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Phillips Announces Early Highlights from the Hong Kong Fall Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art
A Fresh-to-the-Market Work by Yoshitomo Nara to Star in the Evening Sale on 6 October
An Iconic Still Life Painting by Nicolas Party Will be Among the Highlights of the Evening Sale
Hong Kong Fall Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art to Take Place at Phillips’ Newly Opened Asia Headquarters in West Kowloon from 6-7 October 2023
HONG KONG – 10 August 2023 – Phillips is pleased to announce Yoshitomo Nara’s outstanding No Means No as one of the star lots in the upcoming Hong Kong Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, taking place on 6 October from the auction house’s new state-of-the-art gallery and auction space at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. To be offered for the first time at auction, No Means No was created in 2006 at the height of Nara’s artistic prowess. His other stylistically and thematically linked works painted in the same year are part of institutional collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Nicolas Party’s Still Life with an Olive will also be offered as a major highlight in the Evening Sale, also marking the first time the painting has appeared at auction.
Isaure de Viel Castel, Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Phillips Hong Kong, said, “On the heels of our inaugural Evening Sale at the new Hong Kong saleroom which saw a 65% increase over the previous year, we are proud to unveil two exceptional highlights which have never before been sold at auction to kick off the Fall season. Ahead of the sale, we look forward to welcoming our collecting community in Asia to see the works in person, when our exhibitions open to the public in Seoul from 1-9 September, in Taipei 16-17 September, and in Hong Kong 28 September – 6 October.”
Danielle So, Head of Evening Sale, 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Phillips Hong Kong, said: “Having been crowned the most expensive living Japanese artist, works by Yoshitomo Nara continue to remain highly sought after, with his top 20 auction results having been achieved in the past four years alone. Phillips is delighted to offer another seminal work by the artist, following the strong results achieved by Lookin' for a Treasure this spring, Missing in Action in 2021, which set the second-highest auction price for his works, and Hothouse Doll in 2020. No Means No is part of a very small group of large canvases by Nara that have come to auction this year, underscoring the increasingly scarce supply of such large, full, and layered works, thus marking the present work as a rare offering.”
The collaboration between Yoshitomo Nara and the design collective graf began in 2003 when the artist met one of its founders. Together they built a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions with massive installations of wooden houses that feature drawings, paintings and sculptures by Nara across the world. The interior of these houses were inspired by the artist’s studios in Japan, somewhat nomadic homes for Nara at an important time in his artistic career. The present work was featured in their 2007 exhibition in Berlin, Yoshitomo Nara + graf: Berlin Baracke, hosted by Galerie Zink. Nara’s most ambitious collaborative project with graf was A-Z –a series of 26 exhibitions, 26 wooden structures or ‘houses’ that responded to the particular environment of the exhibition venue or the local culture were installed. No Means No formed part of the project that was shown at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in 2008, which marked the first show at a major public gallery in the United Kingdom for Nara + graf.
Created in Nara’s signature ‘layered’ style in which gentle swathes of pastel hide behind a translucent layer of pearly white serving as the background, the present work features an iconic Nara girl staring ahead with massive eyes twinkling like galaxies. The artist has been titling some of his pieces No Means No from as early as the 1990s, and its earliest iteration appears within a 1991 work on paper now housed in the collection of the Aomori Museum of Art, featuring a crashing warplane with the titular words blazoned in red above the scene. In this context, the title carries pacifist undertones as is typical of the anti-war artist.
Also among the Evening Sale’s highlights is Nicolas Party’s Still Life with an Olive. Shown at Party’s first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at the Modern Institute in Glasgow in 2013, the present work is one of only seven still life oil paintings made specially for this show, with each being created over a course of 10 to 20 months, during which Party spends the time working and re-working his paintings, a key element that is central to the iconography of painting as a medium. Featuring a vibrant palette of yellow, red, green, and blue within a harmonious composition, it exemplifies the artist’s dexterity in colour application as well as painterly precision. Familiar fruits and objects are transformed into larger-than-life, biomorphic shapes, demonstrating Party’s playfulness with scale.
Nicolas Party’s top ten results at auction have all been set in the past three years, which is indicative of the continuing strength of the artist’s market. Similar to the present work, two of the artist’s top five results at auction are for still life arrangements of fruit.
Images: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/bg2ba96wisejdi6pwfs83/h?rlkey=mrzftpp23npgy7rkhivwbdpk9&dl=0
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Hong Kong Fall Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale: 6 October 2023, 7 pm Day Sale: 7 October 2023, 11 am Location: G/F, WKCDA Tower, West Kowloon Cultural District, No. 8 Austin Road West, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Previews
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PRESS CONTACTS: HONG KONG – Ingrid Hsu, Public Relations & Communications Director, Asia Ingridhsu@phillips.com +852 2318 2043
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