The Evening Auction on 16 October showcases giants of German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger and Georg Baselitz. Highlights also include Peter Doig’s first tropical landscape painting and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s emotionally charged tribute to his mentor Andy Warhol as well as a major sculptural work by Juan Muñoz. In the spirit of Frieze Week, the Evening Auction also showcases a new generation of leading contemporary artists who are making their mark on the art world, such as Sterling Ruby, Adrian Ghenie, Joe Bradley, Alex Israel, Brent Wadden, Louis Eisner and Toby Ziegler.
Francis Outred, Christie’s Chairman of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe, comments:
“When I first began working in the auction business in 1999, the October series was a mid-season sale with a value of around £2million and an Italian sale of around £5million. This year we’ve surpassed £100million as a low estimate for the season for the very first time, with the combination of the Essl 44 Works collection, the Italian Sale and Evening and Day auctions. This shows the direct impact of Frieze as a cultural and commercial catalyst for London. Our exhibition at Christie’s Mayfair, The Bad Shepherd, looking at the impact of the Brueghel dynasty on six contemporary artists complements the concept of Frieze Masters, with our Old Masters and Post-War and Contemporary art specialists working in unison for the first time. Our October Evening Auction is geared to the Frieze spirit, featuring young, in-demand artists like Brent Wadden and Toby Ziegler alongside rising art market stars such as Adrian Ghenie, Joe Bradley and Alex Israel, who are presented together with the artists who have influenced them, like Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and Peter Doig as well as the Young British Artists. The last three to four seasons have seen a resurgence in the market for YBAs at Christie’s, and, following our record success with Tracey Emin’s My Bed in July, we are proud to offer one of her most important needlework pieces, alongside key works from the 1990s by Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume.”
GERMAN ART TITANS
Coinciding with major exhibitions of German art – Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy of Art and Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern – Christie’s Evening Auction will include major works by these artists, as well as by other German art titans. It features Georg Baselitz’s Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts, 1968 (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000), part of his seminal Fracture Paintings, which represent the transition between his early Hero paintings of the early 1960s and his fully inverted canvases of 1969, as well as Orangenesser, 1983 (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000), one of the largest works of this important series. Kiefer’s sweeping panorama of his acclaimed Occupations series, Laßt tausend Blumen blühen!, 1999 (estimate: £700,000 – 1,000,000) comes to auction for the first time since it set a record for the artist’s work in 2007, along with his powerful sculptural painting, Sefer Hechaloth, 2003 (estimate: £400,000 – 600,000). Other highlights include Polke’s Untitled, 1998 (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000) and Martin Kippenberger’s Falsches Zeichen der Lord Jim Loge, 1985 (estimate: £250,000 – 350,000).
The auction will also offer a mini-retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s work, celebrating the compelling dialogue between photorealism and abstraction that has defined his extraordinary reinvention of painting. A key work is Waldstück, 1969 (estimate: £3,000,000 – 5,000,000), which is one of Richter’s three large-scale paintings capturing the heart of the Chilean rainforest. Dissolving in and out of focus, the blurred edges evoke an atmospheric haze of humidity, pushing the composition to the edge of abstraction. Previously part of the prestigious Onnasch collection, this work has remained in the same hands for nearly forty years and dates from a breakthrough moment in Richter’s career coinciding with his first New York exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Moving into his colour work, Fiktion, 1975 (estimate: £1,500,000 – 2,000,000), closely related to Richter’s Annunuciation series after Titian, is situated on the brink of the Abstraktes Bilder series that would commence the following year as seen in Abstraktes Bild, 1981 (estimate: £1,100,000 – 1,600,000), Abstraktes Bild, 1990 (estimate: £1,200,000 – 1,800,000) and up to the height of his abstract practice with Abstraktes Bild, 1995 (estimate: £1,500,000 – 2,000,000).
THE POWER OF PAINTING
Peter Doig’s The Heart of Old San Juan, 1999 (estimate: £4,000,000 – 6,000,000) – an image of an emerald basketball court on the edge of the sea – holds a significant place in the artist’s oeuvre as it is his first painting in a tropical landscape. This work represents a shift away from the autumnal and wintery landscapes of snowy Canada in the early 1990s towards a renewed fascination with the tropics that has occupied him for the last 15 years. In these works, the paint becomes lighter and more distilled. Moving away from the application of thick textures and multiple techniques in each painting, in this work Doig began to investigate the veiling of sequential layers of liquid paint, looking at how light changes the tone and hue in each veil to create a diaphanous surface replete with the sense of being there. The multitude of textures and painterly techniques offered in The Heart of Old San Juan exhibit the deep investigations Doig was undertaking at this early point in his career that would go on to cement his reputation as a painter of textures. A key transitional work, it has been included in most of his major museum exhibitions including last year’s landmark show No Foreign Lands, which toured to the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013 and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 2014.
