The striking, minimalist black-and-white photographs of the Dutch contemporary photographer Bastiaan Woudt are being featured in a selling exhibition in March at Phillips’s galleries in New York.
Woudt’s photographs offer mesmerizing plays of light and shadow, form, and structure. At Phillips, they’ve been a popular choice at an annual curated photography auction it holds in London titled “Ultimate,” says
Yuka Yamaji, Phillips’s head of photographs, Europe.
For “Essence,” Woudt’s first solo exhibition in New York, Phillips is working directly with the self-taught photographer, who selected 13 works to display. All of the photographs are the last available prints from editions of 10, plus two artist proofs. Each is also 47 1/4 inches by 35 1/4 inches in size, unlike the extra-large editions—scaling more than 70 inches tall—that the auction house has sold before.
All 13 photographs have played “an incredibly important role in my career so far,” Woudt said in a news release.
The images to be shown feature a Black woman model posing with various props, creating dramatic shapes and silhouettes that instantly draw in a viewer.
Contemporary photographers often find it challenging “to come up with something that unique, that’s distinctive, something that you look at and say, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen that before,’ and that’s what stands out in terms of Bastian’s work,” Yamaji says.
“The fact he has remained committed to this monochromatic language for a contemporary artist is quite unusual,” she says.
The approach has allowed him to sharpen “what he feels is kind of the essence of the image—hence the title of the exhibition,” Yamaji says. “He focuses on light and shadow, forms, lines, trying to get to what makes an image stand out.”
Woudt is “all about representing the classic silhouette,” she says. “His works are always very elegant. It just resonates with a very wide audience.”
Woudt, who was born in 1987, is gaining international recognition for these and other works. His first solo museum show, Twist, was in 2022 at Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen, Norway, and he has had solo shows in Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Los Angeles. The artist has also done commercial work for Chanel, and his work has appeared in magazines, such as Harper’s Bazaar and British Vogue.
The photographs on display at “Essence,” from March 4-23, will be sold for between US$20,000 and US$30,000, according to Phillips.
For the Ultimate auctions in London, a sale of photographs “not available anywhere else,” Phillips works directly with galleries and artists. “It’s about kind of discovering new talent and artists that we see kind of long term relationships with,” Yamaji says. “It’s about developing their secondary market on a long term basis.”
For six consecutive years, Phillips has offered a single, extra-large-format image by Woudt—made in editions of three—and each has found a buyer, at times well above the estimated price.
In the first instance, in October 2019, the photographer’s Thula, Alkmaar, 2017—62 3/8 inches by 46 7/8 inches in size—was offered with an estimate between £18 million and £22 million (about US$23,040-US$28,160). It sold for £35,000. In 2021, the auction house achieved a world record for the artist with the sale of Disk, Alkmaar, 2020, for £60,480, nearly three times the high estimate.
“It’s a very unique relationship and it demonstrates how Phillips can help develop an artist’s career and promote their work,” Yamaji says.
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