Peter Doig, Rosedale, signed, titled, inscribed and dated “”Rosedale” PETER DOIG LONDON 1991” on the reverse, oil on canvas, 78 1/2 x 94 1/4 in. (199.4 x 239.4 cm). Painted in 1991. Estimate On Request. Image courtesy of Phillips.

NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announces highlights from the Evening and Day Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art. The Day Sale will take place on Wednesday, 17 May, followed by the Evening Sale on Thursday, 18 May. Comprised of 40 lots, the Evening Sale is expected to realize in excess of $107 million and will offer works by Peter Doig, Gerhard Richter, Roy Lichtenstein, and Willem de Kooning. The Day Sale, offering 185 lots, is estimated to achieve over $15 million, the highest pre-sale estimate for a Phillips Day Sale to date. The sale will include important artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Judd, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. 

Jean-Paul Engelen, Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “Our May sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art mark one of the most significant and comprehensive offerings that Phillips has ever assembled. Our new team is in place and collectors have responded enthusiastically, entrusting us with fresh-to-the-market works.” Robert Manley, Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, added, “We are delighted to offer artworks with exceptional provenance, from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat alongside those from several other prominent private collections. We have seen a great deal of momentum at Phillips in these last few months and we are confident that this season will demonstrate both the strength of the market and Phillips’ place within it.” 

The Evening Sale | 18 May 2017, 5pm 
Leading the Evening Sale is Peter Doig’s Rosedale, which dates from a pivotal moment the artist’s career. Painted in 1991, the work was created for his celebrated solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, after he had won the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize that year. The large-scale painting stands nearly seven feet tall by eight feet wide, depicting a Toronto home through a tapestry of snow and tree branches. Expected to realize in excess of $25 million, the work has never been publicly offered and is poised to set a new auction record for a living British artist is a magnificent example of an artist at the height of his career. This monumental painting is from Richter’s unparalleled opus of abstraction - one that reached its pinnacle during the period the present work was created. Executed in 1994 – following Richter’s breakthrough exhibition at the Tate Gallery and major touring retrospective two years prior – Abstraktes Bild (811 - 1) was notably exhibited the following year in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, an acclaimed show debuting works that now reside in major museum collections across the globe. This work was created during the year that gave rise to some of Richter’s most powerful, monumental abstract pictures, standing as a definitive example of the artist’s hallmark squeegee technique, which found its purest articulation between 1989 and 1994. 

Lot 23. Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (811-1), signed, inscribed and dated "811-1 Richter 1994" on the reverse, oil on canvas, 98 1/2 x 78 3/4 in. (250.2 x 200 cm.). Painted in 1994. Estimate $15,000,000 - 20,000,000. Image courtesy of Phillips.

Provenance. Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1996)
Christie's, London, February 14, 2012, lot 25
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Exhibited: London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties, June 1 - August 4, 1995, no. 23, pp. 59, 85 (illustrated)

Note: "With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity, that is to say, with all the means at the disposal of art, 'nothing' … we allow ourselves to see the un-seeable, that which has never before been seen and indeed is not visible" Gerhard Richter

Engulfing the viewer with its kaleidoscopic surface and iridescent symphony of pure color, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild is a magnificent example of an artist at the height of his career. Free-flowing curtains of emerald green and azure blue paint are swept in horizontal and vertical streaks across the monumental canvas, obscuring but also fusing with the underlying palimpsests of mauve, red and white paint. Evoking the coloration of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas and the expansive power of Mark Rothko’s sublime colorfields, this regal painting is a monumental masterpiece from Richter’s unparalleled opus of abstraction - one that reached its pinnacle during the very period the present work was created. Executed in 1994 - following Richter’s breakthrough exhibition at the Tate Gallery and major touring retrospective two years prior - Abstraktes Bild was notably exhibited the following year in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, an acclaimed show debuting works that now reside in major museum collections such as Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Tate Modern, London, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.  

