New Now [Editorial Catalogue]

W E D N E S D AY, 4 M A R C H 2 0 2 0 4 5 0 PA R K AV E N U E , N E W YO R K phillips.com

Highlights 2 Whatever Happened to My Youth: KAWS & McCarthy’s Toontowns

3 Ed Clark’s Pride of Place Jonathan Gardner’s Contemporary Modernism

4 Making Modern: Property from the Collection of Florence Knoll Bassett The Period of a Wave: Pat Steir

5 Beyond the Biennale: Julian Schnabel

6&7

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“I like the idea of not having a style and just keeping things together with ideas and an attitude. I felt that it was a very radical thing.”

Sarah Lucas, lot 32, Get Hold of This (Black)

Need to Be Seen: Ebony G. Patterson & Jonathan Lyndon Chase 2 Ways to Nowhere: Peter Halley

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COVER: LOT 1 Jonathan Gardner, Daisy. Painted in 2014.

© Sarah Lucas

© Jonathan Gardner

Identity & Invisibility: Kerry James Marshall & Njideka Akunyili Crosby Ones to Watch/Concurrent Exhibitions

Paul McCarthy and KAWS have a penchant for exposing the macabre behind the familiar to conjure the uncanny. It is no coincidence that they appropriate childish pop-culture imagery such as the memorable puppetturned-naughty-boy Pinocchio, punished for his compulsive lying with an ever-growingnose, which McCarthy aptly called a “facial erection.” In KAWS’ PINOCCHIO, 2017, the character covers his eyes in shame to no avail, as the fatal “X”-es are still visible over his hands. To complete the KAWS-ifcation of the wooden toy, swollen bones protrude out of his head to represent a cartoon-like skull.

KAWS employs this irreverent imagery in UNTITLED, 2000, (lot 39) which pictures crops of a COMPANION, his most iconic character, over each side of a vertical black box. While one façade accentuates his pufed belly and disguised groin, another makes a smiley face from the buttons and inseam of his rear shorts. Te top of the box displays a detail of the COMPANION’s head, cropped so dramatically that the form borders abstraction, a strategy frequently employed by KAWS where the viewer’s visual lexicon informs the projection of a full character from such tightly cropped glimpses.

With similar juvenility, McCarthy’s Captain Dick Hat, 2003, expands the phallic nose motif by echoing its bulbous form throughout the sculpture. As rendered in the artist’s earlier work on paper, Penis Hat, 2001, Museum of Modern Art, New York, the pirate’s body merges with his ship, from whose bow a mast protrudes on an upward diagonal.

Yet, his castration, which is announced in the earlier work, has taken full form in the gory sculpture. Te severed member is displayed in enormous proportions atop the captain’s head, in lieu of his tricorne, at the same time depriving him of and ridiculing him for his stereotypical masculinity.

Whatever Happened to My Youth KAWS & McCarthy’s Toontowns 2

LOT 63 Paul McCarthy, Captain Dick Hat. Executed in 2003. © Paul McCarthy

LEFT: LOT 38 KAWS, UNTITLED (KIMPSONS), PACKAGE PAINTING SERIES. Executed in 2002. © KAWS

Tis surreal and forlorn mood is echoed in the over-saturated tones of KAWS’ UNTITLED (KIMPSONS), PACKAGE PAINTING SERIES, 2002, which transforms the otherwise familiar suburban landscape. As another well-known troublemaker wanders down the street, his visage is transmogrifed by KAWS’ signature “X”-eyes, skull-shaped chin and protruding bones. Te traditional acrylic on canvas is unconventionally wrapped in an ordinary blister package, normally found in a convenience store. Te contrast between the two materials humors the ideas of uniqueness, fetishism and commodifcation. With their dark and comical interpretations of popular imagery, McCarthy and KAWS go beyond a critique or glorifcation of mass culture to surpass the distinctions between high- and low-culture. ▲

Ed Clark’s Pride of Place Te specifcity of place has long been a keystone for artists, even defning their careers to a degree—Monet’s Giverny, Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, Mondrian’s Broadway.

Deviating from this tradition, abstract painter Ed Clark found inspiration from a variety of exotic locations, which became integral in his groundbreaking oeuvre.

During Clark’s visit to his friend and fellow artist Jack Whitten’s home on the island of Crete in 1971, he executed about a dozen or so pastels, as he did not have access to acrylic.

