If there’s one thing New York City and Phillips de Pury have in common, it’s a knack for reinvention. Perhaps this is why the avant-garde auction house’s Manhattan division chose New York, New York as the subject for its latest unconventional approach to art auctions: themed sales. Featuring a diverse selection of over 350 works that were either inspired by, or created in New York, last Wednesday’s opening reception was a hopeful reminder of our fair city’s unparalleled creative energy and artistic influence.

There was, of course, a room dedicated to Warhol, the highlights of which was a signed assemblage of 15 album covers with those unmistakable banana stickers from the King of Pop Art’s collaboration with Nico and the Velvet Underground, a surreal print of dancer Merce Cunningham standing at a tilt with a chair strapped around his waist and Burt Glin’s black and white print of Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein “voguing” out of a manhole.

The parade of New York icons continued with a Basquiat print, a minimalist white and grey Ellsworth Kelly lithograph and a geometric Jasper Johns etching which called to mind the Manhattan Grid on a grey day. Russel Young’s screen-print of Frank Sinatra’s mug shot with an overlay of the lyrics to “New York, New York” written in diamond dust epitomized our city’s reputation for bad boys and glamour, and just for good measure, a De Kooning lithograph was included in the mix.

Cityscapes, photographs of street scenes and unconventional images of the Brooklyn Bridge by the likes of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ruth Orkin and Richard Bosman were displayed in expected abundance, as were interpretations of street art (Crash’s spray-painted mini-mural was especially appealing). Naturally, the Guggenheim was found in a variety of shapes, sizes and mediums, the star of which was Erwin Wurm’s white resin rendition of the museum melting in a creamy puddle, but it was the less literal representations of New York that made Phillips’s carefully curated selection of lots come together. For example, Red Grooms’s delightfully campy paper sculpture of a red tugboat fighting through the waves of what one would assume was the Hudson was a child-like ode to old New York’s scenery. Several pairs of gold Tiffany’s “sand dollar” earrings designed by Jean Schlumberger in the 50s transported onlookers into an antique 5th Avenue fantasy and an Art-Deco esque mirrored screen by design team Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch resembled a cluster of glass skyscrapers as they reflect the blinding lights of Times Square.

The lots, which were auctioned off on Saturday, showed art, and New York, in all their forms. They reflected each of the city’s identities from the past, present and future and after experiencing room after room of Phillips de Pury’s Big Apple treasures, one couldn’t help but feel that there’s nowhere quite like New York.