Description
Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening 2/10/15 London
SALE NUMBER: L15020 LOTS : 75
$66.50 to ship overseas. Catalog weighs over 4 lbs. Will send a Paypal for additional postage .
RESULTS
Our evening auction realised £123,515,250 ($188,200,186/ €166,461,924), the highest ever total for a Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art in Europe. The evening was led by Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild which established a new record for the artist, selling for £30.4m, a new benchmark for any European living artist. Created in 1986, and marking a radical departure for Richter, this exceptional work is one of the artist’s largest abstract paintings and one of his favourite works.
Lucio Fontana’s most famous but never-before-seen work, Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1965) from the Hoglund collection, soared beyond estimate (£5-7m) to set a new sterling record for a Concetto Spaziale, Attesa / Attese (slash painting) by the artist at £8.4m.
The Fontana was one of nine works sold tonight from ‘An Important Swedish Private Collection’ acquired by Anna-Stina Malmborg-Hoglund and Gunnar Hoglund MDs over fifty years. Comprising works by key figures from some of the most influential post-war movements in Europe and the US, the collection sold for a combined total of £10.7m, against a pre-sale estimate of £6.6-9.7m for all the works offered. Francis Bacon’s 1977 Two Studies for Self-Portraitmade £14.7m, more than 41 times the price it achieved the last time it appeared at auction (£353,500 at Sotheby’s London in December 1993).
AUCTION DETAILS
Important Notice: This sale is subject to the new buyer's premium rates that came into effect 1 February 2015. To view the updated rates please CLICK HERE
Presenting an astonishing lineup of post-war and contemporary art, this sale is led by an exceptional group of works from an Important Swedish Private Collection, which includes Lucio Fontana’s rarely seen masterwork, Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1965), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Small oil on canvas #4) (1963). The auction also comprises a self- portrait diptych by Francis Bacon from 1977, a monumental and mesmeric Abstraktes Bild by Gerhard Richter and exemplary works by Cy Twombly, Nicolas de Staël, Yves Klein, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Archetypes of post-war British art, Pop art and Abstract Expressionism also feature.
