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\nOlivia Thornton
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“In Arabic 'riyadh' translates to ‘oasis within a desert’ […] my intention is to illuminate that there is a lot of life from a land that is perceived as dry.”
\n—Alia Ahmad

\n\n

Representing Saudi-Arabian artist Alia Ahmad’s auction debut, Malga - The place in which we gather is a work full of lively vitality and thrilling energy. Working on a large scale, her confident handling and sophisticated sense of colour is particularly evident here, with skeins of paint drawn like delicate, melting nets across the surface of the canvas. Drawing inspiration from her home, the vibrant and ever-growing desert city of Riyadh and its heady mix of ancient heritage, modern skyscrapers, luscious fauna, and desert sands, Ahmad’s paintings excavate and interrogate more fixed notions of time and place, overlaying sensation and memory into her fluid and deeply evocative abstract compositions.

\n\n

City Scenes

\n\n

In contradistinction to popular conceptions of the desert as a barren, empty space, Ahmad fills her compositions with the noise and bustle of urban life, capturing the rich diversity of this thriving city and celebrating the dense tapestry of the lives woven through it. Included in the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States, A Meadow … From a Dream, hosted by Kohn Gallery in 2022, Malga - The place in which we gather brings this vividly to life, its richly textured surface evoking the tactility, vibrant colour, and highly decorative qualities of Sadu textiles. However, while these tend to more regular geometries and repeating patterns, Ahmad’s more calligraphic treatment of line adds an energy and irregularity that brings to mind Jean Dubuffet’s own long-standing fascination with his city and the lives within it. For Dubuffet the city was a theatre teeming with life, while the scumbled surfaces of its walls and buildings were sedimented palimpsests, recording and bearing witness to the past and present lives of the city. Sharing a predisposition for the calligraphic line, in Ahamd’s compositions, not unlike Dubuffet’s, boundaries between abstraction, figuration, and the urban cityscape become increasingly blurred and fluid.

\n\n

\"\" — Jean Dubuffet, *Le Plomb Dans L'Aile,* 1961, Detroit Institute of Fine Arts. Image: © Detroit Institute of Arts / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2024

\n\n

Fittingly, Ahmad was recently included in the group exhibition Considering Female Abstractions, hosted by the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas. Situating her work within the broader currents of contemporary abstraction alongside familiar names such as Austyn Weiner, Michalea Yearwood-Dan, and Francesca Mollett not only firmly positions Ahmad in dialogue with others pursuing this exciting new painterly terrain but highlights the rich interplay of painterly abstraction and states of interiority explored by these emerging female voices. Although closely aligned with her contemporaries in this way, Ahmad’s work also looks back to a long history of women and abstraction, notably the innovative play of materials and abstract forms in American-Ukrainian artist Janet Sobel’s all-over canvases, which pioneered a mode of drip painting that preceded Jackson Pollock’s adoption of the method.

\n\n

\"\" — Janet Sobel, *Milky Way*, 1945, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: akg-images / Album

\n\n

Exploring the rich, dreamlike spaces between memory, place, and time - and the forms that bloom and swell from these sites – Ahmad’s compositions are at once rich and muscular, lyrical and expressive. Invoking both Riyadh’s vibrant district of Al Malga, and the Arabic word for ‘refuge’, Malga – The place in which we gather is a moving statement on the central importance of place and history in grounding our sense of personal identity. In this sense, Ahmad’s description of her paintings as ‘blueprints’ seems especially profound, their cellular structure and complex interplay of emerging and dissolving forms a powerful and poetic expression of the shifting nature of identity and memory itself. In March of this year White Cube in Paris will mount a solo presentation of Ahmad’s paintings, her first exhibition in Europe.

