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Masters of Contemporary Art on View in New York

Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys (Diamond Dust), 1980.
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Highlights from Sotheby’s upcoming October auctions of Contemporary Art in London, including works by Lucio Fontana and Andy Warhol, will be on view in New York from 20 – 24 September. The exhibition will include works from the Contemporary Art Evening Auction and The History of Now: The Collection of David Teiger, which is being sold to benefit the Teiger Foundation for the support of Contemporary Art. Click above to see more.

Past Auction
The History of Now: The Collection of David Teiger
5 October 2018 | 6:30 PM BST | London
Past Auction
Contemporary Art Evening Auction
5 October 2018 | 7:00 PM BST | London

Masters of Contemporary Art on View in New York

  • Cecily Brown, Sock Monkey, 2003.
    Cecily Brown, Sock Monkey, 2003.
    Estimate £1,200,000-1,800,000.
    Rooting the scene in the tradition of landscape painting, Sock Monkey sees British painter Cecily Brown frame an erotic scene in a bucolic landscape, referencing in turn the work of artists such as Edouard Manet and Paul Cézanne. The work is a feast of painterly expression, with luscious brushstrokes outlining oily-wet figures that grapple and wrestle one another, caught between violence and eroticism.
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  • Alex Katz, Red Cap, 2003
    Alex Katz, Red Cap, 2003.
    Estimate £200,000-300,000.
    Depicting David Teiger’s close friend Kati Lovaas, a trustee of the Teiger foundation, the present work is a superlative example of the artist’s characteristic aesthetic. Monumental and invitingly impersonal, Katz’s realist style of painting reflects his training in commercial art, with its scale, lack of depth, elimination of extraneous detail and sharpened contours all epitomising Katz’s idiosyncratic painterly style.
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  • Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys (Diamond Dust), 1980.
    Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys (Diamond Dust), 1980.
    Estimate £700,000-1,000,000.
    Characterised by the vibrant intensity of its resplendently glistening red diamond dust alongside a contemplative, brooding blackness, the present work encompasses the vastly polarised yet equally radical advancements in post-war transatlantic art by “the two extreme souls of contemporary art: Warhol and Beuys" (Michele Bonuomo, Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, Vesuvius by Warhol, 1985, p. 33).
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  • Richard Serra, Untitled, 1974.
    Richard Serra, Untitled, 1974.
    Estimate £250,000-350,000.
    Presenting a dramatic interplay between form, material and process, Untitled is a rare and early example from Richard Serra’s celebrated graphic practice and sculptural use of paintstick. This unique work on paper is one of the very first monumental paintstick drawings in Serra’s oeuvre and, created in 1974, it narrates a seminal moment in the artist’s career: 1974 was the year he began creating the site-specific Installation Drawings on canvas such as the acclaimed Abstract Slavery (Kröller-Müller Museum).
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  • Amy Sillman, Purple Thing, 2006
    Amy Sillman, Purple Thing, 2006.
    Estimate £200,000-400,000.
    Amy Sillman’s works on canvas form part of an encompassing and immersive approach to contemporary artmaking that, alongside painting, employs performance, animation, diagrams, and zines. The present work is a strident example of Sillman’s deconstructive/reconstructive approach to painting in which the traditional hierarchy between figure and ground is disrupted and uniformly treated.
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  • Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1965-66.
    Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1965-66.
    Estimate £2,400,000-3,000,000.
    In Lucio Fontana’s dazzling scarlet painting Concetto Spaziale, Attese, four dramatically rendered incisions perforate the otherwise smooth and pristine surface of the work. Executed in 1965-1966, at the pinnacle of the artist’s critically acclaimed and vastly influential career, the work epitomises Fontana’s revered series of slashed canvases known as the tagli (cuts). First implemented at the end of 1958 and continuing right up until the artist’s death in 1968, the tagli constitute a seminal redefinition of the conception of space in painting.
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