Phillips Contemporary Art Auction Night put on an entertaining spectacle on Wednesday night, if only because of two telephone bidders who burst into the auction room and swept away many of the highest lots. impressive of the evening. In total, the night’s deals recorded a decent sell-through of 89%, bringing in $70 million off a pre-sale estimate of $60-85 million via a slow but steady sell-off buoyed by a few lots that emerged as runaway successes. . Perhaps due to a chill in the air, however, a handful of lots per Javier Calleja, Lisa Yuskavage, Robert Motherwell and Mickalene Thomas were removed at the start of the sale (they were not taken into account in the sale rate), and pieces by Robert Colescott, Ed Ruscha, Joan Miró and Issy Wood failed. to find buyers on the floor.
But back to those scammers. Sprinting out the door, Phillips started the evening with an untitled painting by Noah Davis – a gesture painting of a woman collapsed in sleep, completed in 2010 – which sparked a 12-minute bidding war before it sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for $991,000, nearly ten times his estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. The same bidder snagged another hotly contested painting later in the sale: Henry Taylor’s portrait of a security guard, titled Dakar, Senegal #3 (2019), which saw its modest estimate of $80,000 to $120,000 plummet – to loud applause from the audience – when it sold for a whopping $584,000.
The other protagonist of the evening was the telephone bidder glued to the ear of Phillips specialist Jean-Paul Engelen, who caused a sensation at the start of the sale by obtaining the two textile-based paintings by Yayoi Kusama, red stripes And blue spots, both made in 1965 and purchased by collectors Agnes and Frits Becht the same year. (Agnes Becht said of their Yayoi Kusama collection, of which they had enough to fill a shipping container to the brim, “It was so beautiful, I think I had to die of it.”) The works n never left the couple’s collection until now, and Engelen’s bidder bought them for $2.7 million and $3.2 million respectively, beating their joint low estimate of 2.5 millions of dollars. The pieces will be exhibited in a retrospective of the artist’s work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam which opens this fall.
The same bidder also snatched the most expensive work of the night, a Banksy in which two police officers and a police dog stop and search a Basquiat-esque figure. Title Banksquiat. Boy and dog stopping and searchingthe piece is a second iteration of the original on the spot work that remains at the Barbican in London, and it was sold to Engelen’s client for $9.7 million, just below the middle of its $8–12 million estimate.
Pablo Picasso, Head of a woman with a bun (1952). Courtesy of Philips.
Other high-caliber, high-priced works that were submitted to various bidders during the evening included Pablo Picasso Head of a woman with a bun (1952), which emerged as the second most expensive work at the auction when it sold for $7.3 million out of an estimate of $6–9 million; by Roy Lichtenstein girl in the mirror (1964), sold for $5.5 million against an estimate of $4.5–5.5 million; and Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15) (2013), which earned $4.3 million on its estimate of $3.5–4.5 million.
While some pricey sales have been made, bargain hunters have also had their time in the sun. Perhaps most visibly, that of Joan Miró Space (1937) went for $381,000 out of an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Excluding fees, only five lots exceeded their low estimate on the auction floor out of a total of 37 lots.
Another interesting stat? Of the artwork on offer Wednesday night, 80% had never been auctioned before. Robert Manley, vice president of the house, and Engelman wrote in a joint statement: “This approach is something that is unique to Phillips, and we are grateful
for the hard work of our international team in building an auction that so brilliantly captures the breadth of the category.
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