Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art Hong Kong Fall

EVENT DESCRIPTION

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 7 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.

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.