Phillips Live Auction Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session
May 14, 2025New York
Highlights: Tala Madani - Nicolas Party - Kennedy Yanko - Ali Banisadr - Dan Colen - Rashid Johnson - Jason Boyd Kinsella - Jean-Michel Othoniel - Genesis Tramaine - Doug Aitken
Phillips’ Day Sale of Modern & Contemporary Art in New York, on 14 May 2025, achieves $21.5 million. Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Nicole Eisenman Lead the Sale, with Strong Results for Female Artists Including Suzanne Valadon and Firelei Báez.
The Auction House reported new auction records achieved for Genevieve Gaignard, Jordan Nassar, Soumya Netrabile, and Jean-Michel Othoniel.
Tala Madani (b. 1981, Iran)
The Eater
Estimate $15,000 - $20,000
Sold For $53 340
Tala Madani's work brings together various modes of critique about gender, particularly masculine and feminine stereotypes, as well as questioning westernised idealistic notions of childhood, family and the art historical canon. Her work is inflected with a peevish sense of humour and brings to bear basic human feelings and emotions, such as anxiety, anger, fear, isolation, paranoia, envy and lust.
Nicolas Party (b. 1980, Switzerland)
Speaker
Estimate $150,000 - $200,000
Sold For $228 600
Throughout a practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, installation, and murals, Nicolas Party creates a fantastical, often pastel-hued universe. His figurative canvases feature rounded, wide-eyed figures and geometric landscapes drenched in vibrant Fauvist hues. The rest of his oeuvre adds texture to his singular vision and – in his elaborate, immersive exhibitions – extends it into the third dimension.
Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, the USA)
Anoint
Estimate $40,000 - $60,000
Sold For $48 260
Working with paint skins and found metal, Kennedy Yanko constructs sublime sculptures and architecturally scaled installations that defy the limits of their own materiality. Steeped in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, Yanko’s works cast off the boundaries of their medium, occupying the generative spaces between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, surreal and earthbound.
Central to Yanko’s practice is her work with paint skins – a material created by pouring many gallons of paint onto a flat surface that is lifted and shaped into a tarp-like entity once it’s nearly dry. Despite the conspicuous solidity of materials, her sculptures often appear weightless – as if they were on the verge of taking flight or drawing breath.
Ali Banisadr (b. 1976, Iran)
Say My Name
Estimate $70,000 - $100,000
Sold For $171 450
In his paintings, Ali Banisadr creates intangible worlds in which figuration and abstraction are delicately balanced, creating a rhythmic sense of motion in vibrant colours across the canvas. Influenced by the experience of synaesthesia, whereby his senses of colour and of sound are intertwined, he translates this internal state into visual terms.
The figures are often imagined hybrids that stem from the artist's fascination with mythological creatures and embody the constantly shifting identities of our digital world. While these fantastical scenes are anchored in the lineage of art historical figures, such as the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, they also resonate strongly with the world we live in today.
Dan Colen (b. 1979, the USA)
Mother (Hole in Tree)
Estimate $10,000 - $15,000
Sold For $114 300
Over the years, Colen’s practice explored various styles and subjects, ranging from abstract mixed-media projects to figurative painting, to performance art. Throughout these explorations, Colen has maintained a steadfast commitment to interrogating and reshaping the semiotic nature of contemporaneity. His work frequently explores the capacity of artworks to convey symbols and meanings, and delves into the societal significance of mass media and subcultural language. In recent years, Colen’s focus has expanded to encompass social cohesion and community engagement projects.
Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, the USA)
Untitled Escape Collage
Estimate $300,000 - $500,000
Sold For $292 100
Rashid Johnson is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on race and class while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. Though he employs materials drawn from specific autobiographical contexts, and though his practice had its beginnings in photography and conceptual art, Johnson is equally interested in testing the ability of abstract visual languages to communicate across cultural boundaries. The visceral experience of art, on formal terms, is therefore considered inseparable from the social matrix that gives rise to it. Johnson’s work is predicated upon moving freely between these two modes.
Jason Boyd Kinsella (b. 1969, Canada)
Jonathan
Estimate $18,000 - $25,000
Sold For $16 510
Jason Boyd Kinsella started painting again in 2019 after a 30 year hiatus. Unveiling mankind’s psychological makeup lies at the heart of Kinsella’s practice. In his work, he breaks down the personality traits of his characters into distinct geometric units whose shape, colour and size define their individuality based on the Myers-Briggs personality test, anchoring his subjects in the essence of their psychological attributes. If the clean surface of his paintings may recall the Old Masters’ works, his aesthetic and methods are resolutely contemporary.
Jean-Michel Othoniel (b. 1964, France)
Untitled (blue-knot)
Estimate $30,000 - $40,000
Sold For $152 400
Jean-Michel Othoniel creates resplendent, large-scale glass sculptures that explore themes of fragility, transformation, and ephemerality below their shiny surfaces. Having come of age as an artist during the AIDS crisis, Othoniel deploys various strategies to hint at loss and despair – cracks in his objects’ perfect surfaces, scenes of uncanny whimsy, negative spaces, and, early in his career, transient materials like sulfur.
Most identifiable are Othoniel’s jewel-like glass sculptures that function like outsized necklaces, hung in public gardens or twisted in improbable contortions in galleries. He is particularly interested in glass for its ability to be manipulated and transformed, having also used the material to spell out texts and craft opulent installations, like a canopy bed of glass orbs and a public mis-en-scène of puppets.
Genesis Tramaine (b. 1983, the USA)
I Have All That I Need
Estimate $60,000 - $80,000
Tramaine is an expressionist devotional painter who creates abstract portraits of men and women who transcend gender, race, and social structures. She digests the everyday and regurgitates it as work that evokes déjà vu, beckoning memories of past lives and glimpses of undiscovered futures. The blueprint of Genesis’ style is rooted in strong mix of 1980’s urban New York graffiti, and imagined images of gospel hymns sung on Sunday morning during church.
Tramaine’s work is also powerfully influenced by Bible verses and other readings she studied in church. Her spiritual influences have a strong impact on the composition and depth of her paintings, which explore deeply human themes including ethics and insanity, the mundane and the inhumane, spirituality, sexuality, and sentimentality.
Doug Aitken (b. 1968, the USA)EXITEstimate $25,000 - $35,000Sold For $25 400
Aitken is a contemporary artist known for installations incorporating video, photography, sculpture, and performance. Employing a high level of production value and working in large scale, he creates moving works intended to take the viewer unaware, eliciting responses that are unexpected and profound. Tackling a range of subjects, the artist employs film as a means to expand the traditional notions of art. “We’re living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense,” Aitken has said. “These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.”