Press Release London
For Immediate Release
London | +44 (0)20 7293 6000 | Matthew Weigman | matthew.weigman@sothebys.com
Simon Warren | simon.warren@sothebys.com
Sotheby's Forthcoming Contemporary Art Evening Auction
Highlighted by Desirable and Fresh-To-Market
Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francis Bacon Artworks
Orange Sports Figure by Jean-Michel Basquiat
(Estimate: £3-4 million*)
LONDON, TUESDAY, JANUARY 24TH, 2012 ---
Following Sotheby's third most successful year ever (2011)
for global auctions of Contemporary Art, which totalled $1.17
billion, the company is delighted to present its forthcoming
Contemporary Art Evening Auction. The sale, which will be
staged in London on Tuesday, February
15th, 2012, will include an array of major artworks by established Post-War and Contemporary artists including
Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alighiero Boetti and
Alberto Burri, and will also feature an exceptionally strong
British Art section, comprising works by Francis Bacon,
Lucian Freud, Bridget Riley, Leon Kossoff, among others. The
Evening Auction is estimated to realise in excess of £35.8
million*.
Commenting on the forthcoming sales, Cheyenne Westphal,
Sotheby's Chairman of Contemporary Art
Europe, said: "With the outstanding total of $1.17 billion
achieved for Sotheby's global sales of Contemporary Art
in
2011, Sotheby's leads the market in this field. Attesting to
last year's successes, the Evening Auction we have been able
to assemble this winter will be led by numerous desirable and
fresh-to-market artworks by internationally collected
blue-chip artists such as Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Takashi Murakami, Andy Warhol and
Lucian Freud, among others, and the sale carries a pre-sale
low estimate of £35 million which is in-line with the
various-owners Contemporary Art Evening Auctions we staged in
February and June last year."
The painting carries an estimate of £2-3 million.
Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild ("Rot"), which was executed
in
1991, exemplifies Richter's intellectual inquiry into
abstraction. The
1990s saw the artist's thematic use of red colour throughout
a monumental series of canvases. This abstract work is at
once challenging and dense yet strikingly beautiful.
Chromatically expansive, the sweeping red hues and pulsating
greens, yellows and greys of Abstraktes Bild, for which
Richter deployed a squeegee as his primary tool, masterfully
explores the relationships between the instinctual, the
spontaneous and the arbitrary. It is estimated at
£2.5-3.5 million.
Illustrated on the first page is one of the most important
highlights in the sale, Jean-Michel Basquiat's Orange
Sports Figure, an unrivalled pictorial masterpiece and an
exceptionally rare work to come to auction. The work,
estimated at £3-4 million, was painted
Gerhard Richter's Eis ("Ice") of 1981 is the definitive
paragon of the artist's landscape paintings. The breath
taking frozen seascape was based on a photograph the artist
had taken in Greenland, while on a solo retreat in
1972. Widely acknowledged as a reflection of Richter's
psyche, Eis, whose cold landscape shows no sign of life,
poignantly captures the artist's struggle with his marriage
and illustrates his physical and emotional exodus from his
troubled life in Dusseldorf to a polar haven.
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in 1982, the definitive year for Basquiat's oeuvre. Adorned
with his trademark crown, this work engenders a powerful and
ambiguous scrutiny of black athleticism: the aspirational
black sports figure is celebrated yet simultaneously
satirised by an autobiographical allusion to Basquiat's
Haitian heritage - the cheap labour destination for the
export manufacture of baseballs, an American sport
notoriously regarded as predominantly white. This racial
tension is powerfully presented by Basquiat's inimitable and
remarkable synthesis graffiti, primitivism and abstract
expressionism.