Refecting on these works back in New York, Clark felt as though they profoundly embodied the color and light of the island.

From then on, Clark would make travel and the manifestation of those places in acrylic and pigment a tenet of his studies in abstraction.

Visiting such far-fung destinations as Crete and Paris, Bahia, Egypt, and Nigeria and even more domestic regions such as his home state of Louisiana, Clark physically manifested each locale by utilizing luscious colors inspired by his individual impressions of these places. He defned each environ through his interaction with the specifc light and color of those particular moments in time and place. Painted in 1978, Untitled (Acrylic #1) from the series Louisiana is the largest and one of the earliest paintings by Clark ever to come to auction and is a perfect encapsulation of his particular regard for place as translated into abstract form and color. Here, Clark captures the beauty of returning to Louisiana in a canvas that is comprised of three discrete sections, seemingly representative of the earth, air and water of the Delta region. Tese pastel hues meld together in arching forms evocative of the ways in which the Delta can be defned by all three elements at once.

LOT 25 Ed Clark, Untitled (Acrylic #1) from the series Louisiana. Painted in 1978. © Ed Clark

Ed Clark painting in his Louisiana studio, 1978. © Ed Clark

Bisecting the canvas is one smooth brushstroke, broomstroke really, that radiates near-white light from the center and then shifts to warm pinks and sandy browns at its edges. Clark often experimented with white as a base for bright colors, creating a source of light within the paint. Here, we see that luminescence emanating from the horizon line before arching away in the warm bluegreens of the upper register and welcoming speckled pinks of the lower register. Te

incredible balance in the composition begs for the painting to be viewed frst from the middle and then back and forth between the lower and upper regions. Clark’s use of the push broom meanwhile amplifes the importance of the color, revealing subtle but powerful diferences in hue, saturation, and light in each region of the canvas. Te sensitivity and understated power of this painting readily manifest the importance of his experience working from the context of a given location. ▲

Jonathan Gardner’s Contemporary Modernism Early 20th Century modernism aimed to change the human experience, rejecting everyday mundanity and reality in favor of the penetrating peculiarity of cubist deconstruction, unnatural chromatism, Dadaist absurdity and “pure” abstraction. Te artists of those eras reveled in the supernatural and strange beauty of the unexpected and uncanny. Contemporary artist Jonathan Gardner pays homage to these 20th-century ideas in his distinctly beguiling compositions. Paintings such as Daisy, 2014 illustrate how Gardner deftly melds the infuences of his predecessors to form his own imminently recognizable and stunning aesthetic.

Te two main compositional elements in Daisy—an inverted female bust hovering over a singular potted fower resting on a circular white table—seemingly exist in two concurrent realities, both with the same playful pink wallpaper of outlined female fgures in the background. Drawing from infuences such as

Matisse’s cut-outs and Magritte’s distinct objects in surreal interiors, Leger’s body geometries and Seurat’s relaxed bathers, Daisy distorts the viewer’s perception of a singular narrative within the composition. Gardner leaves open the possibility for multiple and simultaneous interpretations of his alluring painting. His ability to synthesize a contemporary fgurative aesthetic in the 21st century illustrates the persistent interest in the manner in which viewers and artists perceive representational art and with it their own natural world. ▲

LOT 1 Jonathan Gardner, Daisy.

Painted in 2014. © Jonathan Gardner

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LOT 80 Richard Anuszkiewicz, Complementary Radiance.

Painted in 1960. © Richard Anuszkiewicz

A true visionary, Florence Knoll Basset was one of the most infuential architects and designers of post-war America and yet her infuence transcends any one of those felds.

Inextricably linked with Knoll, Inc., the furniture company founded by Hans Knoll, Knoll Bassett worked with designers such as Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and George Nakashima to establish that which defned the post-World War II aesthetic and resonates now well into the 21st century.

Knoll Bassett transformed the feld of “interior design,” collaborating with the most important mid-century modern architects, and one of the defning elements of her “Knoll look” was the manner in which it incorporated contemporary art. An avid believer that art was to be lived with and enjoyed on a daily basis, Knoll Bassett made it an indelible component of her own life.

