Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction will Highlight fresh-to-market works

Written by Francis Goodyear Tuesday, 24 January 2012 22:25

LONDON.- Following Sotheby’s third most successful year ever (2011) for global auctions of Contemporary Art, which totaled $1.17 billion, the company presents 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 realize in excess of £35.8 million.

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 Düsseldorf to a polar haven. The painting carries an estimate of £2–3 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 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 inspirational black sports figure is celebrated yet simultaneously satirized by an autobiographical allusion to Basquiat's Haitian heritage – the cheap labor 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.

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.

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 encyclopedic 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 realize 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.

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