Contemporary Curated
Online Auction: 8–14 July 2022 • 4:00 PM CEST • Milan

Contemporary Curated 8–14 July 2022 • 4:00 PM CEST • Milan

S otheby’s is thrilled to team up with Marie-Louise Scio, CEO and Creative Director of the Pellicano Hotel Group and founder of lifestyle website ISSIMO, for the third instalment of Contemporary Curated in Milan this July.

In an exercise of fantasy collecting, Marie-Louise has handpicked a personal edit of artworks by some of the most sought-after Italian and international artists, ranging from established market darlings to young rising stars.
Together, her selection will form part of this season’s ‘Contemporary Curated’ auction, which carries the highest overall estimate for a sale of this kind staged in Italy to date.

The sale includes works by emerging artists, including Robert Nava, Jody Kerwick, Izumi Kato and Negyem Adonoo, whose works will be offered in Italy for the very first time. Here, they will be presented alongside pioneering Italian post-war artists - from Alberto Burri to Enrico Castellani, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Fausto Melotti - and international icons like Andy Warhol, Atsuko Tanaka and Jean-Paul Riopelle.

View 1 of Lot 7: Hammer and Sickle (Feldman & Schellmann II. 161-164)
Andy Warhol
Hammer and Sickle (Feldman & Schellmann II. 161-164)
Estimate: 60,000 – 80,000 EUR
Andy Warhol, Hammer and Sickle
Andy Warhol began the Hammer and Sickle series in 1976 after a trip to Italy where he saw repeated graffiti of this symbol found on Soviet flags in public spaces. Upon returning to the United States, Warhol asked his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone to find source pictures of this symbol. As the reproductions found in books were unsatisfactorily flat in appearance, Cutrone purchased a double-headed hammer and a sickle at a local store and photographed the tools in different arrangements. These photographs formed the basis of his iconic silkscreened series, offering an alternate perspective on this popular symbol that was to Warhol more pop art than political. The Hammer and Sickle series is to a certain extent a reflection of the tense climate of the Cold War, but also a statement on the power of symbols and propaganda through art.
View 1 of Lot 18: Ailes
Jean-Paul Riopelle
Ailes
Estimate: 130,000 – 180,000 EUR
Jean-Paul Riopelle, Ailes
“Riopelle painted tableaux that were textured with thick pastes, applied with a brush and more and more often with a spatula, and these depths, already bubbling with colours, were then slashed in all directions by fine spurts of paint whose network constitutes a kind of jazz rhythm: jerky, syncopated, muscular”

Guy Robert, Riopelle, chasseur d’images, Montréal 1981, p. 68

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