Phillips takes its Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale at five on Thursday 15 October 2026, led by a Gerhard Richter and a Megan Rooney. Viewing from 8 October.
Harry Phillips founded the house in Westminster in 1796 and it turns 230 in 2026, but its modern and contemporary evening sale is the newest thing it does and now the one it is judged on. Where the older houses built their reputations over centuries on old masters and estates, Phillips reorganised itself deliberately around twentieth and twenty-first century material, and the evening sale in Frieze week is where that decision is tested in public each year.
An evening sale is the market pricing itself out loud. Thirty or forty lots are called in an hour against published estimates, in a room containing the dealers and advisers who set those estimates, and the hammer either confirms them or does not. This one is led by Gerhard Richter’s Mathis and Megan Rooney’s Blue departure, a post-war name set against a painter in her forties, which describes exactly the room Phillips is trying to fill.
The sale is called at five on Thursday 15 October 2026 at 30 Berkeley Square, two hours before Sotheby’s takes its own on New Bond Street. Viewing opens on Thursday 8 October and runs the week. PAD is on the lawn outside the door in the same days, so Berkeley Square carries both the fair and the sale. Priority bids close two days before the hammer, on the Tuesday afternoon.