T aking place live in London on 29 June, Sotheby’s major Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale spans the birth of Modernism through to the most contemporary innovations in artmaking today. Traversing the proto-Modernism of Monet and Cezanne, Picasso’s revolutionary treatment of the figure, Kandinsky’s groundbreaking compositions and Cy Twombly’s post-war reinvention of Modernist abstraction, through to the Art-Brut inspired compositions of Dubuffet, controversial Pop-art canvases by Andy Warhol and the confrontational corporeality of Dana Schutz and Wangechi Mutu, this sale charts a course through key art historical developments instigated by the most important artists of the last two centuries.
| Tuesday 22 June | 10:00 am - 5.00 pm BST |
| Wednesday 23 June | 10:00 am - 5.00 pm BST |
| Thursday 24 June | 10:00 am - 5.00 pm BST |
| Friday 25 June | 10:00 am - 5.00 pm BST |
| Saturday 26 June | 12:00 pm - 5.00 pm BST |
| Sunday 27 June | 11:00 am - 5.00 pm BST |
| Monday 28 June | 10:00 am - 5.00 pm BST |
| Tuesday 29 June | 10:00 am - 12.00 pm BST |
Headlined by a masterpiece by the foremost pioneer of 20th-century abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky, this sale includes extraordinary examples of innovations in abstract painting, charting its very genesis via Cezanne through to Jadé Fadojutimi’s captivating I'm pirouetting the night away, from 2019.
The sale is led by a number of striking portraits including those by Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard and Edgar Degas – artists whose ground-breaking and indomitable legacies set new conventions and benchmarks in figurative painting for the next generation. As contemporary artists who have carved out new territory for the corporeal, Elizabeth Peyton, Maria Lassnig, Dana Schutz and Wangechi Mutu have rallied against these past conventions, creating works that utterly redefine figurative painting for the 21st Century.