Now, Phillips is pleased to share this once-ina-lifetime opportunity to revel in the joy of the works of art with which Florence Knoll Basset herself lived. (lots 80–85). ▲

The Period of a Wave

Pat Steir’s monumental Te Wave (after Courbet, as though painted by an Italian Baroque Painter), 1986, combines the artist’s art-historical sensibilities with the physicality of her painting process. One of just four works from Steir’s Wave series, each of which is inspired by Gustave Courbet’s moody seascapes such as Te Stormy Sea, 1869, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, this painting is both an homage and a redefnition of naturalistic landscapes from the art-historical canon. In her Wave series, Steir characteristically pulled from both Eastern and Western traditions. For this aptly titled work, she relied on the chiaroscuro color palettes of Baroque masters, as exemplifed by the dark central pigment resembling the

shadows of Caravaggio and the surrounding graphic, circular motions akin to Hokusai’s Japanese woodblock prints. Together, this fusion of styles perfectly captures the spirit of Steir’s self-coined “quotation art,” which does not copy nor appropriate. As she explained in 1985, such “quotation lets me have a living relationship with art history” (Pat Steir, quoted in “Te Wave—From the Sea—After Leonardo, Hokusai and Courbet”, Tate Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986–88, London, 1996, online).

In harkening back to the paintings of her predecessors, Steir is one of many contemporary artists whose practices are

LOT 45 Pat Steir, The Wave (afer Courbet, as though painted by an Italian Baroque Painter). Painted in 1986. © Pat Steir

Gustave Courbet, The Stormy Sea. Painted in 1869.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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at once informed and inspired by modern masters. However, in works such as the present one, Steir has uniquely honed her exploration of the past into a single motif: water. Her frst depictions of water in the mid1980s, specifcally waves as in this painting, helped her perfect her distinctive pouring technique. Tis process has now come to defne her contemporary practice, as in her celebrated waterfall paintings. In 1987, the transformation from wave to waterfall was realized in the similarly-scaled masterpiece Last Wave Painting (Wave Becoming a Waterfall), 1987–1988, belonging to the artist’s own personal collection.

Te naturalistic phenomenon of the wave lent itself not only to the artist’s own bodily painting process, but also to her belief in the cyclical nature of life. As Steir said just a couple of years after the making of this work, “Te Wave was really more about fear and death, terror of death, than image, and I think in the artists I took it from it’s about that too, in the Hokusai, in the Courbet…Hokusai’s little print and the Courbets that are so small still carry tremendous emotional terror. How uncoincidental it is that feelings haven’t changed so much!” (Pat Steir, quoted in Pat Steir: Gravures. Prints, exh. cat., Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, 1988, p. 11). ▲

Intimacy & Invisibility Kerry James Marshall & Njideka Akunyili Crosby “It just seems so relevant, that feeling of… invisibility that happens when you move here. That’s why I think representation is so important, that feeling of: Do you exist if you don’t see yourself? … On one hand, I refuse to be invisible— meaning I don’t want to not exist due to the lack of representation.”

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

In their personal preparatory works on paper, Kerry James Marshall and Njideka Akunyili Crosby explore themes of identity through intimacy and the black American experience.

In an efort to rectify the absence of black subjects in the Western art-historical canon, these artists introduce new fgures with intimate narratives and complex social motifs.

Refusing to accept invisibility, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s work readily showcases her own personal experience as a Nigerian immigrant living in America. Set in an intimate interior, Untitled, 2011 depicts the artist and her husband making love as her bolded black silhouette hovers over his abstracted white-skinned posterior.

Parallel to Marshall’s persistence in carving out a place for black fgures in art history, Crosby attempts to extinguish persisting and destructive stereotypes about African Americans. Trough sensitive and personal representation, she encourages the education and understanding of diferent cultures.

Crosby’s sensual imagery symbolizes the

harmonious intersection of the facets of her identity, a union that she wishes to promote in contemporary society. Completing the fnal iteration of this subject in Tread, 2012, Crosby quilted her self-portrayed fgure with transferred pop-culture images and historical portraits that manifest and represent her experiences.

Kerry James Marshall’s and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s seminal works on paper stand powerfully independent while also serving as inspiration for their respective paintings. In their production, Preliminary Sketch for Black Painting and Untitled embody the intimate imagery of their compositions by welcoming the viewer into Marshall’s and Crosby’s respective artistic processes. Rigorously yet sensitively representing the black American experience, these works tell a multi-dimensional story of relationship and identity. ▲

© Richard Prince

Kerry James Marshall’s Preliminary Sketch for Black Painting, 2002, depicts the original composition rendered in his thoughtprovoking Black Painting, held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In this work, Marshall voyeuristically captures a couple’s seemingly private and passionate moment protected under the warmth of their covers.