Nero Plastica, a marvellous volcanic topography of molten
black plastic, is demonstrative of Alberto Burri's poetic use
of fire as an artistic tool. It follows in the wake of
Burri's Combustione legno, which realised the remarkable
price of £3,177,250 at Sotheby's London in October 2011. Nero
Plastica has never before appeared at auction, presenting an
exciting debut of a work from Burri's most important corpus
of works. Heralded as the first artist to introduce the
unpredictability of this natural phenomena into artworks,
Burri began executing his first corpus of dedicated plastic
works in 1960, of which this work, made in 1965, is a fine
example. The visceral qualities of the work belie Burri's
past as a qualified doctor, then as a prisoner-of-war from
1944-45, during which time he turned to art. Nero Plastica
appears to reference a living and bleeding body, lacerated
and tortured by the atrocities of war. The work carries an
estimate of £800,000-1,200,000.
Figure with Monkey by Francis Bacon, which depicts a suited
man reaching towards a caged monkey, captures an important
theme within Bacon's oeuvre whereby man and beast appear
indistinguishable and interchangeable. Executed in 1951, this
remarkable work followed a stay in Zimbabwe and Southern
Rhodesia during 1951. During his travels Bacon produced
wildlife paintings and a small series of encaged, screaming
monkeys. The present work, in which the open-mouthed, bestial
scream of the monkey forms the focal point of the painting,
presents Bacon's fascination with wild animals and his
impulse to expose man's primal nature. Scarcely reproduced
and rarely exhibited since its creation, the re-emergence of
this significant early work marks a moment great
art-historical significance. The work is estimated at
£1.8-2.5 million.
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In the wake of the strong prices achieved for works on paper
by Lucian Freud in 2011, including the auction record which
was established by Sotheby's London in June 2011**, the sale
will include an outstanding group of works on paper by Lucian
Freud. This exceptional and encyclopaedic fresh-to-market
private collection of five drawings spans more than four
decades and attests to Freud's masterful draughtsmanship.
Combined, these extraordinary works are estimated to realise
in excess of £1.5 million. Highlighting the group is Lucian
Freud's black charcoal on paper Lord Goodman, executed in
1985. This masterful portrait magnificently illustrates the
artist's inimitable analysis of the human subject and his
incomparable aptitude as a draughtsman. Paralleling a smaller
drawing of the same sitter that is now held in the permanent
collection of the National Portrait Gallery, this drawing is
of museum quality and ranks in the
very highest tier of works on paper by Freud from the 1980s.
Freud's Lord Goodman is one of the outstanding
portrayals in the medium of Lucian Freud's entire oeuvre
and is estimated at £400,000-600,000. (Please see separate
press release for further details about this collection.)
Mappa is a superlative example from Alighiero Boetti's famed
series of bold map tapestries, in which Boetti uses world
maps to delineate geographical territories and conceptualise
the evolving geopolitics of the Cold War. The work, estimated
at £700,000-900,000, was acquired directly from the artist
and will be offered for sale for the first time. Mappa was
designed in 1983 in Trastevere, Rome and subsequently sent to
Kabul, Afghanistan to be embroidered. Boetti was fascinated
with the
culture and indigenous craft of Afghanistan, a territory that
had been off-limits to the artist following political unrest
in
1979. The embroidered text around the map poignantly alludes
to the artist's protest against the Soviet military
occupation that prohibited him from returning to his beloved
Kabul; translated from Italian, it reads "Give birth to the
world in Kabul Afganistan". Boetti simultaneously draws
attention to his artistic powers of creation in re-imagining
the world, while also alluding to the transitory nature of
the political world versus the seemingly unchangeable
geography of the planet.
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Appearing at auction and on public view for the first time,
Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild (numbered 768-4) represents
one of the most vivid and commanding works from the artist's
astounding opus of abstract paintings. With its powerfully
graphic vertical stripes, this work which is estimated at
£3-4 million, belongs to a cycle of abstracts executed in
1992 for which Richter innovatively implemented a squeegee as
his paintbrush. The result is an extraordinary visual tension
between controlled action and chance. Richter explained his
technique as "letting a thing come, rather than creating it…
in order to gain access to all that in genuine, richer, more
alive: to what is beyond my understanding." (Gerhard Richter,
"Notes
1985" in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The
Daily
Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, London 1993, p.
