HONG KONG – 10 August 2023 – Phillips is pleased to announce Yoshitomo Nara’s outstandingNo Means Noasone of the star lots in the upcoming Hong Kong Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, taking place on6 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 Nowas created in 2006 at the height of Nara’sartistic prowess. His other stylistically and thematically linked works painted in the same year are part of institutionalcollections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.Nicolas Party’sStill Life with an Olivewill also be offered as a major highlight in the Evening Sale, also marking thefirst time the painting has appeared at auction.
 

IsauredeVielCastel,Headof20thCentury&Contemporary Art, Phillips Hong Kong,said,“On theheels of our inaugural Evening Sale at the new Hong Kongsaleroom which saw a 65% increase over the previousyear, we are proud to unveil two exceptional highlightswhich have never before been sold at auction to kick offthe Fall season. Ahead of the sale, we look forward towelcoming our collecting community in Asia to see theworks in person, when our exhibitions open to the public inSeoul from 1-9 September, in Taipei 16-17 September,and in Hong Kong 28 September – 6 October.”

Danielle So, Head of Evening Sale, 20th Century &Contemporary Art, Phillips Hong Kong,said: “Havingbeen crowned the most expensive living Japanese artist,works by Yoshitomo Nara continue to remain highly soughtafter, with his top 20 auction results having been achievedin the past four years alone. Phillips is delighted to offer another seminal work by the artist, following the strongresults achieved byLookin' for a Treasurethis spring,Missing in Actionin 2021, which set the second-highestauction price for his works, andHothouse Dollin 2020.No Means Nois part of a very small group of large canvasesby Nara that have come to auction this year, underscoring the increasingly scarce supply of such large, full, andlayered works, thus marking the present work as a rare offering.”
 

The collaboration between Yoshitomo Nara and the design collective graf began in 2003 when the artist met oneof its founders. Together they built a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions with massive installations of woodenhouses that feature drawings, paintings and sculptures by Nara across the world. The interior of these houses wereinspired by the artist’s studios in Japan, somewhat nomadic homes for Nara at an important time in his artisticcareer. The present work was featured in their 2007 exhibition in Berlin,Yoshitomo Nara + graf: Berlin Baracke,hosted by Galerie Zink. Nara’s most ambitious collaborative project with graf wasA-Z–a series of 26 exhibitions,26 wooden structures or ‘houses’ that responded to the particular environment of the exhibition venue or the localculture were installed.No Means Noformed part of theprojectthat was shown at the BALTIC Centre forContemporary Art in 2008, which marked the first show at a major public gallery in the United Kingdom for Nara +graf.

Created in Nara’s signature ‘layered’ style in which gentle swathes of pastel hide behind a translucent layer of pearlywhite serving as the background, the present work features an iconic Nara girl staring ahead with massive eyestwinkling like galaxies. The artist has been titling some of his piecesNo Means Nofrom as early as the 1990s, andits earliest iteration appears within a 1991 work on paper now housed in the collection of the Aomori Museum ofArt, featuring a crashing warplane with the titular words blazoned in red above the scene. In this context, the titlecarries pacifist undertones as is typical of the anti-war artist.
 

Also among the Evening Sale’s highlights isNicolas Party’sStill Life with an Olive.Shown at Party’s first majorsolo exhibition in the United Kingdom at the Modern Institute in Glasgow in 2013, the present work is one of onlyseven 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, akey element that is central to theiconography 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 fruitsand objects are transformed into larger-than-life, biomorphic shapes, demonstrating Party’s playfulness with scale.

Nicolas Party’s top ten results at auction have all been set in the past three years, which is indicative of thecontinuing strength of the artist’s market. Similar to the present work, two of the artist’s top five results at auctionare for still life arrangements of fruit.