However, the apparent serenity of this intimate vignette belies the brutal tragedy of its historical underpinnings. Here, Marshall actually illustrates a December night in 1969 when Chicago Police invaded the home of Fred Hampton, the former chairman of Illinois’ Black Panther Party and subsequently murdered him and his pregnant wife. Unarmed and vulnerable, the pictured couple represents the unfortunate yet prevalent mistreatment of black Americans even in the most unlikely and secure of spaces. Finalizing the resulting painting with enveloping shades of black and blue, Marshall displays a pitch-black room with barely visible fgures, simultaneously present and invisible, symbolizing a paralyzing dichotomy faced by many people of color in American society.

LOT 57 Kerry James Marshall, Preliminary Sketch for Black Painting. Executed in 2002. © Kerry James Marshall

LOT 58 Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Untitled. Executed in 2011. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby

“I’m painting nurses. I like their hats. Their aprons.

Their shoes. My mother was a nurse. My sister was a nurse. My grandmother and two cousins were nurses. I collect ‘nurse’ books. Paperbacks. You can’t miss them. They’re all over the airport. I like the words ‘nurse’, ‘nurses’, ‘nursing’. I’m recovering.”

Richard Prince, lot 61, Untitled (Nurse) (detail) 5

Need to Be Seen Artists Ebony G. Patterson and Jonathan Lyndon Chase directly address their personal histories and manifest the complex matters of race, gender, sexuality and class in their respective practices. Teir work encourages viewers to confront their preconceptions and the ways in which subjective social constructs afect the way we live. By initiating this introspection, Patterson and Chase contribute a new narrative to the contemporary discourse and inspire their viewers to do the same.

While Patterson showcases the transformation of the body and gender by exploring Jamaican dancehall culture in her series Species, 2010–2011, Chase tackles his personal struggle

“I wanted to paint realistically.

The other guys, they all wanted to be abstract. But when you start with realistic, it’s like opening Pandora’s box.

You say, ‘What is realistic?’ I was after something I wasn’t seeing in paintings, an immediacy of perception.”

Alex Katz , lot 44, Untitled (Still Life)

LOT 30 Peter Halley, Nowhere.

Executed in 1992. © Peter Halley © 2020 Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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to accept his identity as a queer black man in America in works such as Untitled, 2016.

Blending various materials such as glitter, sequins, fabrics, beads, faux fowers and jewelry, Patterson confronts the socially constructed notions of identity by manifesting its inherently multivalent composition. While Patterson’s fgures are elaborately embellished, Chase’s are undecorated and confrontational.

Chase explores the ways by which traditional notions of masculinity can be challenged and overturned. His subjects are black queer men that incorporate a compositional fantasy informed by his own life experiences involving pornography, books, social media, and dreams. Te multi-limbed fgure in Untitled squats square to the viewer but looking askance—demanding to be recognized while refusing to present a defnitive reading.

Similarly, Patterson’s Untitled I (Species) presents a glitter-encrusted Jamaican male portrait, investigating the ways in which young black men shape their identity within a particular culture. Te artist boldly references skin bleaching, a century-spanning fashion trend in Jamaica. Not only does Patterson present the fgure with bleached skin, but she also addresses antiquated ideas of gender norms with her use of feminine-associated adornment such as rhinestones, red-painted lips, foral embellishments and the general “prettiness” of her sitter.

By investigating shifting and contradictory gender and race roles as well as contemporary notions of fashion and beauty, Chase’s and Patterson’s portraits challenge the viewer to reconsider the underlying systems that have been internalized as “established norms” by society for too long. ▲

LOT 6 Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled Species I. Executed in 2010–2011.

LOT 5 Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Untitled. Executed in 2016. © Jonathan Lyndon Chase

© Ebony G. Patterso

2 Ways to Nowhere

Peter Halley’s Nowhere embodies his iconic geometric diagrams consisting of a few key symbols—cells, prisons and conduits—that comprise his cleverly analytical oeuvre. Painted in 1992, the year of Halley’s outbreak into the art market, this work is not only layered with rough textured material and fuorescent colors, but also refects the nuances of the social world in which we live. When dissecting Nowhere through the meaning and placement of these symbols, a juxtaposing narrative occurs.