\n\n

Collector’s Digest

\n\n

\n\t
Currently living and working in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Alia Ahmad graduated from Kings College in London with a BA in Digital Culture before going on to study at the Royal College of Art.
\n\t

\n\n

\n\t
The artist has been the subject of several international solo exhibitions at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, Hafez Gallery in Jeddah, and Gallery BAWA in Kuwait. In March of this year, she will open her first solo show with White Cube in Paris, marking her European debut.
\n\t

\n\n

\n\t
The present work represents the artist's auction debut.
\n\t

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YAYOI KUSAMA INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO), 2008

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JESSE MOCKRIN A Cymbal Crashed and Roaring Horns, 2017

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JONATHAN GARDNER Reading Menus, 2021

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SALVO Mediterraneo, 2008

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UGO RONDINONE for what? for space and stars?, 2009

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JORDAN WOLFSON Untitled, 2018

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FRANCIS PICABIA Untitled (Femme et Fleurs), 1942-43

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MICKALENE THOMAS Keri On, 2009

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KEHINDE WILEY Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008

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Frank Auerbach. Image: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

\n\n

A city with an voracious appetite for culture, London is a hub of innovation. And with a history dating back at least to the Romans, change may be what’s most familiar to it. Here, ahead of our London Auctions of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, we highlight artists and works with connections to the city and consider the changing cultural climate from the post-war era through the booming 1980s, the irreverent 1990s, and today. All are on view to the public in Phillips’ luminous gallery space at 30 Berkeley Square through 8 March.

\n\n

Frank Auerbach: From Post-War to Now

\n\n

\n\n

Frank Auerbach, J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio II, 1987–1988. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

\n\n

Frank Auerbach rarely leaves London and has worked in his Mornington Crescent studio nearly every day for over 50 years. Since fleeing Germany as a child in 1939, Auerbach has called the city home and has found inspiration in its architecture, unique light, and vibrant community of artists. Auerbach has notably reminisced about spending time in the bohemian barrooms of London’s Soho district with fellow School of London painters Francis Bacon and fellow German expat Lucian Freud. As the mood of the post-war London in which Auerbach came of age was very different than it is today, the artist has witnessed the city’s penchant for creative reinvention unfold time and again since his arrival. And with each revitalized decade, the London art world cognoscenti continues to celebrate his work.

\n\n

\n
This part of London is my world. I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets.
\n—Frank Auerbach
\n

\n\n

In a serendipitous moment, Phillips offers Auerbach’s J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio II while London’s Courtauld Gallery presents the exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, which runs through 27 May. The subject of the painting, Juliet Yardley Mills, is a British model who Auerbach first met at Sidcup School of Art in the 1950s. Auerbach was drawn to her talent and skill as a sitter — evidenced here in an extraordinary pose she would have had to hold for hours — and has painted more than 130 works of her throughout their collaboration. His characteristic process — which involves scraping away freshly painted surfaces at the end of each sitting and then painting them again — is on full display here. With this approach each area of the canvas becomes a richly textural celebration of paint’s materiality and the artist’s approach to figuration, as well as a document of the passage of time.

\n\n

Andy Warhol: Diana and the 1980s

\n\n

\n\n

Andy Warhol, Portrait of Princess Diana, 1982. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

\n\n

Though well-known as a life-long, die-hard New Yorker, whenever Andy Warhol was in London, he brought his Big Apple verve to a frenzy of engagements across the city’s artistic hotspots. And as an artist obsessed with notions of icon, celebrity, and royalty, London welcomed him. After all, the city calls itself home to personalities with varying degrees of titled fame, as well as some of the more prosperous tabloid magazines (alongside the requisite image-obsessed public that keeps them in business).

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It makes sense then, that as Lady Diana Spencer made waves across the world from the Thatcher-era booming London, Warhol’s eye would turn to her. Altering Lord Snowden’s official engagement portrait of the royal couple to bring Diana’s face into focus and removing then-Prince Charles entirely, Warhol narrows the scope of the iconic source photograph to present a poignant depiction of a young Diana alone. Made just one year after her marriage to the Prince of Wales, this work is the only blue portrait from the original set of silkscreened canvas, highlighting the color of her iconic engagement ring. The image greets us now with perhaps an even more affecting tone than when it was first made, with Diana’s life story reigning prominently in our collective imagination due to the lauded television show The Crown, in addition to the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth and the subsequent ascension of Charles and Camilla.

