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Doig to Dumas: Contemporary Day Auction Highlights

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A journey through the great artistic moments of the post-war and contemporary period, the Contemporary Art Day Auction features superb works by notable masters – from Andy Warhol to Gerhard Richter – alongside important works by emerging and mid-career artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Adam Pendleton. Highlights include Cecily Brown's Twenty Million Sweethearts and an early Waterfall by Pat Steir. A number of greatly sought-after artists, including Ai Weiwei, Marlene Dumas and Carol Rama, are also represented. Click through to see the highlights.

Contemporary Art Day Auction
6 October 2017 | London

Doig to Dumas: Contemporary Day Auction Highlights

  • Cecily Brown, Twenty Million Sweethearts, 1998-99
    Estimate: £300,000-400,000.
    Painted in 1998-99, Twenty Million Sweethearts is an early example of Cecily Brown’s thickly textured canvases that inhabit a realm between abstraction and figuration. With its overt eroticism, its carnal use of colour and its overflowing composition, the work perfectly encapsulates the artist’s unique style that recently set a world record price at Sotheby’s London in June. In Twenty Million Sweethearts, the work's warm yellow palette distinctly shows the influence of Willem De Kooning, one of her artistic heroes, who harboured a well-known fascination for the colour.

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  • Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1984
    Estimate: £350,000–450,000.
    Offered for sale as a landmark exhibition of the artist’s work opens at the Barbican in London, Untitled shows Basquiat working at the height of his compositional complexity. Using his now-iconic Xerox technique, Basquiat superbly layers some of most famous imagery – from stick men and numerals to  spaceships and car – underneath unusually abstract passages of black oil stick. The work, in its pulsating composition, shows the influence of jazz on Basquiat's work. Notably, the work is from a historically important year for the artist – 1984. In 1984, he was selected as the youngest artist ever to show at the Whitney Biennale, Basquiat also began one of the most famous art collaborations in history with Andy Warhol. It was a year that ushered Basquiat into the top tier of contemporary art, placing him toe to toe with his idol, Andy Warhol. The artistic confidence this imbued on Basquiat is reflected in his complex approach to the creation of Untitled.

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  • Michaël Borremans, The Portrait, 2002
    Estimate: £120,000–180,000.
    The Portrait , in its disarmingly enigmatic composition and virtuoso draughtsmanship, is an archetype Borremans’ canvas. Firmly rooted in a figurative tradition that stretches back to the great masters of the past – from Rembrandt to Goya and Velázquez, The Portrait exemplifies Borremans’ position as the contemporary heir to this lineage. Yet for all its reverence of the past, the work is profoundly contemporary. It is a painting that subverts the figurative tradition in its ambiguity of narrative. As Borreman's himself writes “I want to give information in a way that's clearly incorrect, not fitting, out of place. I think that’s more honest".

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  • Lynn Chadwick, Maquette IV Jubilee III, 1987
    Estimate: £120,000–180,000.
    Speaking about her husband’s work from the 1980's, Eva Chadwick reflected, “he has always been intrigued by movement, either actual or implied, in his sculpture… his cloaked walking women with windswept hair of the 1980s explored figures in motion. Sometimes their cloaks and draperies flow out in the wind from behind them, or are caught by a gust and wrap themselves around the figures". Maquette IV Jubillee III , part of one the artist’s most iconic series – the Jubilee figures, is a lyrical testament to Chadwick’s power to shape and imply movement in his sculptures. These optimistic, celebratory figures that evoke the power of the wind and the human form suggest a sense of rebirth, a new figurative form for a post-war age.  

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  • Keith Haring, Untitled, 1981
    Estimate: £150,000–200,000.
    At first glance, Untitled is simple yet refreshingly cool image penned by one of New York’s most iconic draftsmen, at second glance, a comment on cable television's strangle hold on the American people and Haring's closely guarded Protestant faith; Keith Haring's Untitled from 1981 exemplifies the artist’s ability to condense cultural comment into highly reductive images. With its sense of speed, spontaneity and use of white line on a black background, Untitled is an extenuation of the notorious chalk drawing Haring was producing at the same time on the New York subway system. Haring recounted: "Many times I had the idea from the subway and then would do them in the studio …The studio and the subway started growing together, and the subway became like a drawing workshop to develop ideas..."



     

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  • Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2006
    Estimate: £150,000–200,000.
    One of the most highly regarded painters of the contemporary period, Rudolf Stingel's works continually challenge, investigate and experiment with the very surface of painting. Explorations of paint's inherent materiality, his subtle yet mysteriously conceived works, exemplified by Untitled , have revolutionised our understanding of the picture plane. As Stingel explained in 2004: "I am demonstrating that using different surfaces, we can produce very diverse environments".

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  • Rosemarie Trockel, Ohne Titel, 1987
    Estimate: £150,000–200,000.
    Part of the esteemed collection of Raymond Learsy, Ohne Titel is a superb example of Trockel’s iconic wool works. Begun in the 1980's during a time when the German art scene was dominated by male painters such as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, these are a powerful riposte to the male-dominated concept of the artist-as-genius. Machine made, here Trockel undermines the medium of knitting and its association with female domesticity. As Trockel herself explained, her medium constitutes a series of "signifiers of femininity, culturally inferior materials and skills". Her machined, knitted works have brought her critical acclaim and position her as one of the most powerfully feminist artistic voices in the contemporary period.

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  • Andy Warhol, Man Ray, 1974
    Estimate: £280,000–350,000.
    "I took a SX-70 and I put in a whole roll" noted Andy Warhol, "and I got ten…pictures of that and then he put a cigar in his mouth … I think they [Luciano Anselmino and Man Ray] were friends because Luciano bought him the best cigars in town…and actually the cigar was bigger than he was'. Warhol's words perfectly sum up his recollections of the momentous occasion he met and photographed one of his idols, the modernist photographer Man Ray. The only photographer whose work Warhol truly collected, the reverence Warhol held for the older artist is exemplified by a work of art hung prominently in Warhol's sitting room – Man Ray's Peinture Feminine from 1954. The resultant portrait he created is one of the most painterly examples of Warhol's portraits. With its free-spirited, luxurious brush work, it conveys the significance Warhol held for this portrait and the sitter in particular.  

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