips Hong Kong Spring Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art
19 March 2023 - 31 March 2023
FreeEVENT DESCRIPTION
Phillips is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition and sale dates for the company’s spectacular new headquarters in the WKCDA Tower in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. The new Asia headquarters, which spans over 52,000 square feet across a total of six floors, will open for business in phases beginning on 18 March of this year. The state-of-the-art galleries and saleroom on the ground floor and first floor will open with the exhibition of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Watches and Jewellery from 18 March to 5 April, leading up to auctions spanning from March to May. The company has also announced the Hong Kong auction calendar for Spring 2023, along with early highlights from the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sales, and key highlights from Watches and Jewellery online sales.
Among the auction highlights from the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Hong Kong Spring Sales to be debuted at the new location on 30-31 March is Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin. One of the highest value works by the artist to ever be offered at auction, proceeds from its sale will benefit the Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum in Clarinda, Iowa, United States. Donated by esteemed collectors Karen & Robert Duncan, who owned the painting for 23 years, the sale of this important work by the artist will further the Museum’s critical mission of promoting the Arts to a global community of enthusiasts, while also supporting local Arts and Youth programs. Phillips is delighted to offer this fresh-to-market work by Kusama after having achieved the world auction record for the artist most recently in May 2022 in New York. Currently on view at M+, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is the largest retrospective of the artist’s work ever held in Asia outside Japan, and the work featured in the inaugural Evening Sale will be presented in Phillips’ new space flanking M+. Pumpkin brings together the three most iconic symbols in Kusama’s oeuvre – the pumpkin, polka dots, and the infinity net. Symmetrical, full, and round, the present work is brilliantly luminous, and a prime example of the artist’s most coveted motifs. Set against an expansive background of net-like patterns that directly evoke her Infinity Net series, the vivid yellow pumpkin is covered with polka dots of alternating sizes.
Another exquisite example of Kusama’s central artistic motif offered in the inaugural Evening Sale on 30 March is Infinity Dots (HTI), a rare and magnificent triptych work measuring 194 x 390cm. Coming to auction for the first time, the present work was exhibited at Yayoi Kusama: Dots Obsession at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney in 2005. Closely related to the artist’s Infinity Net series in its intricate, repetitive accumulations and dots best characterise her work, acting at once as the materialisation of these visions, and a therapeutic response to them, a translation of ‘hallucinations and a fear of hallucinations into paintings’. Layered over time, circles of impasto lay atop of one another, varying in degrees of opacity. With some more translucent than others, Kusama’s iconic polka dots coalesce into a wave of pattern, coming alive as they breathe and shimmer as if stars under the night sky. These all-encompassing dots form a fluctuating visual field that moves beyond the picture plane, immersing the viewer within a delicate web of shimmering silver.
Also highlighted in the auction will be the late Chinese Canadian artist Matthew Wong’s The Road, which was exhibited at the artist’s important 2018 Karma gallery show in New York. Offered for the first time at auction, The Road is a striking example of Matthew Wong’s highly coveted landscapes rendered in monumental scale. Indeed, the present work bears resemblance to the artist’s River at Dusk, also from 2018, which sold for over HK$37.7 million / US$4.8 million at Phillips Hong Kong in 2020 and set the artist’s world auction record at that time. Both largescale works share visually arresting autumnal amber palettes, as well as depth of perspective achieved through the artist’s adept use of an elevated horizon line. Wong’s works have captivated audiences worldwide with his dreamlike landscapes and still lifes, often drawing comparisons to the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch.
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