HONG KONG.- On 30 November and 1 December,
Phillips will present its Fall Auctions of 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design in Hong Kong in association with Yongle auction. The Day Sale on 30 November and the Evening Sale on 1 December bring together a diverse curation of works by post-war masters, highly sought-after contemporary names, as well as ultra-contemporary artists. Among them are a number of extraordinary works by female artists from different cultures, backgrounds and eras, including Yayoi Kusama, Lucy Bull, Caroline Walker, Christina Quarles, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Ewa Juskiewicz, Hulda Guzmán, Kristy Chan, Ana Benaroya, and more.
Isaure de Viel Castel, Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Phillips Hong Kong, said, “As the leading house for introducing some of the world’s most talented contemporary artists to Asia’s auction market, this season, Phillips is proud to present works of many women artists from a range of backgrounds and practices. Over the last few years, Phillips Hong Kong has been repeatedly achieving record auction results for female artists, notably Lucy Bull, Emily Mae Smith, Jadé Fadojutimi, Loie Hollowell, Ayako Rokkaku, Genieve Figgis, and more. We continue to discover and spotlight works by women artists from around the world in our Hong Kong sales, and we look forward to seeing their works being recognised and appreciated by more collectors across the region.”
Repetition and Accumulation: Yayoi Kusama
This November, the largest retrospective of the 93-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in Asia outside Japan will be presented at Hong Kong’s M+. Coinciding with the special exhibition, Phillips is proud to offer a selection of works by Kusama, who is often considered the most successful living female artist in the world. INFINITY-NETS (GMBKA), 2013, is among the highlights of this season’s 20th Century & Contemporary Art Hong Kong Evening Sale and a remarkable example from the artist’s iconic Infinity Nets series. The series serves as a cornerstone of her artistic practice, acting as the foundation from which Kusama develops many of her sculptures and installations. Generating an entrancing optical sensation, the labyrinthine web of INFINITY-NETS (GMBKA) seems to expand and contract, coming alive as it radiates and pulsates with palpable rhythm. From afar, the repeated iterations of a single touch of the brush establish a spellbinding sense of pictorial space. Upon closer examination, the incessant quality of this calculated gesture reveals a dizzying, labour-intensive technique that envelops both the viewer and the artist in the concept of the infinite. Expanding her palette to include vibrant colours, INFINITY-NETS (GMBKA) represents a mature, archetypal work from the artist’s oeuvre rendered in acrylic paint instead of oil – a pivotal transition that Kusama undertook in the late 1970s. This transition signified the artist’s return to a water-based medium, which built on her foundational training in traditional Japanese painting.
Coming to auction for the first time, Gold Accumulation (1) offered in the Evening Sale is an exquisite example of Kusama’s central artistic motif – the polka dot, and has remained in an important Asian collection for more than two decades. Executed in 1999, the present work marks the apex of a period when a major retrospective of her works was shown in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo that in all respects solidified Kusama’s status and significance in the contemporary art world. Kusama’s devotion to polka dots can be traced back to her childhood, when immense grasslands would blur her vision and create a sense of self-obliteration. Closely related to her celebrated Infinity Net series in its intricate, repeating, all-over pattern, Gold Accumulation (1) captures the obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite that best characterises the artist’s internationally celebrated practice. Accumulating gold dots with variations in size create a topographical landscape of connected circles, drawing viewers into Kusama’s own, definitive experience of infinity.
Offered in the Day Sale, Kusama’s Red Shoe was created in 1979, a period of uncertainty in the artist’s life, six years after Kusama permanently returned to Japan from New York and two years after she checked herself into a private psychiatric facility in Tokyo, seeking treatment and stability from her mental and physical battles. Kusama’s use of polka dots in Red Shoe, combined with the plant motif, further recall the image of scattered seeds – thus linking Red Shoe to the artist’s connection to the natural world and her childhood spent at her family’s seed farm in Matsumoto, where her hallucinations of “dense fields of dots” first began.
While Kusama has worked across a widely diverse range of media during the many distinctive phases in her career, her fundamental methodology of obsessive patterning, as seen in these three works presented, retains a remarkable consistency that has carried throughout her practice.
