Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 work Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari sold for $12.6 million at a Phillips modern and contemporary art evening sale in Hong Kong this week. That figure, which includes premium, means the work sold for just above its low estimate of $12 million, but it also makes the picture is the most expensive piece to sell this season in Hong Kong.
That record follows the sale of Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening sale in New York earlier this month for $46.5 million. That work was the most expensive lot of the New York sales.
“These outstanding results confirm our unwavering dedication to Basquiat’s legacy and truly showed all of which we are capable,” Meiling Lee, Phillips’s head of modern and contemporary art in Asia, said in a press release.
This spring, Phillips sold three early works by Basquiat. Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, also sold at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening sale, bringing in $7.8 million.
The Hong Kong sale brought in a total of $26.8 million with a sell-through rate of 96 percent, a 10 percent increase from the previous season, the house said.
Additional highlights from the sale were Banksy’s Leopard and Lamb (2016), which sold for $4.7 million; Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY NETS (ZGHEB) from 2007, which sold for $3.3 million; and another Kusama, Pumpkin (2000), which brought in $1.7 million.
