Doig, Richter, Hockney and More Contemporary Masters

Peter Doig, The Architect's Home In The Ravine.
Estimate: £14,000,000–18,000,000.

The Architect’s Home in the Ravine is as uncanny as it is inviting, coldly voyeuristic and blurred in dreamlike abstraction. Across the entirety of its complex composition, Doig conflates surface, and depth, distance and promixity, materiality and illusion.

This work marks an important milestone within Doig’s career. In 1991, only a year after graduating from his Master’s degree at Chelsea, he was awarded the highly prestigious Whitechapel Artist’s award. This early recognition spurred a period of intense painterly production and the resultant works are some of the most celebrated of his entire career.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Gerhard Richter, Gelbgrün (Yellow-Green).
Estimate: £7,000,000–10,000,000.

1982 marked the true beginning of Richter’s ground-breaking Abstrakte Bilder: a career defining engagement that now spans two thirds of the artist’s output.

Comprising two panels that together extend to just over 4 metres in length, Gelbgrün is one of the very largest works by the artist, and a monumental exposition in abstract mark-making. It made its debut at the historic documenta 7 and has featured in countless museum surveys since. It encapsulates a newly realised yet pioneering and celebrated artistic direction.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Gerhard Richter, Wind.
Estimate: £2,500,000–3,500,000.

Wind is an exceptional abstract work from an important phase of Gerhard Richter’s career that has been in the same private collection for 25 years.

It is an essay in colour; a perfect example of the artist’s ability to variegate texture, timbre, tone, and hue in order to create paintings of stunning quality and astounding complexity.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Gerhard Richter, 1025 Farben.
Estimate: £5,000,000–7,000,000.

The artist’s first series of Farbtafeln or Colour Charts originated in 1966. They were intended, Richter explained, as "an assault on the falsity and religiosity of the way people glorified abstraction...".

The present work is from the final series of Farbtafeln that occupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974. In this series Richter added mixes of light grey, dark grey, and later, green, to generate an even wider range of colours.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Rudolf Stingel, Untitled.
Estimate: £4,000,000–6,000,000.

Belonging to a corpus of approximately twelve different yet equally monumental mountainscapes, Untitled was first exhibited with many others from the series as part of Rudolf Stingel: LIVE at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Together these pieces share nuanced signs of wear and individuated traces of age rendered in paint with minute monochrome precision. The result is paradoxically affecting: these works reinvigorate Romanticism for the post-modern and post-photographic age.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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David Hockney, Different Kinds Of Water Pouring Into A Swimming Pool, Santa Monica. Estimate: £6,000,000–8,000,000.

Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica delivers an extraordinary illustration of what is arguably David Hockney’s most iconic motif within his long and varied oeuvre: the swimming pool.

The great symbol of California's outdoor pleasures – and an extremely exotic and sumptuous prospect for a young man from Bradford – the swimming pool plays the central role in Hockney's output from 1963-1967.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Damien Hirst, Loving You.
Estimate: £800,000–1,200,000.

Executed in 1994-95, Loving You is a seminal example of Damien Hirst's celebrated Butterfly Paintings. This painting is one of the first monochrome butterfly canvases created by the artist and belongs to a fleet of only twelve equally sized 84 by 84 inch works, for which Hirst was awarded the prestigious Prix Eliette von Karajan in 1995.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Hurvin Anderson, Some People (Welcome Series).
Estimate: £600,000–800,000.

Peppered with half-remembered details of a place once visited, Some People (Welcome Series) is the strongest painting from a body of work that has had an immense impact on Hurvin Anderson’s practice.

A vibrant red and white interior scene is subdivided by a tessellating grille with each segment rendered a minute geometric abstraction by its interior frame. Punctuating details, such as the garland hanging across the ceiling of the room, the reflective top of the bar and, most noticeably, the posters of semi-naked women that plaster the walls, lend the scene a sense of familiarity.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Christopher Wool, Untitled.
Estimate: £4,200,000–6,200,000.

Having developed his practice at the critical height of the Pictures Generation – a group of artists whose appropriative, photographic strategies undermined the validity of painting in contemporary art – Wool set out to prove the critical agency of painting within a set of newly defined parameters.

Untitled is a towering distillation of the artist’s post-modern and post-conceptual approach to painting. Pollock-esque tendrils of black enamel, drawn onto canvas using a spray gun, have been scrubbed-out and overlaid with yet more abstract marks to impart an incessant cycle of affirmation and negation.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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Michelangelo Pistoletto, Amanti (Lovers).
Estimate: £2,300,000–3,000,000.

In 1962, Michelangelo Pistoletto transformed the intimate moment of a couple's passionate embrace into an artistic spectacle.

A snapshot of two lovers presented on a reflective mirrored surface, Amanti (Lovers) is a seminal example of Pistoletto’s most recognisable and celebrated series, the Quadri Specchiati or Mirror Paintings. By inviting the viewer into a complex reciprocal dialogue with the intermediary figures in the painting, the spectator becomes a voyeuristic bystander in a very private moment.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
7 March 2018 | London

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