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OVER £ 117 MILLION FOR CHRISTIE'S SALE OF POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN LONDON
16 February 2015
Catégorie : MARKET
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Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art evening auction held on February 11, 2015 realised a total of £117,142,500 selling 95% by value with outstanding sell-through rates. The top price of the evening was paid for Cy Twombly's Untitled (New York City), which sold for £19,682,500. This result follows the record-breaking sale of one of Cy Twombly's blackboards which sold for $69.6 million at Christie's New York in November 2014. 3 record prices were set during this auction including for Paolo Scheggi, Howard Hodgkin and Theaster Gates.
Gerhard Richter's Vierwaldstätter See (1969), sold for £15,762,500, well over its £10 million estimate. The painting is the largest of a distinct series of four views of the famous Swiss lake painted by Richter in 1969. Purchased from the artist by the present owner in 1973 after its inclusion in the Grand Art Exhibition at the Haus der Kunst Munich, it stems from a landmark period in Richter's early oeuvre. One of the last paintings of Pope Pius XII held in private hands Francis Bacon's Study for a Head from 1955 sold for £10,050,500. Whereas previous works had presented the Pope as a screaming, agonised phantom, Study for a Head presents a figure submerged in existential contemplation, riddled with the same quiet dignity and introspective tension that was to define Bacon's first self-portrait the following year. Exhibited at Tate, London, in 1962, Study for a Head remained unseen by the public for over 40 years, resurfacing in major retrospectives at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, in 2003 and at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, the following year. Comprising 105 paintings, body paintings, drawings and letters, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made by Tracey Emin realised £722,500. Following the success of Tracey Emin's iconic My Bed, 1998, which achieved a world record price at auction quadrupling its pre-sale estimate to realise £2,546,500 (estimate: £800,000-1,200,000) in July 2014, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996, documents a seminal moment of breakthrough within the artist's oeuvre, witnessing an impassioned re-engagement with her painting and drawing practice after a six-year hiatus. Paying homage to her influences including Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and Yves Klein, Emin's paintings and drawings have since come to represent one of the most significant strands of her oeuvre, culminating in her appointment as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2011, and will be celebrated in the exhibition Tracey Emin – Egon Schiele: Where I Want to Go at the Leopold Museum, Vienna, in April this year. Damien Hirst's iconic pill cabinet Lullaby Winter, 2002 fetched £3,050,500 (estimate: £2,500,000 – 4,000,000). Another from the series of four cabinets named after the four seasons, Lullaby Spring, sold at auction in 2007 for £9.65million, breaking the record for a work by a European living artist at the time of sale. Just as Monet painted the four seasons, Hirst captures the winter atmosphere with his assembly of thousands of beautifully hand-crafted pills. Precisely positioned on razor-sharp shelving and enshrined within a perfect, mirrored surgical steel cabinet, these pills number the amount a single human might expect to consume in a lifetime
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Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art evening auction held on February 11, 2015 realised a total of £117,142,500 selling 95% by value with outstanding sell-through rates. The top price of the evening was paid for Cy Twombly's Untitled (New York City), which sold for £19,682,500. This result follows the record-breaking sale of one of Cy Twombly's blackboards which sold for $69.6 million at Christie's New York in November 2014. 3 record prices were set during this auction including for Paolo Scheggi, Howard Hodgkin and Theaster Gates.
Gerhard Richter's Vierwaldstätter See (1969), sold for £15,762,500, well over its £10 million estimate. The painting is the largest of a distinct series of four views of the famous Swiss lake painted by Richter in 1969. Purchased from the artist by the present owner in 1973 after its inclusion in the Grand Art Exhibition at the Haus der Kunst Munich, it stems from a landmark period in Richter's early oeuvre. One of the last paintings of Pope Pius XII held in private hands Francis Bacon's Study for a Head from 1955 sold for £10,050,500. Whereas previous works had presented the Pope as a screaming, agonised phantom, Study for a Head presents a figure submerged in existential contemplation, riddled with the same quiet dignity and introspective tension that was to define Bacon's first self-portrait the following year. Exhibited at Tate, London, in 1962, Study for a Head remained unseen by the public for over 40 years, resurfacing in major retrospectives at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, in 2003 and at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, the following year. Comprising 105 paintings, body paintings, drawings and letters, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made by Tracey Emin realised £722,500. Following the success of Tracey Emin's iconic My Bed, 1998, which achieved a world record price at auction quadrupling its pre-sale estimate to realise £2,546,500 (estimate: £800,000-1,200,000) in July 2014, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996, documents a seminal moment of breakthrough within the artist's oeuvre, witnessing an impassioned re-engagement with her painting and drawing practice after a six-year hiatus. Paying homage to her influences including Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and Yves Klein, Emin's paintings and drawings have since come to represent one of the most significant strands of her oeuvre, culminating in her appointment as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2011, and will be celebrated in the exhibition Tracey Emin – Egon Schiele: Where I Want to Go at the Leopold Museum, Vienna, in April this year. Damien Hirst's iconic pill cabinet Lullaby Winter, 2002 fetched £3,050,500 (estimate: £2,500,000 – 4,000,000). Another from the series of four cabinets named after the four seasons, Lullaby Spring, sold at auction in 2007 for £9.65million, breaking the record for a work by a European living artist at the time of sale. Just as Monet painted the four seasons, Hirst captures the winter atmosphere with his assembly of thousands of beautifully hand-crafted pills. Precisely positioned on razor-sharp shelving and enshrined within a perfect, mirrored surgical steel cabinet, these pills number the amount a single human might expect to consume in a lifetime
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