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Contemporary Art

Strong London Line-up for Contemporary Day Sale

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A selection of outstanding works will go on sale in the Contemporary Day Auction On 8 October at Sotheby's in London. Against the backdrop of the Frieze Art Fairs and the arrival of the worlds leading galleries and collectors in the city, this varied and exciting sale will showcase works by some of the 20th Century's most prolific artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Willem de Kooning and Sturtevant. Click ahead to see highlights of the auction. 

Contemporary Art Day Auction
8 October | London

Strong London Line-up for Contemporary Day Sale

  • Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Nets. Estimate £200,000–300,000.
    Forming part of her best known and most recognisable series, Infinity Nets is aimed to highlight the irrelevance of the individual in the context of the infinite, where Kusama has compared her own significance to that of a single dot in her painting. There is an ethereality to the present work, rendered by the subtle variations in the texture of the dots alongside its golden hue, which elicits ideas of light and movement.



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  • Alighiero Boetti, Oggi e Sedicesimo Giorno del Sesto Mese.
    Estimate £120,000–180,000.
    Boetti’s embroideries were made in Peshawar, Pakistan by Afghani craftswomen. Boetti first travelled to Afghanistan in the 1970s, where he became enamoured with the colourful landscape and culture, local hospitality, and the rituals and traditions of the country. On an early trip to Afghanistan he developed a relationship with Afghani embroiderers, who would go on to execute works for him for the next two decades. 



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  • Lee Ufan, From Line No. 780210. Estimate £250,000–350,000.
    Ufan’s most critically acclaimed series, From Line, combines a minimalist aesthetic with a profound meditation on the action of painting. Ufan’s uniquely crafted lines are formed by a paint-loaded brush, which is dragged down the canvas in a strictly vertical manner without any replenishment of the paint. Thus, the saturation of colour and the length of the line are entirely dependent on the material contact. 



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  • Sturtevant, Warhol Gold Marilyn. Estimate £250,000–350,000.
    Renowned for being the originator of the appropriation art movement, Sturtevant has challenged notions of originality and exposed gendered bias through the subtle alteration of the works of famous and commercially successful male artists, such as Rauschenberg, Johns, and most famously, Andy Warhol. In Warhol Gold Marilyn , Sturtevant appropriates both Andy Warhol’s famous series as well as his own appropriation of the image of Marilyn as twentieth-century icon.



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  • Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Painting. Estimate £400,000–600,000.
    Modern Painting reflects Lichtenstein’s interest in highlighting the fashion in which mass reproduction has eliminated the tactile elements of painting and art.  Forming part of a series of Modern Paintings, this series did not deal with modernity, in spite of its name, but rather the rapidly aging decorative styles of the 1930s Art Deco era.



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  • WestImage - Art Digital Studio
    Michael Borrëmans, The Swan. Estimate £180,000–250,000.
    The Swan is a wonderful example of Borremans’ idiosyncratic Post-Surrealist painting style. This highly staged portrait demonstrates Borrëmans' mastery of 17th century oil painting techniques whilst demonstrating contemporary features. There is a certain ambiguity in the present lot, as its title and cropped view presents the viewer with an uncanny image that challenges notions of representations and interpretation. 



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  • Kazuo Shiraga, Untitled. Estimate £400,000–600,000.
    Untitled is an eye-catching piece that was executed at the height of the first phase of the Gutai movement. Shiraga played a major key in the founding of Japan’s most significant post-war collective. The painting presents the artist’s full physical presence on the canvas, which was one of the core elements of Gutai, and anticipates his famous later foot paintings from the 1980s.



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  • Tom Wesselmann, Nude (Frontal). Estimate £150,000–200,000.
    One of the great American Pop artists, Tom Wesselmann’s ouevre, distinctive for its somewhat sordid, stylised eroticism, is immediately recognizable and vitally important. By combining elements of sexual fantasy and domesticity, the artist has developed a new approach to representational abstraction. Nude (Frontal) navigates a potential ambiguity in terms: on the one hand there is an empowerment in the confident ownership of sexuality by Wesselmann’s subject, but there is also a distinct voyeurism imposed on the viewer.



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  • Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (A.H.T). Estimate £350,000–450,000.
    Produced after 18 years of self-imposed, relatively anonymous exile in Japan and executed two years before Kusama was selected to represent Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Pumpkin (A.H.T) is a rare example to come to action due the fact that it predates the artist’s major re-emergence into the market and art world in 1993. The present work contains the motifs of the pumpkin and the nets which have made Kusama’s work some of the most recognizable of the late 20th and 21st centuries and masterfully displays the combination of her signature style with definite nods to a Pop aesthetic. 



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  • Rosemarie Trockel, Framed Waterfall. Estimate £200,000–300,000.
    Framed Waterfall is an alluring example of Trockel's critically acclaimed Strickbilder or 'knitted pictures'.  With her influential wool series Trockel addressed the established subordination of women in art and wider society. She challenged the signifiers in of wool and knitting, traditionally a material and activity aligned with female handicraft, and thus domesticity. 



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