119). The present work's remarkably complex, monochromatic
scheme makes it an irrefutable rival to Richter's other
extraordinary abstractions currently held in the prestigious
collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.; the MoMA in San Francisco; the Kunstmuseum Winterthur
in Switzerland; the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany and
numerous others.
Takashi Murakami's vibrant Open Your Hands Wide, Embrace
Happiness!, which carries an estimate of £600,000-
800,000, is a superlative example among his animé-inspired
floral motifs, a globally-recognised trademark of the
renowned artist. The motif has notably been embraced in
collaborations with Louis Vuitton and hip-hop artist Kanye
West. According to Murakami, the present work's endless,
repeating plane of flowers stems from his time teaching
schoolchildren how to draw flowers at a preparatory school.
His initial repulsion by overtly "cute" flowers, which made
him feel uneasy, soon blossomed into artistic appreciation.
Murakami explains, "I really wanted to convey this impression
of unease, of the
threatening aspect of an approaching crowd" (the artist cited
in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Takashi
Murakami, 2002, pp. 84-85).
Diamond Dust Shoes by Andy Warhol is an impressively
large-scale, glittering composition of acrylic and 'diamond
dust' depicting women's shoes provided to the artist by
iconic fashion designer Halston, and references his early
days as a fashion illustrator on Madison Avenue. Warhol
recognised high-heels as an agent of glamour, and when
re-visited
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this emblematic theme in 1980, he employed his new
silkscreening technique using diamond dust - a direct
reference to movie-star glamour, high fashion, fame and
money, subjects Warhol loved and frequently explored. For the
present work, which is estimated at £700,000-
1,000,000, Warhol took a series of Polaroid pictures of the
shoes, selected one to print, then finished the composition
using large crystals of pulverized glass to achieve brighter
sparkle than that of real diamond dust.
Roy Lichtenstein's Nude in Apartment is a spectacular
late work executed in 1995, and
which has never before appeared at auction. It references the
early images of ladies from his Cartoon series, for which the
artist is internationally acclaimed. Dominating the work is
the life size female figure facing a full-length mirror. In
other important works, the artist has employed mirrors,
windows and other reflective surfaces to explore rich,
complex visual interactions with light. This work is
estimated at
£600,000-800,000.
Leon Kossoff's Christ Church No. 1, August 1991 is an
arresting image of an iconic landmark of London's East End,
and the first of Kossof's Christ Church series to have ever
been offered for sale. For the Christ Church paintings,
Kossoff made a dedicated pilgrimage half-way across London to
revisit the East End, where he spent his formative years
amongst the area's immigrant community. Kossoff, born to a
Jewish family of Ukrainian descent, found the Christ Church's
imposing Christian architecture to be a representation of
foreign territory. His intense rendering of a bold icon of
Christianity expresses his own assimilation into an
ostensibly hostile culture, in which he and other London
immigrants like him are outsiders. The painting is also
highly indicative of Kossoff's lifelong artistic engagement
with London's particular inner-city urban landscape. "London,
like the paint I use seems
to be in my blood stream," Kossoff wrote. "It's always moving
- the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk
past me when I draw have become part of my life" (the artist
in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Leon
Kossoff , 1996, p. 36).
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Bridget Riley's exuberant Tabriz, executed in 1984, belongs to the cycle of "Egyptian Palette" paintings produced following Riley's travels in Egypt in the winter of 1979-1980, which had a profound influence on the artist. Riley was immediately struck with the art found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, which depicted magnificent scenes in a surprisingly limited number of hues. Tabriz, estimate at £250,000-350,000, is among the most optically arresting and jubilant of this important series. In keeping with Riley's inimitable technique and inspired colour palette, the present work is restricted to only six colours of uniformly sized lines. The result is a spectacular optical illusion, which distorts the width of the lines and even the tone of the pigments, creating a rhythmic, pulsating effect.
Notes to Editor:
*Estimates do not include buyer's premium
**Lucian Freud's Beach Scene with a Boat, colour chalk and pen and ink, executed in 1945, sold at Sotheby's London on June 15, 2011, £2.6 million ($4.2 million)
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