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HomeNewsLondon Autumn Auction Season | Introduction On Highlighted Modern and Contemporary Artworks

London Autumn Auction Season | Introduction On Highlighted Modern and Contemporary Artworks

Follow by the autumn auction season in New York and Hong Kong, London is about to enter it's highly anticipated auction season as well. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams and other auction houses have presented a various group of modern and contemporary artworks, including classics such as Georg Baselitz, Francis Bacon, George Condo, Banksy, etc. All works will be released this season. Now, please follow ArtPro to view the selected works of the upcoming auctions in London.

Bonhams Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale

Bonhams’ Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale will open on October 15th. There will be masterpieces by artists like Salvador Dali, Tsuguharu Fujita, and Osip Zadkine.

Featured Lot No.1: Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages of Salvador Dali

Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages shows some of the most iconic elements of Salvador Dali's most famous works. Its innovative form and fascinating imagery make it one of the most significant works of this extraordinary artist in history. This work intertwined his romantic life and art practice. Dali's masterful painting technique can be seen in the virtuoso modelling of the tumbling storm clouds blowing in from the top left corner, the swirling brushwork contrasting with the smooth desert foreground. The jewel-like cerulean sky also provides a stunning complementary contrast to the luminous blonde, sandy ground. Further movement is created through the bowed skeleton of the tree in the left panel, the tension in the skipping girl as she attempts to swing the rope against the wind of the storm, and the delicate curlicues of flames and smoke rising from the giraffe.

Featured Lot No.2: Femme allongée, Youki of Tsuguharu Foujita

Painted in 1923, this work is one of the most alluring of all Foujita's works. Depicting the odalisque of the European tradition, seen through the prism of the Japanese painter's unique vision. In the present work, Foujita has used a smoky black to depict the background of the bedroom, throwing her alabaster skin into stunning contrast. Upon close study the subtle variations in her skin tone become clear, the shell-pink of her nipples and lips, and the shadows highlighting her breasts. The warm brown of her wavy hair surrounded this woman who was affectionately called as 'Youki' by Foujita. In this work, he creates a very intimate space, where Youki stares directly at the audience, as if looking at the eyes of her lover.

Featured Lot No.3: Ephebus of Ossip Zadkine

This work was carved from honey-colored elm-wood, which is emblematic of Zadkine's deep respect for the integrity and natural properties of the material. Zadkine discovered his own unique characteristics when dealing with the texture of wood. For example, is underscored and dictated by the direction and curvature of the rings, which also help to shape the chin of the figure, while the verticality of the bust is emphasized by the linear striations and absence of the right shoulder. By further foregrounds the varying qualities of the wood and prompts an evocation of the tree itself. The process of creation is no longer to impose the vitality on an inert material but rather to reveal the life and spirit from within.

Philips 20th Century &Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale will open on October 20th. There will be more than forty exquisite pieces by artists like Georg Baselitz, Jean Michel Basquiat and George Condo etc.

Featured Lot No.1: Das letzte Selbstbildnis I of Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz was born in Saxony, Germany in 1938. At the age of 20, he crossed the Berlin Wall and moved from East Germany to West Germany. His works have a sense of his generation which is characterized by the "dismemberment" of landscapes and figures on the canvas, using fragmented, inverted images to reflect to the nightmare of the time and the country. This upcoming painting Das letzte Selbstbildnis I was created in 1982. It is the most important period of Georg Baselitz's painting creation. The present masterwork presents its protagonist in Baselitz's signature upside-down format, with his head twisted to side and a slash of light paint running down his naked body. Arranged within a prismatic network of tactile and vibrant brushstrokes, the lively red-yellow colours inhabiting the portrayed figure plunge the surrounding background into infinite darkness.

Featured Lot No.2: The Age of Reason of George Condo

To look at a George Condo is to embark on a rich, multi-layered experience. The Age of Reason renders the entire picture in vermilion, nearly 2 meters high, depicting the silhouettes of a group of seven people. These silhouettes are broken down and distorted, reflects the emotional and psychological depth of Condor's work. In the work, countless fine white lines are randomly scattered on the entire surface, forming obvious eyes, grinning mouths, breasts and clenched hands. Together they constitute the concepts of "Psychological Cubism" and "Artificial Realism" created by Condor, in which four mental states occur simultaneously in the picture, including hysteria, joy, sadness and despair.

Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Sale will kick off in October 20th. They will present forty eight exquisite pieces by artists like Banksy, Adrian Ghenie, Bridget Riley and Albert Oehlen etc.

Featured Lot No.1: Show Me The Monet of Banksy

Show Me The Monet is one of the most iconic paintings in Banksy's provocative oeuvre. This is his rare on canvas piece. In this work, Banksy redefines the iconic image in Western modern art: Claude Monet's Japanese bridge and water garden in Giverny. With a sumptuously rendered orange traffic cone and a thickly textured shopping trolley disrupting the romance of Monet’s iconic Impressionist masterpiece, Banksy's version is more twenty-first century fly-tipping spot than timeless idyll. Delivered with the ironic dead-pan immediacy of a punchline, the underlying conceptual complexity at stake here belies its humour.

Featured Lot No.2: Untitled (Diagonal Curve) of Bridget Riley

Untitled (Diagonal Curve) was created in 1966 is an outstanding representative of Bridget Riley's groundbreaking black and white paintings in the 1960s. Riley began to create a series of works using simple geometric and curved monochrome elements to achieve two-dimensional dynamic effects in 1961. This painting is a summary of Riley's art practice during this period and is also one of the last large-scale paintings in the series.

Featured Lot No.3: Pie Fight Interior of Adrian Ghenie

Merging past and present, reality and imagination, Adrian Ghenie’s Pie Fight Interior is a lesson in the spectacle and tragedy of history. Through the fusion of abstraction and concreteness, the series of works reveal the atrocities in European history in the 20th century and Ghenie’s questioning to the collective memory. In sweeps of ochre, violet, amber and bronze, the surface of this workd swirls and pulsates, illuminating the artist’s energetic handing of paint. Using the brush liberally, Ghenie obfuscates the scene to a degree of ambiguity, the spectre-like figure alternately appearing and disappearing amidst overlapping strata of pigment.

Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale will be launched on October 22. It will include 28 masterpieces from Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Marina Abramovich and other great artists.

Featured Lot No.1: Head of Man of Francis Bacon

This is a very rare masterpiece of Francis Bacon's jewel-like portrait. Head of Man is a gorgeous work dating back to a critical period in his career. This painting was created in 1959, it is one of a handful of surviving works that the artist completed during a four month sojourn in St Ives on the Cornish coast. During this period, Bacon entered a new creative stage, prompting him to develop in the direction of visceral and physical artistic language, which dominated his work in the 1960s. With its near-sculptural brushwork, textured impasto and extraordinary marbled palette, it sets the scene for what was to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest explorations of the human condition.

Featured Lot No.2: The Lifeof Marina Abramovich

The world’s first Mixed Reality artwork – and the first of its kind to be presented at auction – Marina Abramovich’s The Life marks an extraordinary new chapter in the history of art. Premiered at the Serpentine Gallery in 2019, it offers a 19-minute digital encounter with the artist. A dimensional photographic capture of the artist – like a hologram – appears before the viewer, performing a unique, meditative and altogether entrancing piece within a roped off five-metre circle, before evaporating into thin air. Here, she broaches the dream of immortality, creating a real-time simulacrum in which her body and spirit are preserved for eternity.

Featured Lot No.3: Santa Monica Boulevard of David Hockney

Created in 1978, and unseen in public since the following year, Santa Monica Boulevard is a vibrant cosmopolitan vision that signals David Hockney’s triumphant return to his beloved Los Angeles – and, indeed, to painting. Saturated with bold, vivid hues, it belongs to a small group of works depicting the colourful neighbourhood outside the artist’s newly-acquired studio. Painted in conjunction with the vast six-metre-long work of the same title – held in the artist’s personal collection – these theatrical urban scenes paved the way for his masterful Californian landscapes of the early 1980s, including Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and Nichols Canyon.

For more lot information, please enter the special section to view. ArtPro will continue to track the global information of the October auction season to bring you more market trends.


Impressionist & Modern Art
Bonhams London
15 Oct 2020, 16:00
101 New Bond Street London


20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Phillips London
20 Oct 2020, 17:00
30 Berkeley Square London London


Contemporary Art Evening Auction
Sotheby's London
21 Oct 2020, 19:00
34-35 New Bond Street London


Post-war And Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Christie's London
22 Oct 2020, 19:00
8 King Street, St. James's London
Source: ArtPro Author: Ning Ning