Gerhard Richter’s abstract works are universally regarded as the pinnacle and culmination of a life-long conceptual investigation into the possibilities of painting vis-à-vis photographic representation. It was in 1960s post-war West Germany that Richter first gained critical acclaim; working in the context of but, also in reaction to, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art. His Photo Paintings radically re-visited the decade long debate on the end of painting in the face of mass reproduction and the glorified pseudo-religiosity of abstract art. With these immaculately blurred Photo-Paintings, Richter essentially bridged the purported dichotomy between (painterly) abstraction and (photographic) figuration. Richter arguably achieved the furthest limit of his radical investigation into the nature of perception and cognition with his abstract paintings from 1972 onwards. While formally distinct, Richter’s abstract paintings can be considered within the same spectrum of intangible reality as his Photo-Paintings. As Richter, in his most definitive elucidation of his method of abstraction noted in the Documenta 7 exhibition catalogue in 1979, "every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals. Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images like heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood' (Gerhard Richter quoted in Roald Nasgaard, "Gerhard Richter", Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). 

Executed in 1994, Abstraktes Bild was created during the year that gave rise to some of Richter’s most powerful, monumental abstract pictures and irrefutably stands alongside such masterpieces as Wand (Wall), 1994. The work is a definitive example of the artist’s hallmark squeegee technique that found its purest articulation between 1989 and 1994. Further developing the haptic swirls of painting that canceled out the photorealistic images in his early work- such as Tisch (Table), 1962 - Richter from the mid-1980s onwards began to use a home-made squeegee to rub, drag and scrape large bands of paint. By the 1990s, the application of the squeegee had developed into a rhythmic, structured gesture that gave rise to stark columns reminiscent of wall planks. In Abstraktes Bild, Richter applies wet emerald paint with successive vertical strokes across the vast canvas, creating an iridescent veil that partially reveals and submerges the antecedent layers of drenched white, blue and mauve and red paint. The rhythmic traversing of the squeegee coalesces into a symphony of sublimely diffused color, the crisp mauve diagonal in the upper left area of the canvas inserting an additional level of dynamism and depth. Hovering mysteriously between figuration and abstraction, Abstraktes Bild simultaneously evokes Claude Monet’s Nymphéas and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s expressionist landscape paintings as if seen through a opaque veil. 

As with Richter’s greatest abstract painting, Abstraktes Bild 811-1 radiates a sense of ease and spontaneity that stands in stark contrast to Richter’s famously laborious and intellectually complex working method. Indeed, the present work would have undergone multiple variations whereby Richter would repeatedly apply, erase, remake and obliterate the various paint strata - each addition and effacement introducing new chromatic and textural juxtapositions. The squeegee takes a central role in this creative process, for, as Dietmar Elger observed, it "is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start" (Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2009, p. 251). The chance effect of Richter’s confident application of paint allows the artist to remove his hand from the composition, creating quasi-mechanical palimpsests of layered and scraped down color. As Richter, however, clarified, “above all, it’s never blind chance: it’s a chance that’s always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I’ve worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I’m often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am" (Gerhard Richter, quoted in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting – Writings 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 159). 

With Abstraktes Bild the viewer is presented with a diaphanous color palette, lyrical composition and expansive power that in many respects evokes the work of the great Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Its towering field of blue and green variegation vividly recalls the tonal stacking central to Rothko’s inquiry into the sacred spaced bestowed by color, or what Robert Rosenblum has described as the "abstract sublime". While referencing such work as Rothko’s Blue, Green and Brown, 1952, Abstraktes Bild is nonetheless resolutely anti-idealistic in that it denies any claims to a Rothko-esque transcendental sacred image. Apart from the fact that Richter’s stance on Rothko remains ambivalent – resolutely distancing himself in early years, but more recently softening his thinking towards the notion the sublime – abstract works such as the present one formally deny any claims to visual supremacy. With its seemingly infinite chromatic variations and shifting perspectives, this work ultimately puts forward a multiplicity of paintings. “If the ability of colour to generate this emotional, spiritual quality is presented and at the same time negated at all points”, as Benjamin Buchloh indeed argued with the notion of mise en abyme in mind, "surely its always cancelling itself out. With so many combinations, so many permutational relationships, there can’t be any harmonious chromatic order, or compositional either, because there are no ordered relations left either in the colour system or the spatial system” (Benjamin Buchloh, "An Interview with Gerhard Richter" (1986) in Benjamin Buchloh, ed., October Files: Gerhard Richter, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 23-24). 