Rising Young Female Stars
Scottish-born painter Caroline Walker made headlines recently at London’s Frieze week auctions, setting new records twice in an evening. Throughout her work, Walker makes women the focal point. Her chosen women are those typically viewed on the outskirts of society, allowing the artist to explore the myriad of social, cultural, economic, racial, and political factors that affect women’s lives today. Since graduating from her Master of Arts degree in 2009, Walker has been the subject of several solo exhibitions internationally and her works are included in a number of prominent public collections. This November, she will open a solo show at K11 in Shanghai and in conjunction with this exhibition during Shanghai’s art month, Phillips is delighted to present her work The Masquerade in the Evening Sale which will mark the artist’s auction debut in Asia.
Christina Quarles explores the abstracts of the human form with a visual language that is surreal and deliberately ambiguous. Identifying as a queer, mixed race woman, Quarles draws inspiration from her personal experiences, translating the ambiguity of gender and racial identity into vibrant acrylic works with her highly personal approach to painting. Quarles has enjoyed international museum attention, and her unique vision was celebrated in her first solo exhibition in Asia at the X Museum in Beijing, as well as a major solo showcase at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2021. These global recognitions—virtually unprecedented for an artist of only 37 years old—have translated into her status as one of the most sought-after painters among her contemporaries.
Lucy Bull’s abstract paintings play with dynamic texture, weight, and space, creating an entrancing viewing experience that titillates the senses. The viewer's eyes are drawn into these compositions before encountering a seemingly limitless number of associative interpretations. After a breakout in Los Angeles last year, Bull has become a darling of both collectors and critics alike: the former ardently pursuing her arenas of psychedelia, the latter heralding her as the new champion of Western abstraction. This June, Phillips Hong Kong debuted Bull’s work, 8:50, at auction in Asia which sold for over HK$11 million/ US$1.4 million and set the artist’s auction record. Alluding to a poignant children’s tale of the same title, Giving Tree offered in this season’s Evening Sale emits an ethereal glow from within, its neon colours resplendent in contrast with deeper shades of pine greens and Prussian blues. As one grapples with various associations in their minds for the work – whether it be gentle branches hanging from a mossy tree trunk, or a phoenix about to spread its glowing wings – each image seems to concretise; yet like fleeting mirages, its true identity is impossible to decipher.
Marking her auction debut in Asia, What's the Use in Yearning presented in this season’s Evening Sale is a work of high intensity by young British artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan, which combines text and gestural mark-making in exuberant and expressive passages of vibrant colour. Diaristic and deeply personal, Yearwood-Dan’s paintings record her observations on the key social issues of the day, prompted by her reflections on race, class, gender, and environmentalism. Focusing on tensions between nature and culture, her paintings and sculptures incorporate botanical motifs and forms in the creation of lush, all-over environments that are as contemplative as they are visually compelling. Earlier this month, her work, Coping Mechanisms, sold for £239,400/ US$267,410 in Phillips London and set the artist’s auction record.
As a rising star in the world of contemporary art, the buzz around Polish-painter Ewa Juszkiewicz continues to grow at a catapulting rate. Since 2012, she has focused her art practice on portraits of women, seeking to dismantle how the female image has been represented throughout art history—especially in the Renaissance—as anonymous objects of beaty, perfection and deference. She covers their faces with mysterious masks composed of symbolic features such as foliage, fabrics or locks of hair, shielding the sitter’s face from view as she introduces a sense of the otherworldly and grotesque. In Untitled, 2017, presented in this season’s Day Sale, Juszkiewicz firstly built a model head covered in leaves which she then treated as if painting a still life. From this model, two paintings were created – the present work and a similar composition that was acquired by Poland’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow for their permanent collection.
Marking her first appearance at auction, And Then I Looked Up, 2018 offered in the Day Sale was unveiled at Hulda Guzmán’s solo show in Athens, which coincided with the artist’s participation in the Venice Biennale in 2019. Living and working in Samaná, on the northeast coast of the Dominican Republic, Guzmán paints surrealist works that are connected to nature. They are connected both in their materiality—such as the present painting being executed on wood with the natural grains contributing to the overall image—and by incorporating the lush vegetation from her home country into her compositions. In And Then I Looked Up, viewers see this in the lower right quadrant where neon disco lights bounce and reflect off silhouetted fauna.