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The Young British Artists and 1990s Irreverence

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In 1988, an enterprising art student at Goldsmiths Art College by the name of Damien Hirst took over an abandoned fire station at Surrey Docks. Assembling his works alongside those of his classmates — including Sarah Lucas — Hirst featured experimental and at times shocking works as he rewrote the rule book for how young artists should behave and how much they should take ownership of their commercial success. Word of the unique show spread quickly and was followed by subsequent prominent exhibitions. London was now the hottest scene in the contemporary art world, and the phenomenon of the Young British Artists (YBAs) was born.

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Damien Hirst, Cupric Nitrate, 2007. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Throughout the 1990s the YBAs created works that shocked and challenged viewers. Damien Hirst became best known for boundary-pushing sculptures of animals submerged in formaldehyde, his series of medicine cabinets, and his celebrated Spot Paintings. With this sale, Phillips brings one such work, Cupric Nitrate, to auction for the first time. It was included in the Paris iteration of Hirst’s ambitious multi-venue presentation of Spot Paintings, mounted by Gagosian Gallery across its eleven global locations simultaneously in 2012, and in the first major museum retrospective of Hirst’s work, which opened at Tate Modern in London that same year. Works by Tracey Emin — an artist long associated with the YBAs and London — are on offer in the day sale as well, including the provocative self-portraits I held you in my hand and Tight.

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Tracey Emin, I held you in my hand, 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

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Rachel Jones, Issy Wood, Daisy Dodd-Noble and London Today

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Rachel Jones, Untitled, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

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Today London continues to draw young artists from around the world due to its vibrant cultural climate and exceptional art schools. Rachel Jones, a young London-based painter on the rise, who earned her MA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, centers color and ambiguity in her work. Looking beyond the swathes of color that make up the ostensibly abstract Untitled from 2020 reveals two rows of teeth positioned in a clenching fashion — an enduring motif for the artist.

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Issy Wood, Super Luncheon, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

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As a global hub, London also pulls artists from elsewhere into its embrace. The young artist Issy Wood — who was born in North Carolina — moved to the city to attend Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy Schools and never left. Her 2020 work Super Luncheon, on offer here, is a clear example of the hazy appearance and disquieting surrealism that has come to define her style. Her works are imbued with a sense of a lingering and inescapable past that contaminates our present moment, a sense the writer and curator Margaret Kross has called “the estrangement of the contemporary.” The young painter Daisy Dodd-Noble is yet another American artist who has made London her base. Dodd-Noble, trained in New York, explores themes around the environment and our relationship with nature through bucolic and vividly colored landscapes that spread awareness about environmental conservation.

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Daisy Dodd-Noble, Tree at Waters Edge at Sunset, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

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More to Explore

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Cecily Brown, Luck Just Kissed You Hello, 2013. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Further artists associated with London feature prominently in the sale, including the British painter Cecily Brown. Long associated with the city, the artist has recently relocated to New York and honored with a major career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her lauded blend of figuration and abstraction characterized by theatrical and indulgent compositions is on full display here in her 2013 work Luck Just Kissed You Hello, which was first presented at an eponymous exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills.

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Dame Barbara Hepworth, Four Figures Waiting, 1968. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Of further note is the 1968 work Four Figures Waiting by British sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth. The artist studied in London at the Royal College of Art before eventually settling in St Ives until her passing in 1975. One of the most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century and a defining figure of international modernism, this work showcases the elongated forms, experimental approach to space, and sensitivity to the tactility of her chosen materials. Her works often seem to embody both the human figure and the prehistoric standing stones found throughout the Cornish landscape she called home.