While conversing with the annals of 20th century abstraction, Richter’s abstract works ultimately postulate themselves as a “new kind of post-photographic painterly image space” (Peter Osborne, "Abstract Images: Sign, Image and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter’s Painting" October Files: Gerhard Richter, Cambridge, 2009, p. 109). The crucial driving force of Richter’s over five decade long artistic practice has indeed been centered around the dialectic between photography and painting. As Richter importantly explained, “I’m not trying to imitate a photograph; I’m trying to make one. And if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then, I am practicing photography by other means: I’m not producing paintings of a photograph but producing photographs. And, seen in this way, those of my paintings that have no photographic source (the abstracts, etc.) are also photographs” (Gerhard Richter quoted in Rolf Shön (1972) in: Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 73).  

While abstracts works such as the present are independent from any particular photographic model, they nonetheless exhibit a quasi-mechanized reproducibility. Similar to the blurring in his early photo-painting, the blending color with the squeegee in Abstraktes Bild gives rise to the sensation of looking into the abyss of an otherworldly, half-seen or remembered out of focus image. "Richter’s abstract images are images of this image space itself”, Peter Osborne aptly observed, "In this respect they are still ‘photo paintings’, but in an ontologically deeper sense than the phrase conveys when used as a designation for the earlier, more particularistically ‘photo-based’ work – a sense which is compatible with a compositional productivity, which places them closer to the video image and the digital image than the photographic image as such, as some works from the mid-1990s start to register, explicitly, in their videotic inflection of the famous blur” (Peter Osborne, "Abstract Images: Sign, Image and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter’s Painting", in October Files: Gerhard Richter, Cambridge, 2009, p. 109). Radically reformulating the sublime beauty of Rothko-esque chromatic abstraction through the mechanistic squeegee technique, Abstraktes Bild is a magisterial example of Richter’s acclaimed post-conceptual affirmation of painting in the face of photographic, televisual and now digital visualities.

Agnes Martin’s Untitled #1 from 1985 is a stunning example of her aesthetic of this time. Abandoning her earlier gridded canvases in favor of uninterrupted vertical and horizontal bands, Martin began executing works embodying an ethereal, evanescent beauty in varying shades of gray. Executed in her standard format (for this time period) of a 72 by 72 inch square – a size which Martin specifically chose for its particularly human scale – the present lot wonderfully exemplifies her process of mixing acrylic with gesso, lending her work a matte tonality and adds a particular luminescence to the painting. Untitled #1 is a testament to Martin’s reputation as a master of paring down the forms within their art to their most reductive elements in order to encourage a perception of perfection and to emphasize a sense of transcendent reality. 

Lot 20. Agnes Martin, Untitled #1, signed and dated "a. martin 1985" on the reverse, gesso, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm). Executed in 1985. Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000. Image courtesy of Phillips. 

Damien Hirst’s The Void is the largest of his Pill Cabinets ever to come to auction and one of the first he ever created. This particular example is the first from the series to be shown by Hirst in a commercial exhibition – his seminal and celebrated Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York – and it is the first Pill Cabinet he showed in the United States. Other examples can be found in such esteemed Foundations as the Broad Museum or the Pinault Foundation, and in museums such as the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen – Museum Brandhorst in Munich and the Leeum Museum in Seoul. The rarity and significance of the Pill Cabinets series; the importance of this example being just the second version Hirst ever made; and the monumental scale and dazzling visual complexity of this example, all combine to elevate the prominence of The Void making it one of, if not the most important work of art by Damien Hirst to come to auction. 

