On Wednesday night, Phillips held a modern and contemporary art evening sale in New York that brought in a hammer total of $97.4 million, or $118.9 million with premium.
17 of the lots—including those by artists such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Mark Rothko and David Hockney—came secured with guarantees.
In a post-sale press conference, the executive team at Phillips expressed relief that the global art market continues to have a strong recovery from the pandemic slump.
“I don’t think I’ve ever known that in my career,” he said of the back-to-back successes in Hong Kong and New York.
As big-ticket guaranteed lots often do, it attracted few bids before going to a New York buyer on the phone with Lori Spector, Phillips’ regional director in Zurich, hammering at a below-estimate $9.24 million.
Mickalene Thomas’s bejeweled painting Portrait of Jessica , a collaged and glittered portrait, at a Christie’s evening sale in May.
Once in the hands of curator Jan Hoet, who put Hammons on the map in the ninth edition of Documenta in 1992, it was in the same family collection for 30 years before last night’s sale.
A large-scale Takashi Murakami painting titled Red Demon and Blue Demon with 48 Arhats sold for an above-estimate hammer price of $5 million and a final price of $6.2 million.
Samson has made a name for himself in recent years at the Armory show in 2018 with Cape Town’s blank projects, a presentation for which the dealer won the Presents Booth Prize.
It then entered the public collection of the Rema Hort Foundation, a charity established by contemporary art collectors and printing company owners Susan and Michael Hort in honor of their daughter, Rema, who died of cancer at the age of 30 in 1995.
It was sold by Baltimore collector and NMWA board member Steven Scott, who has plans to donate a portion of the sale proceeds to the D.C.
The same New York buyer on the phone with Phillips client advisory director, Philae Knight, bought de Kooning’s abstraction East Hampton V .