10 Exceptional Highlights from The London Sales

Conceived in 1987, Little Girl II features one of Chadwick’s unmistakable female figures, seated statuesquely on a bench, looking decisively forward. Though it references ancient sculpture, her angular, primordial form, forged from rough metal, feels entirely modern. It may lack facial features, yet she feels strangely familiar, both the otherworldly and the human. Little Girl II strikingly embodies the mature stage of Chadwick’s shift to figuration in which he blended a formalized geometric vocabulary of gender and a more sensitive handling of the human body.

Head of Julia encompasses thick, impasto passages of paint, contrasted with the background where the paint has been scraped off to render a thinner application—the effect makes Auerbach’s striving towards three-dimensional reality apparent. Julia is composed from different shapes of strokes: blocky shapes to make up her forehead, black swirled lines making up her facial structure and there is an impassioned stroke through the middle from her head to her shoulder.

Henry Moore returned to the theme of mother and child repeatedly during his lifetime. This maquette for a larger piece, is a moving exploration of human emotion, sculptural form, and symbolic abstraction. Far from being a literal representation, his treatment of the mother and child transcends individual identity, achieving a universality that evokes a sense of personal tenderness and collective memory.

Figure, Courtyard – Greenleaves belongs to a moment when Hitchens was discovering his rhythm as a painter, developing a language in which landscape painting and abstraction are held together in an effortless embrace. Here, the figurative subject extends that inquiry, making the relationship between a person and their surroundings the foundation of a pictorial composition.

The courtyard provides a framework of enclosure, while the figure introduces a human scale. Such a setting offered Hitchens the possibility of treating space simultaneously as a recognizable environment and as an arrangement of forms upon the canvas. The subject and the painting’s independent rhythms remain in productive dialogue.

Willem de Kooning’s paintings from 1977 have long been regarded as among the finest within his extensive oeuvre; executed during a critical period defined by an explosive outpouring of creativity prompted by the artist’s renewed engagement with painting, Untitled belongs to an illustrious corpus of large-scale, color-saturated canvases that rank among the finest achievements of his prodigious career.

Painted on a grand and thoroughly commanding scale, Abstraktes Bild is a defining masterpiece from the height of Gerhard Richter's abstract practice. Testament to its importance, this work was first shown at the landmark Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, and later was selected for Richter's definitive, internationally celebrated retrospective Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, shown first at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2002, and subsequently at the Art Institute of Chicago.

"The palette of this work recalls Richter's celebrated Seascapes” says Antonia Gardner, Head of the Contemporary Evening Sale. “The aqueous teal, blue, and slate is squeegeed over a remarkable variety of colors from pink and red to yellow and orange, creating the same sense of light caught and refracted across a moving surface of water."

While much of the world quarantined during the spring of 2021, David Hockney found inspiration in a vase of flowers on the table of his Normandy home, creating twenty vibrant iPad still lifes from the same viewpoint. Dated like diary entries, the series celebrates the beauty of everyday life, capturing subtle shifts in light, mood and arrangement while revealing endless variation within a single domestic scene.

David Hockney’s 20 Flowers series grew out of the iPad compositions he created while living and working in Normandy during the pandemic. Drawing inspiration from the everyday surroundings of his home, Hockney used the digital medium to capture fleeting effects of light, color and seasonal change. The resulting works demonstrate his remarkable ability to transform familiar subjects into vivid, immersive compositions, while retaining the immediacy and expressive touch of his hand.

This work is a seminal example of Donald Judd’s iconic wall-mounted Menziken boxes, which exemplify the artist's singular ability to entice the viewer with an immersive, depth-defying spatial field, projecting powerfully into the space. Judd is widely regarded to be the pre-eminent figure of Minimalism (a label he firmly resisted), and among the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. This work is an excellent example of why.

A stay in Davos marked the beginning of Gerhard Richter's renewed engagement with watercolor, one that would remain an important thread within his work thereafter. 2.1.1978 was created during a period of remarkable experimentation and coincides with Richter's movement between figuration and abstraction, and with his growing fascination with the balance between intention and chance.