NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced highlights of the Editions & Works on Paper sale in New York this October. Featuring a selection of modern works by Matisse, Duchamp, Dalí, Miró, Munch, and Redon, along with contemporary editions by Celmins, Gober, Wojnarowicz, Marclay, Ruscha, Bourgeois, Nara and Nauman, the sale will be held during New York’s “Print Week” alongside the IFPDA Print Fair and the EAB Editions fair. Phillips’ Editions sale on 25 October will present over 400 lots, which will be split across three sessions: 10am, 2pm and 6pm.
Kelly Troester and Cary Leibowitz, Phillips’ Co-Heads of Editions, said, “This season we are thrilled to present a sale with such a wide breadth of master prints, with examples produced in the late nineteenth century all the way up through this year. We will offer several iconic portfolios, including Keith Haring’s The Fertility Suite and Andy Warhol’s Cowboys & Indians and Electric Chairs, as well as sets by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, and KAWS. Following the enthusiastic response from bidders in our London sale in September, we look forward to continuing the momentum with the upcoming auction in New York.”
Among the sale’s highlights and cover lot is The Fertility Suite, Keith Haring’s large and vivid screenprints from 1983. This complete set of five images display Haring’s characteristic fertility and ‘radiant baby’ iconography, as well as his distinctive linear and cartoon-like drawings. Haring discussed the recurrence of babies and fertility as subjects in his work, stating in 1981 that a baby “is the purest and most positive experience of human existence. Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form.” In The Fertility Suite, large bellied dancing pregnant women appear to worship a kind of ‘fertility god’ in one scene, and a ‘radiant baby’ in another. Extraterrestrial space ships intervene beaming down upon a pyramid as a pregnant figure cheers on. These are images that celebrate the creation of life in all its glory.
Also among the full sets of works to be offered, and serving as the sale’s top lot, is Andy Warhol’s Cowboys & Indians, 1986. Known as an artist of the fabulous and the famous, Warhol created a vast oeuvre of prints unified by his use of repetition and exploitation of the multiple. Warhol came to printmaking in the early 1960s, interested in the photomechanical processes of the medium. One of Warhol’s last series, Cowboys and Indians is a set of ten screenprints that features popular western icons from Annie Oakley to John Wayne, as well as important Native American figures, such as Geronimo and Northwest Coast Mask. This series, while playful, was as Warhol wanted for “grown-ups” a Warholian take on a beloved West, in all its twentieth-century allure.
Belonging to the Post-War, New York School of Action painters, Joan Mitchell distinguished herself amongst her contemporaries as an accomplished printmaker, making prints throughout almost every stage of her career up until her death. With Tyler Graphics and its founder Kenneth Tyler in the early 1990s, Mitchell embarked on the most innovative and ambitious prints of her oeuvre, after his urging that her paintings could be translated beautifully into lithography. Sunflowers II, from the Sunflower Series, presents a pictorial achievement through color and line, disordered bouquets of sunflowers appear and again disappear to the viewer. Joan Mitchell’s electric gestural prints were deliberate and considered. In Sunfowers II, Mitchell’s explosive mark-making meets the ethereal quality of paper, creating a diptych at once free-flowing while contained within the margins. Tyler Graphics allowed Mitchell to work in more colors than ever before, creating richly colored works that rivaled the more subdued hues of the prints she had produced earlier.
Nine works by David Hockney will be offered on 25 October, with six appearing in the Evening session. Leading the group is Hotel Acatlán: Second Day, from the Moving Focus Series, 1984-1985, another Tyler Graphics masterwork in lithograpy. Hockney discovered the Hotel Romano Angeles in the small town of Acatlán, Hidalgo Province, Mexico, by accident afer his car broke down on a trip from Mexico City to Oaxaca. Arranged around a courtyard with tropical plants and a well in the center, its rustic charm and vibrant colors immediately appealed to the artist inspiring five images at the hotel. Additional examples by Hockney to be offered include The Wave, A Lithograph, 1990, Black Tulips, 1980, and Potted Dafodils, 1980.
M.C. Escher’s rare Eye will also be offered in the Evening session. In 1946, Escher became interested in mezzotint, a technique that fascinated him because of the possibility of obtaining extremely subtle graduation of light and dark. Though new to Escher, the process of mezzotint was actually developed in 17th century Germany and named mezzo-tinto, or ‘half-tone’ and he referred to the technique as 'zwarte kunst prent’ or ‘black art prints.’ A highly laborious process, Escher produced only eight mezzotints during his career, including the present work – a depiction of his own eye, a hauntingly beautiful self-portrait.
Erich Heckel’s woodcut Zwei Frauen (Two Women) is one of the earliest works to be offered in the October auction. A strong example of the artist’s interest in primitivism, the work is heavily influenced by nineteenth-century carvings by the African Mbole tribe, notably the exaggerated outlines of the facial features, as well as the narrowly slit eyes and angular faces. This rare first state has only come up for auction twice in the past 30 years.
