22 Apr What Is Sotheby’s Selling at Spring Sales in New York? | News

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/what-is-sothebys-selling-at-spring-sales-in-nyc/

A preview exhibition of the auctions’ most prized lots takes place in the Big Apple from 3 May 2024.

Works by Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, and Leonora Carrington are among the highlights of Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art auctions next month.

The Contemporary Evening Auction on Monday 13 May is led by Francis Bacon’s painting of his lover and muse George Dyer for an estimated U.S. $30–50 million.

Dyer was 29 when he met Bacon, then 54, in 1963. The portrait was painted three years into their relationship, which ended tragically when Dyer died from an overdose of sleeping pills just 36 hours before Bacon opened a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971.

Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Crouching (1966). Oil on canvas, 198 x 147 cm. Estimate: U.S. $30–50 million. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

‘This painting is a gut punch—a vortex of flesh and emotion that lures you in with this almost gravitational pull,’ said Sotheby’s Head Of Contemporary Marquee Sales In New York, Lucius Elliott.

‘Dyer is simultaneously predator and prey, isolated in the picture frame with a single blood red eye trained on the viewer, both fearsome and desperately alone,’ he said.

In the same auction, four Abstract Expressionist paintings by Joan Mitchell, including the brightly coloured Noon (1969) and Ground (1989–90) will go under the hammer for a combined estimate of U.S. $40 million.

Joan Mitchell, Noon (ca. 1969). Oil on canvas, 259.1 x 200.7 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

Lucio Fontana’s trypophobia-inducing cadmium yellow canvas Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio (1964), which translates to ‘Spatial Concept, The End of God’, is another highlight.

In their press materials, Sotheby’s described the work as ‘a defining icon of a generation on the cusp of stellar technological advancement’.

Owners Cindy and Howard Rachofsky said the work ‘raised the bar for our collection to another level’.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio (Spatial Concept, The End of God) (1964). Oil on canvas, 177.8 x 123 cm. Estimate: U.S. $20–30 million. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

It wouldn’t be a New York sales week without works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose standout lot this time is a collaboration between the two artists.

The painting Untitled (1984) heads to auction after showing as part of Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 2023 exhibition Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands, which brought together around 70 of the 160 canvases they collaborated on between 1983 and 1985.

Sotheby’s will be hoping for a better reception this time around than these collaborative paintings received at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985. Reviewing the show, New York Times critic Vivien Raynor wrote, ‘the collaboration looks like one of Warhol’s manipulations, which increasingly seem based on the Mencken theory about nobody going broke underestimating the public’s intelligence.’

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1984). Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and oil stick on canvas. 294.6 x 419.7 cm. Estimate: in the region of $18 million. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

The star lot in the Modern Evening Auction on Wednesday 15 May is Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945), pictured top, by British-born Surrealist Leonora Carrington.

The work, which borrows liberally from Hieronymus Bosch, was painted two years after Carrington arrived in Mexico from Europe.

Carrington’s son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, is a professor of comparative literature at the Universidad Autónoma de México. He said, ‘Leonora studied with great care and attention both the northern Renaissance painters and the Quattrocento [the Early Renaissance], and Les Distractions de Dagobert combines these influences in an extraordinary exploration of objects and textures, conjuring chromatic fire and illuminating our inner space in a fiery meditation.’ —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/what-is-sothebys-selling-at-spring-sales-in-nyc/