Lot 8. Damien Hirst, The Void, glass, stainless steel, steel, aluminum, nickel, bismuth and cast resin, colored plaster and painted pills with dry transfers, 92 7/8 x 185 3/8 x 4 1/4 in. (235.9 x 470.9 x 10.8 cm). Executed in 2000. Estimate $5,000,000 - 7,000,000.  Image courtesy of Phillips.

Phillips will include three works from the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the auctions; Untitled (Venus 2000 B.C.) and Untitled will be included in the Evening Sale and an additional untitled work will highlight the Day Sale. By the time Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Untitled (Venus 2000 B.C.) in 1982 he had established himself as the impresario of the international art world within an exhilarating period of just a few years. 1982 was momentous for Basquiat, and this work resonates with all the creative energies and artistic momentum that he manifested around the world, having recently travelled to Modena, Italy, and to Los Angeles. The painted composition of Untitled (Venus 2000 B.C.) is comprised of a myriad of Basquiat’s most potent symbols. Notably, the eponymous Venus figure of the title dominates the canvas. Accompanying her metaphoric beauty is Basquiat’s creative genius as manifested in the expressionistic scrawls and encrypted imagery that populates the far corners of this distorted stretcher. Paintings like the stunning Untitled (Venus 2000 B.C.) are infinitely more than the sum of their parts – they manifest Basquiat’s particular visual lexicon. Those symbols functioned as both visual cues and intellectual stimulants. By the time Basquiat completed Untitled two years later, in 1984, he already had five major solo shows across America, Europe, and Japan under his helm and was the youngest artist - at 23 years of age - ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial. The present work stands out within the scope of Basquiat’s oeuvre for its focus on a singular, frontally-portrayed figure and its high degree of chromatic nuance and abstraction. In stark contrast to the frenetic canvases of Basquiat’s earlier years, Untitled puts forward a more serene composition. This artwork is testament to the centrality that the human figure – particularly in the guise of a black man – takes in Basquiat’s inimitable oeuvre. 

Lot 5. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Venus 2000 B.C.), acrylic and oilstick on canvas mounted on tied wood supports, 60 1/4 x 59 1/4 in. (153 x 150.5 cm). Executed in 1982. Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000. Image courtesy of Phillips.

Lot 11. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, acrylic and paper on canvas, 66 x 60 in. (167.6 x 152.4 cm). Executed circa 1984. Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000. Image courtesy of Phillips.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is being offered with an estimate in excess of $10 million, poised to set an all-time record for a sculpture by the artist. The sculpture, completed in 1996 a year before the artist’s unexpected death, was created during the height of Lichtenstein’s career. Taking the art historical use of the bust through the lens of Lichtenstein’s signature Pop Art idiom, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is widely considered among the artist’s greatest works. The work is being sold by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to benefit its study center projects.  

Roy Lichtenstein, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight, inscribed with the artist's signature, numbered and dated "0/6 rf Lichtenstein 96" on the Sunlight side, painted and patinated bronze, 41 x 25 1/4 x 13 2/4 in. (104.1 x 64.1 x 34.3 cm). Executed in 1996, this work is the artist's proof from an edition of 6 plus 1 artist's proof. Estimate On Request. Image courtesy of Phillips.

Willem de Kooning’s Untitled II is also among the highlights in the May Evening Sale. A magnificent tour-de force of his painterly virtuosity, Untitled II is one of less than ten works created in 1980, an important turning point in de Kooning’s career. At 77 by 88 inches, it is an example of the largest of the three canvas sizes de Kooning used, reserved for his most ambitious projects. Untitled II is acts as an important transition from the artist’s heavily worked “pastoral” canvases of the mid-1970s to the more minimal ribbon-like brushstrokes that would become the signature of his output in the 1980s.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled II, signed "de Kooning" on the reverse, oil and newsprint on canvas, 77 x 88 in. (195.6 x 223.5 cm). Executed in 1980. Estimate $12,000,000 - 18,000,000. Image courtesy of Phillips.