ANDY WARHOL’S SIX SELF PORTRAITS TO LEAD
CHRISTIE’S POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION

HIGHLIGHTS BY BACON, BASQUIAT, BOURGEOIS, BRADFORD, BURRI, DOIG, FONTANA, LALANNE, MAPPLETHORPE, POLLOCK & SCHÜTTE

6 MARCH 2018

 

Andy Warhol, Six Self Portraits, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, in six parts, 1986, estimate on request

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Auction, part of ‘20th/21st Century at Christie’s’, a season of sales that take place from 20 February to 7 March 2018, will present work by some of the greatest icons of the 20th Century alongside those artists at the forefront of contemporary art today. The season will be led by Andy Warhol’s Six Self Portraits (1986, estimate on request), a rare masterpiece completed just months before his sudden death in 1987. The present work stands among his last great artistic gestures, his self-image charged with a poignant sense of his own mortality. Jackson Pollock’s Number 21, 1950 (1950, estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000), an opulent, splashed and spattered painting from the peak of his seminal ‘drip period’. New York was the creative backdrop for a group of dynamic artists working in the 1980s including Jean-Michel Basquiat whose Multiflavors (1982, estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000) dating from the year of Basquiat’s meteoric rise to fame is presented alongside four iconic self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe in which he grapples with his own multi-faceted identity. Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1965, estimate: £8,000,000-12,000,000), a masterpiece by the artist with 24 cuts on canvas enclosed in the artist’s unique black-lacquer frame, shows his quest for a fourth dimension at the apex of the space age. The Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction will be held on 6 March 2018 and is followed by the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 7 March 2018. All works will be exhibited at King Street from 2 to 6 March 2018.

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