New York, 15 April 2026 - Phillips has announced that its May Evening Sale of Modern & Contemporary Art will offer the most significant two-dimensional work by the American artist Lee Bontecou to ever appear at auction. Untitled, an acrylic and pastel on canvas measuring nearly six feet wide, carries an estimate of $1,200,000 to $1,800,000 and is poised to break the record for a two-dimensional work by the artist at auction. Having remained in the same private collection since its execution, the painting comes to the saleroom on 19 May, the first time it will be offered publicly.
The viewing ahead of the sale also marks the first time the work will be exhibited since its inclusion in Bontecou's celebrated traveling retrospective of 2003 to 2004, jointly organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles's Hammer Museum, and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Executed between 1985 and 2001, Untitled represents one of Bontecou's few works on canvas and the culmination of a decades-long cycle of drawings from the 1980s and 1990s. The luminous, expansive pastel composition, defined by sweeping, wave-like forms, embodies Bontecou's notion of the "worldscape," where landscape, organism, and imagined terrain converge into a single field of energy and transformation, animated by the medium's capacity to gather and diffuse light across its surface.
A singular work in the artist's oeuvre
Robert Manley, Chairman, Modern & Contemporary Art, said, "Untitled is a truly singular work within Lee Bontecou's oeuvre. While she is rightly celebrated for her revolutionary steel relief sculptures, this expansive work occupies a category entirely its own. There is nothing else quite like it in her entire body of work. Deeply immersive and luminous, this worldscape distills decades of Bontecou's thinking about space, energy, and transformation. Its scale, rarity, and presence make it incredibly special, and its appearance at auction for the first time represents a rare opportunity for our collecting community to encounter Bontecou at her most ambitious and visionary."
The sale
The work will be offered in the May Evening Sale of Modern & Contemporary Art, with the auction taking place on 19 May 2026 and viewings running from 9 to 19 May 2026 at Phillips' galleries at 432 Park Avenue, New York. The estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million reflects the rarity of a finished work on canvas within an oeuvre defined principally by sculpture, and the appearance at auction of a composition not seen publicly for more than two decades.
The sale arrives as Phillips marks its 230th anniversary in 2026. Founded in London in 1796 by the auctioneer Harry Phillips, the house has long offered a forward-looking approach to Modern & Contemporary Art, Design, and Luxury, and today holds its principal auctions in New York, London, Geneva, and Hong Kong.
Estimates do not include the buyer's premium; prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer's premium.
(Press Release)
