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Contemporary Art

Cutting Edge Art from Yayoi Kusama, Bridget Riley, Richard Hamilton and Other Contemporary Artists

Launch Slideshow

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction brings together seminal pieces by acclaimed and highly sought-after artists. The sale will include important works by some of the most celebrated German artists, including Gerhard Richter, and Franz West, as well as vibrant examples from the hugely popular Japanese artists Yayoi Kusama and Yoshitomo Nara. Click the image above to view.

Past Auction
Contemporary Art Day Auction
4 October 2019 | 10:30 AM BST | London

Cutting Edge Art from Yayoi Kusama, Bridget Riley, Richard Hamilton and Other Contemporary Artists

  • Yayoi Kusama, The Canal in Glow
    Estimate £250,000-350,000 (€270,000-378,000, $302,000-423,000)
    Bursting with electric psychedelic vibrancy, Yayoi Kusama’s The Canal in Glow is a visually arresting painting, created in a pivotal moment in the career of an artist who has redefined the parameters of contemporary art. Throughout the past six decades, Kusama has been a seismograph of the zeitgeist, a critic of power structures in the development of society, and an innovative thinker about our ways of seeing the world.
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  • Enrico Castellani, Superficie Rossa
    Estimate £280,000–350,000, (€303,000–378,000, $339,000–423,000)
    Enrico Castellani’s Superficie Rossa invites the observer to engage in a kinetic encounter that is deeply rooted in the perceptual experience of space itself. An undulated landscape of geometric patterns, the monochrome canvas is moulded by the warping bends in its physical structure.
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  • Tschabalala Self, Cross, 2016
    Estimate £50,000–70,000, (€54,000–76,000, $60,500–85,000)
    “I feel like everyone’s body signifies something culturally; people’s bodies and appearances are used as symbols and signifiers the same way that language or any other symbol can be used” — Tschabalala Self.
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  • Eddie Martinez, Your Past Is My Future
    Estimate £80,000–120,000 (€86,500–130,000, $97,000–145,000)
    Charged with a visceral energy that radiates from the palette of acid green and cherry red, Eddie Martinez’s Your Past Is My Future visually represents the artist’s passionate and frenzied artistic process. Beginning with a simple Sharpie sketch, these drawings are then magnified to match the size of the often-monumental canvases on which they are painted. These minimal outlines provide a framework for the oil paints, enamel, spray paint and occasional collage which create Martinez’s towering biomorphic compositions.
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  • Robert Indiana, ART (Red), 2000
    Estimate £80,000–120,000 (€86,500–130,000, $97,000–145,000)
    Blending a high-impact graphic vocabulary together with hard-edge line and pure colour, ART combines several of Robert Indiana’s signature stylistic features while heralding a distinctly new direction in his artistic output. The complexity of the three-dimensional form of the present work is arresting and possesses a distinct architectural quality.
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  • Mickalene Thomas, Naomi Looking Forward, 2013
    Estimate £150,000–200,000 (€162,000–216,000, $182,000–242,000)
    Mickalene Thomas presents a regal portrait of supermodel Naomi Campbell in this present work. Reclined on a sofa, Campbell’s serpentine body snakes down the cushion, further complicating the cacophony of textures scattered around the picture plane. Set in a domestic setting decorated to reflect the stylistic trends of the 1970s, Thomas infuses Naomi Looking Forward with memories of the wood-panelled living room of her childhood. She is reinventing experiences that exist only in memory, incorporating parts of her identity that inspire her into her work including: African textiles, African photography, and Yoruban art alongside canonical European art history.
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  • Bridget Riley, Untitled
    Estimate £60,000–80,000, (€65,000–86,500, $72,500–97,000)
    Bridget Riley developed a personal style in the 1960s which explored optical phenomena. Known as 'Op-art' works, they produce a dynamic, disorientating effect on the viewer. Between October 2019 and January 2020 a major retrospective of Bridget Riley's work will appear at the Hayward Gallery.
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  • Antony Gormley, Mother’s Pride Tate Collection
    Antony Gormley, Mother’s Pride III
    Estimate £100,000–150,000, (€108,000–162,000, $121,000–182,000)
    Mother’s Pride III is an important example from Antony Gormley’s ‘bread works’ series, which began in 1979 and continues to the present day. The series is part of the artist’s early and ongoing material examination of the body as a vessel and site of alchemical change. Gormley’s bread work, Bed, (1980 – 1981), which is now in the collection of the Tate, London, marked the first time that the artist’s body appeared in his work purely as a void left by the marks of his own teeth, using 8640 slices of Mother’s Pride bread.
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  • Richard Hamilton, Sign
    Estimate £200,000–300,000 (€216,000–324,000, $242,000–363,000)
    In Sign we in fact see Hamilton aligning a number of key themes: Duchamp, the ready-made, advertising, 'self-portrait', European modernism, design, democratic 'high' aesthetics, the everyday 'epiphany'… The Sign of 1975 perhaps also functions on the level of Hamiltonian (that is, Joyce/Duchamp/Broodthaers-ian) wordplay. Beyond the adding of an 'H' to a 'Ricard' advertising sign, we also see here a clear Sign of the Times, that is, a charming post-Pop reiteration of Dada's easy/witty cafe culture values. — Ashley Heath.
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  • Daniel Richter, D.O.A.XL
    Estimate £150,000–200,000, (€162,000–216,000, $182,000–242,000)
    Richter presents a neon dystopia occupied by a group of amorphous, faceless figures who confront the viewer with inescapable glowing eyes. Combined with the acidic hot and cool colour palette mapped onto the alien terrain of the canvas, connotations of thermal imaging and the feeling of total surveillance are unavoidable.
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  • Thomas Houseago, Walking Man
    Estimate £80,000–120,000 (€86,500–130,000, $97,000–145,000)
    Infused with an urgency and brute physicality, the work of Thomas Houseago captures the decisive moment when man reveals his internal strength which stems from his momentum and energy. This work appeared at Almost Human at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the artist's most recent solo exhibition.
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  • Yoshitomo Nara, Winter Long, 1999
    Estimate £200,000–300,000 (€216,000–324,000, $242,000–363,000)
    Winter Long is an exquisite example of Yoshitomo Nara’s career-long engagement with themes of innocence and solitude that define the essence of childhood. Exquisitely rendered in harmonious colours of acrylic paint and pencil, the present work has an enchanting dream-like presence.
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