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2

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1. Cell:

2. Conduit:

3. Prison:

the open square that consumes either side of this rectangular canvas and acts as a home base, a city block, or region. Te left cell is open and receptive, connecting with the world through conduits.

the neon green, orange and pink linear connectors that interact with the cell. Tese represent the means of movement, interaction and exchange. Te conduits allow for the formation of a network around which to center a society.

the barred neon yellow cell hovering within a darker cell. Lacking conduits and thus closed of, the right half of this painting resides in isolation and confnement. To look out the slits of the barred cell is to see only an infnite replication of emptiness. ▲ 7

Beyond the Biennale artist to come to auction and exemplifes Schnabel’s practice during the years that came to defne the radical return to painting.

Since its establishment in 1885, La Biennale di Venezia has become one of the world’s most prestigious cultural organizations at the forefront of promoting and propelling artists to critical acclaim. With a fresh iteration that takes on a new theme every two years, the Biennale has decisively proven to be on the pulse of the most signifcant artistic movements that have emerged since its inauguration. Indeed, Julian Schnabel’s inclusion in the 1980 and 1982 iterations signifed the emergence of an artistic movement that would come to defne the 1980s.

Much in the spirit of the Venice Biennale’s comprehensive program, which spans beyond the Arts sector to include Architecture, Cinema, Dance, Music and Teater, Schnabel has expanded upon his breakthroughs of the 1980s to establish a multidisciplinary practice of painting, sculpture and flm. While Schnabel’s oeuvre has diversifed over the decades, his practice has maintained a deep connection to his early paintings. Considering flm to be a natural extension of his paintings, his frst full-length feature flm, Basquiat, 1996, chronicled the life and career of a fellow pioneer of Neo-Expressionist painting.

With his second flm, Before Night Falls, 2000, Schnabel returned to Venice, this time

winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival—an achievement that underscores the signifcance of Venice and the Biennale within Schnabel’s career and a wider art-historical context.

Schnabel’s paintings, sculptures and flms have continued to inform one another, and while his oeuvre has evolved and expanded over the decades following his inclusion in the Venice Biennale in the early 1980s, it has also shown an enduring connection to these formative years. Exceptional paintings from this period, Portrait of God from the series Mutant King, 1981, and Angela, 1982, embody the practices that became the pillars of Schnabel’s multidisciplinary endeavors. ▲

LOT 49 Julian Schnabel, Angela.

Executed in 1982.

In sharp contrast to the prevailing movements of the 1960s and 1970s that witnessed the “dematerialization” of the art object, the 1980s were defned by a return to the traditions of painting. Emerging from the conceptualist and minimalist practices that dominated for two decades, Neo-Expressionist artists, such as Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michael Basquiat, Eric Fischl and David Salle, re-invigorated and re-introduced painting with fgurative subjects rendered in gestural brushstrokes upon canvases of heroic scales. Shortly after his frst exhibition at Mary Boone’s gallery in New York in 1979, Schnabel was selected for the 1980 iteration of the Venice Biennale, which allowed him to introduce this radical shift towards painting to an international audience.

Included in the following iteration of the Venice Biennale, Schnabel’s Angela, 1982, is one of the largest and earliest works by the

© 2020 Julian Schnabel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Ones to Watch Featured in New Now

LOT 5

Phillips has sold the only 2 works ofered at auction—both selling far above their estimates

Jonathan Gardner

Ebony G. Patterson

LOT 1

Artist’s frst time being ofered at auction

Leonhard Hurzlmeier

LOT 3

Artist’s frst time being ofered at auction

LOT 6

To be featured in 2 solo museum shows in 2020 at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis

Jef Sonhouse

LOT 15

Phillips holds the world auction record for this artist, achieved in 2019

Leonhard Hurzlmeier, lot 3, Frauen im Bade © Leonhard Hurzlmeier

Ed Clark

LOT 25

Currently featured in 3 major museum shows at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the de Young Museum, San Francisco

New Now Artists Featured in Concurrent Exhibitions

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Noah Davis

LOT 14

New York, David Zwirner, Noah Davis through February 22, 2020

Nicolas Party

LOT 43

New York, The Flag Art Foundation, Nicolas Party: Pastel through February 15, 2020 First exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, Nicolas Party: Sottobosco February 13 – April, 12, 2020

Alex Katz

LOT 4 4

London, Timothy Taylor Gallery, Alex Katz through February 22, 2020

Noah Davis, lot 14, In Search of Gallerius Maximumianus © Noah Davis