The Now Evening Auction focusses on the art of our time, offering the most exciting, cutting-edge works on the market and providing a masterpiece context for well-established and newly canonized artists. From Yayoi Kusama to Lucy Bull, the auction also provides heightened visibility and a relevant art historical context for younger artists, establishing the masters of today and tomorrow.
The November 2022 iteration of The Now Evening Auction combines critically acclaimed masterpieces by artists such as Yoshitomo Nara and Thomas Schütte with the best of newly emerging artists such as Salman Toor and Louis Fratino. Works by Jacqueline Humphries, Albert Oehlen and Avery Singer see their creators boldly engaging with technology as a means of image making, while tender portraits by the likes of Elizabeth Peyton, Julien Nguyen and Toyin Ojih Odutola evidence the uprooting of this historic genre in the 21st century. Taken together, the auction traces the arc of artistic production this century and examines many of the prevailing themes addressed by artists today, forming a dynamic portrait of the varied trends that constitute the art and culture of our time.
The Now sale is further distinguished by the inclusion of best of type outdoor sculptures by Thomas Schütte and Yayoi Kusama. Juxtaposing the ostensible softness of sensuous, natural undulations in form with the intense solidity of their chosen materials, Kusama's Pumpkin (M) and Schütte's Großer Geist Nr. 6 are at once alien and deeply grounded. While Kusama enlarges her familiar subject to the scale of her viewer, highlighting the beauty and strangeness of its form, Schütte creates a being that is both extraterrestrial land resolutely of this plane. These are works that could just as well have sprung from the ground or fallen from space, and they together represent two boundary pushing ventures in the field of contemporary sculpture.
