Freud, Hockney & Basquiat Take Centre Stage for London Contemporary Auction

Lucian Freud, Portrait on a White Cover, 2001-03.
Estimate £17,000,000–20,000,000.

Representing the culmination of Freud’s lifelong engagement with the reclining nude – a theme he first embarked upon in 1950 and returned to throughout his career – this painting is one of the last five nudes painted by the artist. The work depicts Sophie Lawrence, who worked at Tate publishing and met Freud whilst he was preparing for his Tate retrospective in 2002. First exhibited at the Wallace Collection in London as part of an exhibition of new paintings, it has since been exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Yves Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 5), 1962.
Estimate £5,500,000–7,500,000.

A picture of weightless exaltation – the dawning of Klein’s ‘blue epoch’ – Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 5) is an exquisite, rare instance of Yves Klein’s series of body paintings, the Anthropométries.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982.
Estimate £1,500,000–2,500,000.

Searing in its electric immediacy, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled is masterful example of this artist’s instinctive draughtsmanship that is deeply imbued with a sense of self-portraiture. The present work was created during a year of unprecedented success for the twenty-two year old prodigy: in 1982 Basquiat had his first solo exhibitions with Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and other galleries in New York and Rotterdam.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Francis Bacon, Study of a Figure, 1954.
Estimate £3,000,000–4,000,000.

This remarkable painting is a recent Bacon discovery, given that for more than sixty years it remained in private collections, lost to public view until it was exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Grimaldi Forum , Monaco in 2016.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, New York, 1981.
Estimate £7,000,000–10,000,000.

Having resided in the same private collection since 1981 when it was first exhibited in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s seminal exhibition; SAMO at the Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, Italy, New York, New York is a powerful and arresting exhibition of Basquiat’s early period of work that brought the urgency of his art from the street to the studio. Intensely forged in an array of media including oil stick, acrylic, and spray paint, New York, New York is highly charged and raw with energy.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Andy Warhol, Marilyn (Reversal), 1979-86.
Estimate £1,200,000–1,800,000.

In Marilyn (Reversal), the viewer confronts an uncanny, prismatic and postmodern representation of the most iconic image in Andy Warhol’s visual lexicon. Conceived as a re-reading of his best-known Pop paintings at the suggestion of his dealer Bruno Bischofberger, the Reversal series of 1979 to 1986 joins Warhol’s 1980 memoir POPism: The Warhol Sixties and the Andy Warhol’s TV series as part of the artist’s unprecedentedly reflexive and experimental later period.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Peter Doig, Daytime Astronomy (Grasshopper), 1998-99. Estimate £6,000,000–8,000,000.

Daytime Astronomy (Grasshopper) is a spectacular distillation of all the elements that have made Peter Doig one of the most celebrated painters of his generation. Showcasing the immense invention inherent in Doig’s response to the masters of Twentieth Century art, Daytime Astronomy (Grasshopper) is a perfect realization of Doig’s immense technical and conceptual awareness, and serves as a testimony to his status as one of the greatest painters working today.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Roy Lichtenstein, Cubist Still Life, 1974.
Estimate £1,800,000–2,500,000.

Forming part of Lichtenstein’s iconic Cubist Still Life paintings created between 1973 and 1975, the present work is one of only two from this group of eleven works in which Lichtenstein used silver paint mixed with sand taken from the beach near his studio in Southampton, Long Island.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982.
Estimate £7,500,000–10,000,000.

At once reminiscent of the graffiti of New York’s subway; beholden to the art historical influence of Cy Twombly; evoking the collages and linguistic play of Dada; and channelling a fierce socio-political contemporary angst, Untitled belongs among the most striking and powerful of Basquiat’s single head paintings of 1981-82.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21A, City Girl Close Up, 1978. Estimate £450,000–650,000.

In 1977 Cindy Sherman started work on a project that would become one of the most ground-breaking and iconic photographic series of the postmodern era: the Untitled Film Stills. From the sequence of seventy images that comprise the corpus, the present work is perhaps the most widely recognised and reproduced example from the series.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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Sam Gilliam, Forth, 1967. Estimate £400,000–600,000.

Forth played a unique role in the launch of Sam Gilliam’s early career, and forms part of his Bevelled-Edge Paintings series. To make these paintings, Gilliam applied diluted acrylic to raw canvas and then folded and creased the soaked material with his hands in a sequence of virtuosic bodily gestures that allowed pigments to infuse into unforeseen chromatic compositions.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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David Hockney, Double East Yorkshire, 1998.
Estimate £10,000,000–15,000,000.

This large-scale work across two canvasses presents a theme that dominated Hockney's career for many years: Yorkshire. The vibrant colour and repeat patterns of the fields demonstrate the artist’s passion for his home county and the changing face of the landscape through the seasons. Exhibited in Hockey’s 2012 exhibition at the Royal Academy, the work forms part of an ongoing series of landscapes that resonate with the artist; whether the English county in which he was born and raised, or his adopted home in the Californian sunshine.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
26 June 2018 | London

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