Phillips’s upcoming modern and contemporary art evening sale in New York will feature a painting of a Californian home by David Hockney with a $12 million–$18 million estimate. It will be among the top lots to be offered in the sale, which is scheduled to take place on June 23 at the auction house’s new Park Avenue headquarters.
A Neat Lawn, made in 1967 as part of Hockney’s “California Dreaming” series, depicts a manicured green lawn in front of a concrete residential building, with a sprinkler system spraying water on the grass.
“A Neat Lawn is one of the most significant examples of Hockney’s ‘California Dreaming’ paintings, long considered among his greatest achievements,” Phillips’s deputy chairman and co-head of 20th century and contemporary art, Robert Manley said in a statement. The work last sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $3.6 million, a record price for the artist at the time.
Since then, Hockney’s auction prices have skyrocketed. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s New York in November 2019, making him one of the most expensive living artists at auction. West Coast art collector and real estate developer Richard Hedreen sold another California scene, Nichols Canyon (1980), at Phillips for $41 million during the house’s 20th century and contemporary art evening sale in New York in December 2020.
The Hockney will hit the block at Phillips alongside Wayne Thiebaud’s painting Winding River (2002), which is expected to fetch $6 million, and Matthew Wong’s landscape Field in a Dream (2014–17), which is expected to fetch $1.5 million.
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