Executed in 1987, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Love Dub for A (estimate: £4,000,000 – 6,000,000) is an emotionally charged posthumous tribute, sized at billboard proportions, to his close friend and mentor, Andy Warhol who had died unexpectedly in February that same year. Warhol’s death greatly affected Basquiat as the two had a charged and competitive relationship. Painted the year before Basquiat’s death, the explosive composition marks the return of the Basquiat that the art world had fallen in love with in 1981, especially through its embodiment of his inimitable street-inflected style. Vividly capturing the sensation of the artist both at the height of his creative powers and on the brink of destruction, Love Dub for A exemplifies Basquiat’s unmistakable idiom, particularly his bravura handling of paint, spontaneous sense of line and inventive use of colour. These expressive qualities combine to create a work that bursts with a charged sense of dynamism, reflecting the complex emotions and deep sense of poignancy that underpin this work. The sale also includes another Basquiat work, Infantry, 1983 (estimate: £1,800,000 – 3,000,000), which was painted at a climactic moment in his career, marked by the artist’s celebrated inclusion in the Whitney Biennial that year.
One of the earliest paintings from Zeng Fanzhi’s iconic Mask series, Mask No. 3 (estimate: £850,000 – 1,200,000) offers a vision of a dapper young man seemingly at the pinnacle of success. However, upon closer inspection the raw, reddened hands exposed below his cuffs reveal his supressed tension beneath the tranquil surface. Capturing the zeitgeist of a young generation in modern China, the disguise becomes a poignant expressionist device offering a psychological, intense and vital means of painting. Created a time when China was in the throes of unprecedented socio-political changes, Zeng’s Mask series charts both a personal and country-wide attempt to adjust to a rapidly changing social landscape.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
Following the spectacular success of Tracey Emin’s My Bed at Christie’s last July, the Evening Auction features her applique blanket Mad Tracey From Margate. Everyone’s Been There (estimate: £700,000 – 1,000,000). Executed in 1997, the same pivotal year as her appearance in the landmark Sensation exhibition of YBAs at the Royal Academy of Arts, the work represents a key statement of her self-image and a key point in her career. Other iconic YBA works in the Evening Auction include Whiteread’s Untitled (Twenty-five spaces) (estimate: £300,000-400,000). Executed in 1994, the year after she won the Turner Prize for House, these translucent resin casts of the space underneath chairs typify the artist’s quest to sculpt intangible and evocative domestic spaces. Jenny Saville’s Branded ( estimate: £200,000 – 300,000), executed in 1991-2, displays all the hallmarks of Saville’s painting and prefigures the larger painting Branded from 1992, which defined Saville’s career and was her first work to enter the Saatchi collection. Gary Hume’s Bird on a Branch, 1998 (estimate: £150,000 – 200,000), a painting in his trademark household gloss paint on aluminium, was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he represented Great Britain, and in his Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, 1999-2000. Executed in 1992, Aldosterone 18, 21-Diacetate-3-(0-Carboxymethyl)oxime: BSA is an early spot painting from Damien Hirst’s seminal Pharmaceutical Paintings series (estimate: £700,000 – 1,000,000). This work comes from a pivotal period in the artist’s career, created in the same year Hirst was first nominated for the Turner Prize, as well as the launch of the ground breaking exhibition Young British Artists I at the Saatchi Gallery, London, where Hirst unveiled his now legendary shark: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Influenced by the Punk movement of the 1970s, Tim Noble and Sue Webster exploit shock tactics in their work. The New Barbarians, 1997-99 (estimate: £120,000 – 180,000), which shares its title with a punk band from the late 1970s, is a seminal self-portrait sculpture of the artistic duo, in which they have cast themselves in resin and fibreglass as naked primordial humanoids at the dawn of time. Widely exhibited, the work was shown in the Chisenhale Gallery, London in the year of its completion.
Among the most important Juan Muñoz sculptures, Conversation Piece I (estimate: £1,500,000 – 2,000,000) is composed of four figures that collectively produce a dramatic narrative. The curated distance between sculptural components immediately places the figures in conversation with one another, allowing the spectator to move among the figures, acknowledging their own bodily presence in relation to the rich bronze patinas and spheroid forms. Using his sculptural form of the body, repeated yet varied in each piece, Muñoz adapted the purity and perfection of Minimalism to present a socially charged commentary on alienation and isolation in society.
