LONDON.- Phillips’ June sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art will offer works from a number of private collections, including the Miles & Shirley Fiterman Collection, property from the Estate of Ryan Brant, and property from the collection of American baseball star Alex Rodriguez. The Evening Sale, taking place on 27 June, will present 36 lots of Modern, Post-War, and Contemporary Art, and will be followed by the Day Sale on 28 June, comprising 160 lots.

Luc Tuymans’s Schwarzheide, 1986, leads this season’s Evening Sale with unparalleled conceptual and historical significance. The painting – essentially a landscape depicting a line of sparse pine trees – appears to present an innocuous subject. However, taking its name after a World War II concentration camp, Schwarzheide belongs to a cycle of works that Tuymans commenced in the latter half of the 1980s, touching on themes of loss and violence in the context of the Holocaust. Tuymans has said of the work, “I wanted to make my paintings look old from the start, which is important because they are about memory.” Having resided in the same private collection since its execution, the work has been exhibited extensively over the last three decades, including showings at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Tate Modern in London, the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and at Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. It has recently been reproduced as an immense marble mosaic at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition La Pelle.

On view with Tuymans’s Schwarzheide at Documenta IX in 1992 was Marlene Dumas’ Losing (Her Meaning), 1988, and the two works will be reunited once again, with the Dumas also being offered in the Evening Sale. An early masterpiece by Dumas, Losing (Her Meaning) draws the viewer into an ethereal scene painted in a palette of moody blues and greens.

Property from the Miles & Shirley Fiterman Collection
Phillips is pleased to offer Property from the Miles & Shirley Fiterman Collection, comprising 95 works to be offered across the auction house’s salerooms throughout the year. The May auctions in New York were the first to feature these works, and now the London Evening Sale is to be led by Roy Lichtenstein’s The Conductor, 1975. The Conductor boasts Lichtenstein’s characteristically delineated forms, his distinct red, blue and yellow colour palette, and his iconic Ben-Day dots. It is an example of the artist’s musings on modern art, taking Gino Severini’s Mare = ballerina (Sea = Dancer), 1914, as a point of departure. It was one year before the execution of the present work that Lichtenstein first engaged with Futurism as his subject matter, painting a limited number of Futurist-inspired works between 1974-1976. Two other highlights from the Fiterman Collection presented in the June Evening Sale are Pablo Picasso’s Homme assis (Mardi gras), 1972, and Alexander Calder’s Two Moons, 1969.

Property from the Collection of Alex Rodriguez
Coming to auction for the first time are two works from the private collection of American baseball star Alex Rodriguez. Considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time—setting numerous records for the Seattle Mariners, Texas Rangers, and New York Yankees— Rodriguez has employed his passionate spirit and acute eye to pursue new collecting ventures within the realm of art. Two works, which have resided in his Florida home, will figure prominently in the Evening Sale – Richard Prince’s Mustang Painting, 2014-16, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Pink Elephant with Fire Engine, 1984.

Falling within the iconographic field of muscle-car culture, Mustang Painting presents an iridescent mustang cruising amidst an abstract and indistinct mass of blue paint. A brilliant example of Prince’s thematically driven work, the work continues the artist’s sustained exploration of his series-oriented practice, the most celebrated of which focus on various different elements of the same fetishized culture: cars, nurses, cowboys and dry jokes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Pink Elephant with Fire Engine pulsates with the artist’s characteristic energy. The work, which has been exhibited internationally over the last thirty-five years, not only mirrors the energy of New York’s bustling cultural scene, but also conflates a number of the artist’s most revered artistic tropes and idiosyncrasies, brimming with chromatic vigor and presenting a spontaneous, gestural style throughout.

Property from the Estate of Ryan Brant
Phillips will present to market four works by the acclaimed artist KAWS, from the estate of Ryan Brant. The Brant surname is synonymous with contemporary culture, and many will be familiar with the Brant Foundation, or indeed with the long-standing family ownership of Interview Magazine. Brant’s passion for art was driven in an absolute belief of the talent who created it, and it was this commitment, combined with his natural creative foresight, which led him to acquire works such as UNTITLED (MBFV5), to be featured in the Evening Sale. This painting, brimming with rich chromatic hues, presents KAWS’s prodigious reinvention of Snoopy, as part of his relentless exploration of graphic imagery and the cartoon world. Also presented in Phillips’ Day Sale from the Estate of Ryan Brant are two sister paintings by KAWS, both entitled KIMPSONS and dated 2005, along with the artist’s UNTITLED (HTLD5), 2011.

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale | 28 June
Among the leading highlights in the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale is the cover lot, Dana Schutz’s Crapping, Braiding and Whistling, 2009, and back cover lot Anti-Entropy, 2011, by William Kentridge, whose work is the current focus of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel. The Day Sale is led by KAWS’s UNTITLED, 2014.