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Hong Kong Spring Auctions

Spotlight: Western Contemporary Highlights in Hong Kong

hong kong | 9 july
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S otheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale in Hong Kong on 9 July 2020 presents an unprecedented diversity of art from the East and West. Highlights include important works by David Hockney and Clyfford Still as well as iconic and distinguished pieces by a wide range of blue-chip artists. Click through for selected highlights, or browse videos here.

Past Auction
Contemporary Art Evening Sale
9 July 2020 | 7:00 PM HKT | Hong Kong

Spotlight: Western Contemporary Highlights in Hong Kong

  • David Hockney,
    30 SUNFLOWERS.
    Estimate Upon Request
    Executed in 1996, at the brink of Hockney’s sixtieth year, 30 Sunflowers is an extraordinary masterpiece of crucial significance within Hockney’s oeuvre. Marking Hockney’s return to painting after a decade primarily immersed in photography, the magnificent work represents his momentous undertaking of traditional subject matter – the venerated still life – at the height of his artistic powers, when he must have finally deemed himself ready to encounter his heroes and predecessors. Revealing unrivaled formal execution and profound emotive depth, the work is a definitive painting ranking among the very best of Hockney’s mature work.
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  • Clyfford Still, PH-306.
    Estimate: HK$54,000,000 — 84,000,000
    Formerly in the collection of Clyfford Still’s daughter, Sandra Still, PH-306 from 1946-1947 is a representative work from the artist’s transitional period in the 1940s, emblematizing his aesthetic shift towards the fragmentary and the abstract. Still personally gifted this painting to his cherished daughter Sandra in 1976 to grace the wall of her Manhattan apartment, reflecting this work’s particular significance to the artist. The modest size of PH-306 gains intensity, drawing the gaze inward rather than engulfing the spectator. 1946-47 signifies a turning point in Still’s oeuvre when he experimented with smaller canvases and the residual figuration completely disappears to a radical non-objectivity.
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  • Rudolf Stingel, UNTITLED.
    Estimate: HK$11,000,000 — 21,000,000
    Fresh to auction, this is a remarkably exquisite example of Rudolf Stingel’s iconic and highly coveted series of gold carpet paintings. Articulating a regal, elegiac luminosity, Untitled balances the complex relationship between the intricate craftsmanship of the Art Nouveau and the readymade repeatability of a stencil, referring on the one hand to the decorative styles of the Italian Baroque and French Rococo and to his overarching concerns regarding the fusion of pictorial and architectural space and the industrialization of ornamentation and beauty.
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  • Jonas Wood, UNTITLED (CAT POSTER).
    Estimate: HK$5,500,000 — 7,000,000
    Untitled (Cat Poster) from 2011 is a prime example of Jonas Wood's celebrated paintings of quotidian contemporary American life, which masterfully dissemble the canonic concepts of abstraction and figuration. Straddling three of the artist's principal concerns – interiors of deeply personal locations, a prolonged engagement with art history, and a fascination with domestic animals – the visually complex Untitled (Cat Poster) draws these themes to a succinct yet endlessly beguiling conclusion.
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  • Richard Prince, UNTITLED (COWBOY).
    Estimate: HK$2,200,000 — 4,200,000
    With its iconic imagery, Untitled (Cowboy) is emblematic of Richard Prince’s career-long investigation into the motif of the American cowboy. A compound symbol associated with ideas of American exceptionalism, the cowboy first seduced Prince as an image through Marlboro cigarette advertisements from the 1970s that used the symbol as a commercial vehicle. By re-appropriating images from Marlboro advertisements, Prince not only challenges the nature of photography and its authorship but more importantly deconstructs and interrogates romanticized images that shape American identity.
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  • Albert Oehlen, DIE PFEIFENDEN VON (THE WHISTLERS OF).
    Estimate: HK$ 14,000,000 — 24,000,000
    A vivid, electrifying profusion of psychedelic color, form and gesture, Albert Oehlen’s Die Pfeifenden von (The Whistlers of) is a thrillingly robust work. Across the energetic panorama, nomadic figurative shapes are swept and tossed by tidal currents of gestural abstraction: an overturned teapot, the visage of a wax doll, a femur, gloved hands. Executed in 2001, the painting typifies Oehlen’s vital push-pull dynamic of figuration versus abstraction. Pushing his medium past its historical connotations to its breaking point, Oehlen challenges, examines, and revitalizes painting in a post-painting world.
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  • Robert Colescott, NEW GOD AT THE BATHER'S POOL.
    Estimate: HK$2,500,000 — 3,500,000
    A radical reimagining of the age-old trope of bathers, Robert Colescott’s New God at the Bather’s Pool depicts a world of searing dichotomies – between male and female, black and white, tragedy and comedy, past and present. The first African American to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1997 – and the first painter selected for the honor since Jasper Johns, over a decade earlier – Colescott is revered for his unique style of narrative figuration. The Bathers series in particular exemplifies the artist’s accomplishments at the height of his career; while continuing to develop his well-established strategy of appropriating themes from European art history, he ventured into a more psychological realm.
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  • Günther Förg, UNTITLED.
    Estimate: HK$2,000,000 — 3,000,000
    Raw and exuberant, Untitled forms part of Günther Förg’s eclectic spot paintings created from 2007 to 2008. Executed with bravura and ease of hand, a buoyant network of gestural hatchings waltzes across the vast expanse of the canvas, at once structured yet loose, open yet confined. Developed out of his earlier Grid Paintings characterised by dynamic lattices of vertical and horizontal lines, the spot paintings are amongst the late German artist’s final cycles of works, representing the grand culmination of his lifelong practice that demonstrated overt awareness of Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and other strands of art whilst also appearing fiercely independent and unique.
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