Displaying items by tag: phillips

Michael McGinnis, president of auction house Phillips, is leaving the company after 16 years as the smaller rival to Christie’s and Sotheby’s undergoes a transformation under new senior management.

McGinnis will step down on Nov. 30 to spend time with his family and pursue other opportunities, Phillips said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. After founding the contemporary-art department in 1999, McGinnis became the boutique auctioneer’s chief executive officer in 2012 and held the post until CEO Edward Dolman’s arrival in 2014, when he assumed his current role.

There’s more than $2.1 billion of art for sale at the New York auctions next month. Almost half of it, including an Andy Warhol painting belonging to billionaire Steven A. Cohen, already has a buyer before the first paddle goes up.

When the two-week sales start Nov. 4, $1 billion worth of paintings and sculptures are guaranteed to sell by Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips at minimum prices regardless of what happens in the salesroom. The companies are lining up deep-pocketed backers for the guarantees or financing them with their own money -- a risky proposition because they can end up owning the works if there are no takers.

Phillips has been entrusted with the sale of selected artworks by Le Corbusier from the Heidi Weber Museum Collection. The most comprehensive selection of his artworks to be presented at auction, it is offered from the collection of one of his most prominent patrons, Heidi Weber, who housed many of the works in the Heidi Weber Museum / Centre Le Corbusier, her private museum in Zurich designed by the artist and dedicated to showing his artistic works. Consisting of over 50 works and including paintings, sculptures, enamels, tapestries and works on paper, the collection will be offered at various-owner auctions in London and New York over the next three years and is conservatively expected to realize in excess of $30 million.

When Fredric Brandt, the plastic surgeon to the stars, took his own life earlier this year, he left behind a trove of artworks that might have surprised those who thought his tastes were purely cosmetic. His collection, scattered between his homes in New York and Miami, includes works by Wool, Baldessari, Stingel, and Oehlen, and when it came time to find an auction house for the estate, Phillips emerged victorious after a fairly competitive jostle. It began readying the sale of 200 works, valued at $15 million in total, and 18 of these works went on sale tonight, at the house’s contemporary art evening sale in London.

Art auctions used to be a gentlemen’s business. Now the gloves are off.

As art sales face their first major test since the August financial market rout, auction houses are jockeying not only for trophy artworks but also for the best positions to highlight them at the November auctions in New York. The result is a shakeup in a schedule that for years was tightly coordinated, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s traditionally alternating who goes first. Even the weekends are no longer off limits; in a surprising move, Phillips, the smallest of the three, switched its main sale to a Sunday.

Ratcheting up one of the oldest rivalries in history, 219-year-old Phillips Auction House is resurrecting its Modern art business and launching a blitz of hiring and powerful partnerships. It will seek to compete head-to-head with age-old rivals Sotheby’s and Christie’s this fall in the high end of the billion-dollar art market.

People close to the matter say that, after downsizing about a decade ago in the wake of some unsuccessful sales, the company—working with just-announced partners eBay, former Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman and executives with ties to the deep-pocketed Arabian collecting world—could be making a play to disrupt the Coca-Cola/Pepsi-like hold on the art auction market that the Big Two have long enjoyed.

Last September, Arnold Lehman announced that he was retiring from his post as director of the Brooklyn Museum, a job he has held since 1997. Today, however, it became clear that his retirement won’t last very long, with Phillips announcing that he has joined the auction house as a senior advisor to its chairman and CEO, Edward Dolman.

Dolman joined Phillips last July after having spent 27 years at Christie’s and three years as the executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority.

Phillips will sell a $35-million contemporary art collection at its New York auction house this May, featuring works by artists such as Alighiero Boetti, John Chamberlain, Brice Marden, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Ryman. The consignment represents a coup for the house and a sign of the clout and art world connections of new chairman and CEO Edward Dolman. The longtime Christie's CEO took over the lead role at Phillips this past summer. The house has salesrooms in New York and London and plans to expand to Hong Kong.

Though Phillips typically holds much smaller contemporary art sales than Sotheby's and Christie's, it has nonetheless carved out a niche and become well known for selling art by younger artists like Alex Israel, Oscar Murillo, and Sterling Ruby.

Phillips is used to coming in at the tail end of these auction series, with a smaller, shorter sale than Sotheby's or Christie's, and with a more contemporary, less postwar emphasis. The auctioneer's problem is to secure good examples by artists at reasonable estimates because, in most cases, the house is second or third port of call for sellers. Now in its plush, central location on London's Mayfair, with Sotheby's and the new, large Gagosian gallery-to-be just around the corner, it is also upgrading the staff. With former Christie's chief executive Ed Dolman at the helm, the latest signing is Matt Carey-Williams, a young man with a veteran's experience from Sotheby's, Gagosian, and White Cube, as deputy chairman, Europe and Asia, who was very much part of the action this evening.

The Contemporary Art Evening auction at Phillips on February 12 features works by many art world heavyweights including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Julian Schnabel, and Antony Gormley, but the star that is likely to steal the show is undoubtedly Ai Weiwei's sculpture "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads." This group of 12 gold-plated sculptures, portraying the signs of the Chinese zodiac, is offered as Lot 8 with a pre-sale estimate of £2-£3m.

Created in 2010 the zodiac heads are inspired by those which once comprised a water clock-fountain at the Old Summer Palace, the complex of palaces and gardens in Beijing built between 1750 and 1764 by Emperor Qianlong of the Qing dynasty.