This October, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction in London will offer a fantastic array of works from the post-war period to the present, bringing together standout works by highly sought-after artists. The sale will include important pieces by some of the most celebrated Contemporary artists, including works by Sigmar Polke, Laura Owens, Louise Bourgeois, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst.
This sale features an exciting selection of works by Cecily Brown, Laura Owens, Bridget Riley, Dana Schutz and Louise Bourgeois among others. While Schutz and Brown blur the boundaries between abstraction and figuration in their dynamic compositions, Owens explores fantastical storytelling in her whimsical Untitled painting and Riley’s Bassacs and 1st Study for Painting develop new visual relationships between form, colour and shape.
Works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Tom Wesselman demonstrate the continuing power of American Pop Art to confront and to engage, mythologising life and elevating the everyday to the status of quasi-religious iconography that both celebrates and questions the symbols and priorities of western civilisation. Warhol's Society Portraits in particular, each of which was commissioned by the sitter, stand at the crossroads of these key themes in Warhol’s practice: the interplay of commerce and fine art, the cult of celebrity and the seriality of image production.
Compelling and powerful works by British artists including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley and Gilbert and George demonstrate the diversity of perspective and tone present in Contemporary British Art. Damien Hirst's brooding meditations upon death are at once stark and poetic, while Gormley's scrutiny of the human form brings about an intimacy with the body both as a symbol of our being and as an inanimate object, entirely disconnected from us.
