Works by Jean Dubuffet and Jeff Koons will headline Phillips' contemporary evening auction on 8 May, the official start to the big spring auction season in New York.
Out front is Jeff Koons’s Naked (1988), a sculpture of a prepubescent boy and girl estimated to reach between $5m and $7m. The work is from the artist’s well-known Banality series, comprising larger-than-life versions of kitschy porcelain souvenirs (among the works in it is a sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles the monkey). Another edition of Naked sold for $9m at Sotheby's New York in May 2008, well above a high estimate of $ 2m. This work has been in the same collection for over 25 years.
Dubuffet’s Barbe des rites (1959) oil on canvas comes from his Beard series and is estimated to sell for between $1.5m and $2.5m. One of the earliest works in the series of “vast, cosmic, mystic beards”, as the artist is quoted as describing them in the catalogue essay, the painting could make a record. The highest selling Beard, also from 1959, reached $1.2m at Christie's New York back in 1999.
The works are the front-line soldiers in a heated battle for collector dollars among the New York auction houses. Phillips faces extra competition this year since Christie’s has once again scheduled a third auction—for the same night as the one at Phillips’—adding to a week that has already crammed all six sales into as many days. Later that night, Christie's has one of Koons’s floating basketball sculptures up for sale, with an estimate of $12m.