Exuberant and respiring with life, Cecily Brown’s large-scale Spree from 1999 is a paragon of the artist’s virtuosic practice (estimate $3/4 million). Executed during the watershed of her prodigious thirty-year career, Spree sets the tone for Brown’s life-long exploration of nascent aesthetics. By this point in her career, Brown's ebullient, serpentine compositions had gained traction in the modern art landscape, however, her breakthrough assumed form in a blockbuster solo show just two years earlier at Deitch Projects in New York—Jeffrey Deitch’s first exhibition of the painter. Soon after, Brown cemented herself as a leader within the vein of Modern Expressionism and a constituent of the enfant terrible inner circle. Centered on the ever-shifting dynamics of existence, Spree comes alive with a luscious and rich palette, and evokes titillating and deep sensations of a corporeal nature, showcasing a masterful handling of paint.

Executed in 1967, Ed Ruscha’s Face It bears the mark of time of its creation at the apex of the American neo-avantgarde (estimate $400/600,000). Emblematic of the artist’s lexicon of quips and ironic one-liners, Face It is one of Ruscha’s most self- reflexive works, drawing to the fore subconscious denials, uncertainties and doubts. While interested in the drama of Hollywood, and the maximal environmental impact of light, Ruscha was equally inspired by the oftentimes banal underpinnings of popular culture. An early example of the artist’s startling gunpowder drawings, the literally explosive potential of gunpowder in the present work is rendered soft and benign, yet a sense of obscured danger remains.

Further works will feature in the Contemporary Art Day auction in November, including Lichtenstein’s Imperfect Painting (estimate $700,000/1,000,000); Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign (estimate $450/650,000); Frank Stella’s Green Solitaire 3X (estimate $300/400,000); among others, and Jim Dine’s Venus (estimate $25/35,000); Martin Eder’s Mascara (Dream Endlessly) (estimate $25/35,000), and Ellsworth Kelly’s Cyclamen (estimate $25/35,000), and more on offer in a dedicated, online auction this December.