NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced highlights from the forthcoming Under the Influence Auction. Featuring tomorrow’s blue chip artist’s today the season opening sale includes 257 lots with a pre-sale low estimate of $4,009,000 / £2,396,530 / €3,000,142 and a pre-sale high estimate of $5,700,000 / £3,407,389 / €4,265,605.

“Phillips’s Under the Influence sales are known as the prime auction marketplace for emerging art, giving collectors an early opportunity to own the stars of tomorrow. In keeping with this reputation we are proud to kick-off the fall season with an exceptionally strong sale featuring a selection of the most sought after young artists to emerge recently, including many that are being offered at auction for the first time. In addition the sale includes works by established contemporary masters as typified by the cover lot for the sale’s catalog, David Hammons’ Moving to the Other Side of 1969. The combination in the sale of radical and highly sought-after works from different epochs underscores the consistency of the dialogs present in cutting edge artistic practice over the last 50 years.” Benjamin Godsill, Contemporary Art Specialist and Head of Sale, Under the Influence.

In addition to these recognized blue chip artists the sale is populated by a number of works by artists who have burst onto the scene over the last several years to much acclaim. Though different in their approaches and aesthetics many of these artists seek to challenge the problems of painting in a post digital world.

Moving to the Other Side of 1969—a rare and highly important body print by the brilliant David Hammons—is a highlight of the sale with a pre-sale estimate of $100,000-150,000. A truly ground breaking artist, Hammons has been reimagining how to approach the act of art making through the lens’ of performativity, race and identity for almost 40 years. Highly desirable in the market, as well as highly influential amongst younger generations of artist’s Hammons’ is a true lodestar.

To create the body prints, such as Moving to the Other Side, Hammons covered parts of his body and clothing with butter or other oily substances and then physically pressed himself against large sheets of paper, then subsequently dusted the impression with powered pigment. Sticking to the greased areas, the pigment reveals in surprising detail the textures of the artist’s hair, clothing, and skin. In works such as Moving to the Other Side we see the artist exploding the modes and boundaries of print and art making while also engaging in a wry analysis of how identity is constructed and represented. The sale includes additional works by other important contemporary master’s including Christopher Wool and Ed Ruscha. Three Women (Light II), 2005 is a fantastic example of Christopher Wool’s engagement with abstraction. In this large-scale work on paper from 2005 we see the artist continuing his longstanding dialog with contemporary abstraction; here translating this conversation into the medium of printmaking. Ed Ruscha’s, St.-Ave of 2003 continues this important American artist’s long- standing interest in the intersection of place and linguistic, masterly combining elegant print making with hand painted unique over painting.

Parker Ito is known for being at the forefront of this movement and this sale is populated by three of the artist’s most interesting works; The Agony and the Ecstasy (23) a 2012 “scotchlite” wherein the artist has created a “painting” that looks different in person than it does in photographs, calling into question how art images circulate in a digital age; Memoirs of an Imperfect Kawaii Trill BB 11, 2013 the first sculpture by the artist to appear at auction and Details – gradient – screensaver 3.0.jpg from a 2010 series that is likewise the first example to be sold in an auction.

Ito is joined by fantastic “abstract” paintings by Michael Staniak, Leo Gabin, Michael Manning, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet and Nicolas Deshayes; all young artists who are in high demand from collectors and who have received much attention from curators, critics and connoisseurs for their insightful investigations of the boundaries of painting in an era of infinite, loss-less reproducibility.

Phillips will additionally offer the first work at auction by Kour Pour, an exceptional painter who draws on his Persian heritage to create incredibly detailed paintings that reference the complex and brilliant history of Persian rugs and in a sense of the history of abstraction and representation as a dichotomy in art history.