NOTEWORTHY FIRST TIMERS
Capturing the spirit of Frieze Week, the October Evening Auction includes a number of young artists who have works appearing for the first time in a Christie’s Evening Auction in London, including Brent Wadden’s Alignment (10), 2013 (estimate: £20,000 – 30,000), an archetypal example of the artist’s fusion of painting and knitting. The painter Adrian Ghenie trained at the Cluj school of Fine Art in Romania, home to a growing number of highly regarded young painters. His painting The Blue Rain, 2009 (estimate: £200,000 – 300,000), is an atmospheric mise-en-scene that exemplifies his practice of painting what he calls ‘the texture of history’. Toby Ziegler’s The Grand Cause, 2006 (estimate: £40,000 – 60,000), in which geometric patterns swirl across the canvas in a variety of shapes and sizes, painted over gold leaf with opulent purple and flaming red hues to suggest a brilliant, abstracted sunset. The sister painting of this work, The Hedonistic Imperative Version 2 (2006) is in the Tate Collection. A sculpture by the artist made a record price in Christie’s Thinking Big: Monumental Sculpture from the Saatchi Gallery Collection auction in October 2013. Other debut artists in the Evening Auction include Joe Bradley, Alex Israel, R H Quaytman and Louis Eisner.
THE ITALIAN SALE
Following the record performances of the Italian Sale in 2013 – the most successful Italian Modern Art sale in history – and the single owner collection Eyes Wide Open, An Italian Vision this past February, Christie’s is the market leader in Italian 20th Century Art. The annual Italian Sale, immediately following the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction, features an important single-owner collection ‘Mapping Modern Art in Italy’, a mini-survey of half a century of Italian art, spanning from Marino Marini – with his iconic sculpture Cavaliere – echoing the artist’s L’Angelo della città, a cast of which famously stands at the entrance of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000) to important pieces by Post-War Italian masters. Highlights include Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale (estimate: £800,000 – 1,200,000) and Alberto Burri’s Rosso Nero (estimate: £1,500,000 – 2,000,000) – Burri is the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim New York in 2015. Further highlights include the Azimut/h artists Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, coinciding with the exhibition Azimut/h: Continuity and Newness (until 19 January) at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, sponsored by Christie’s. Other sale highlights include Alighiero Boetti’s Colonna, (estimate: £1,500,000 – 2,000,000). Rarely found offered on the private market, this is a unique opportunity to acquire such a significant arte povera sculpture in exceptional condition. Executed in 1968, Colonna is a highly important and pivotal work that marks both the culmination of the artist’s early arte povera explorations and the beginning of the more conceptual direction that his art would take on after this decisive year. Boetti is further highlighted in the sale with a selection of other works including a green Mappa (estimate: £1,000,000 – 1,500,000, pictured above) from the series of embroidered world maps that he made between 1971 and his premature death in 1994.
POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART DAY AUCTION
The Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction will take place on 17 October. A highlight of the Auction is Andy Warhol’s Barbie, Portrait of BillyBoy*, 1986 (estimate: £200,000 – 300,000), one of only two existing paintings of Barbie created by the artist; the second known example with a ruby red background was commissioned later by Mattel in 1986. The work is distinguished for its deeply personal provenance as Warhol gave it to the young designer, BillyBoy*, who was a highly original creator of couture clothes for Barbie, whose surreal couture clothes and bijou jewellery impressed Warhol. Following the success of David Hockney’s painting With Conversation, which led Christie’s July Auction, a further highlight of the October Day Auction is David Hockney’s Ravel’s Garden 3, 1980 (estimate: £400,000 – 600,000). Taking nature as his primary inspiration, Hockney propels the viewer into another world of three vibrant trees set in a field and creates a vision informed by the musical cadence of opera that draws upon the art historical canon and places the artist within its pantheon of great colourists. The Day Auction is also proud to offer five works of art to benefit Macmillan Cancer Support, including the lush, textural painting Sundown, 2013 (estimate: £20,000-29,000) by Marius Bercea, one of the notable group of young painters trained at the Cluj School of Fine Art in Romania, as well as work by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Antony Gormley, Mark Wallinger and Yinka Shonibare. All proceeds from this auction will fund Macmillan Cancer Support Line, which answers over 150,000 calls a year and provides a lifeline to people with cancer.