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With more than 150 works on view, there are nearly endless possibilities for creative discovery in our London gallery right now. The collected works, by artists associated with London and elsewhere, prove that there’s no end in sight to the creative vitality of the city.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Works on view at Phillips 30 Berkeley Square Gallery. From left to right, works by Alia Ahmad, Jonathan Gardner, Jean Dubuffet, Dame Barbara Hepworth, and George Condo.

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It’s a new season in the art world and Phillips leaps into 2024 with our London 20th Century & Contemporary Art auctions on 7 and 8 March.

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The full selection offered in the auction is on view through 8 March from our unique gallery space at 30 Berkeley Square. Consider this your personal invitation to discover these remarkable works in a light-filled, modern, and enticing gallery that is unlike any other auction space in London.

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From left to right, works by Yayoi Kusama, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke on view at Phillips London.

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Discover works by well-known artists like Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in addition to those by younger contemporary artists including Wynnie Mynerva, Caroline Walker, Cecily Brown, Kehinde Wiley, and countless others.

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Below, we highlight the auction’s campaign of revealing articles and videos to inspire your visit. Be sure to subscribe and follow us for the latest updates from around the globe.

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Subscribe to the Phillips Newsletter >

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Follow Phillips on Instagram >

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Andy Warhol and Diana, “The People’s Princess”

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Phillips Global Chairwoman Cheyenne Westphal is your guide to Andy Warhol’s iconic 1982 work Portrait of Princess Diana. Executed just a year after the wedding of Diana and Prince Charles, Warhol’s approach echoes that of his defining Pop depictions of American celebrity in the 1960s — including his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy — and presages his portraits of Queen Elizabeth II.

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Discover More >

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London and Its Art and Artists

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Frank Auerbach, J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio II, 1987–1988. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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In a celebration of London and the creativity it inspires, we highlight works by artists who fell under the cultural influence of the city on the Thames. The article tracks an array of artistic practices in London from the post-war era through today, with surprising insights into how artists shape and react to the city’s ever-changing cultural milieu.

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Read A River Flows Through It: London’s Ever-Shifting Art Tides >

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The Infinite Pulse of Yayoi Kusama

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Watch as Senior Specialist Tamila Kerimova explores the vibrant and dynamic INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) by Yayoi Kusama. The work is a particularly sophisticated and rhythmic example of Kusama’s landmark series — a cornerstone of her practice.

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The largest red Infinity Net to come to auction, its entire surface is covered in tightly rendered whorls of deep cadmium red that continue across the canvas edge. Kusama once said that “by obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the infinite universe.” We tend to agree, as the visual pleasure of total immersion in this work is akin to a spiritual experience.

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Discover More >

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Painter’s Choice: Behind the Process

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Bernard Frize, Risti, 2004. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

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The material, the medium, and the message are all clear: acrylic (and more) is anything but an alternative for several abstract painters featured in our Day Sale. Learn more about why Bernard Frize, Paolo Scheggi, Katharina Grosse, and Feng Xiao-Min chose acrylic paint, and about the surprising materials used by Minjung Kim, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jiří Georg Dokoupil. Soap anyone?

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Read: Painter’s Choice: Behind the Process >

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Swimming in Renoir

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Plunge into a world of imagination with Dr. Caroline Knighton and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1879 masterpiece. La petite pêcheuse depicts the young Marthe Bérard, daughter of the diplomat and banker Paul Bérard. Renoir spent long summers with the family in their country home at Wargemont on the Normandy coast between 1879 and 1888, producing some fourteen portraits of the family, many of which are now held in major institutional collections around the world. This work was commissioned by the sitter’s godmother, Madame de la Perrière, and has been held in only two family collections since its creation.

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Gallery Tour

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Join Rosanna Widén — Head of Evening Sale, London — and Olivia Thornton — Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe — for a virtual tour of the gallery. The pair highlight works by Alia Ahmed, Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, and many more from 30 Berkeley Square.

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Discover Evening Sale >

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Discover Day Sale >

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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1

Alia Ahmad

Malga - The Place In Which We Gather

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

Alia Ahmad