Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Hockney’s 15 Canvas Study of the Grand Canyon sells for £6 million / $8 million
ottobre 06, 2017 - Sotheby

Hockney’s 15 Canvas Study of the Grand Canyon sells for £6 million / $8 million

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

In Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London

**Highest price ever achieved for the artist in a London auction**

5 October 2017 – Moments ago at Sotheby’s in London, one of the greatest Hockney landscapes in private hands sold at auction for£6,008,750. Never before offered at auction, 15 Canvas Study of the Grand Canyon was painted in preparation for ‘A Bigger Grand Canyon’, the seven and a half metre wide masterpiece housed in the National Gallery of Australia. Hockney’s status as England’s greatest and best-loved living painter has been cemented by these landscape paintings, and this is a perfect example of the style that has catapulted him to international acclaim. 

The painting’s importance is underlined by its inclusion in two of the most important exhibitions of the artist’s career, including his major 1999 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and his blockbuster retrospective in London at Tate Britain earlier this year.

A new record for the artist was set at Sotheby’s last year, when a Yorkshire landscape, ‘Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October, 2006’ reached $11,712,500 in New York.

Further details on the work are available here.

Other notable results from tonight’s sale so far:

Wolfgang Tillmans,Greifbar 26 (2014) sells for £548,750/$725,996 (estimate £150,000- 200,000)

Created by exposing light and developing chemicals onto undeveloped photographic paper, the Greifbar are cryptic pictures that blur the boundaries between photography and painting. Another of Tillman’s Greifbar pieces  Greifbar 29 – was chosen for the catalogue front cover of the celebrated exhibition, Wolfgang Tillmans, at Tate Modern this year.  In 2000 the German born artist became the first photographer, and the first non-British person, to be awarded the Turner Prize. Full details here.

Howard Hodgkin, House (2005-2007) sells for £704,750/$932,384 (estimate £350,000 – 450,000)

A late, fully mature work painted at the height of Hodgkin’s powers, House was painted over a two-year period between 2005 and 2007. The work is a radical re-imagination of the modern European tradition of colour. With its carefree dots that recede back into an almost enveloping sense of depth, Hodgkin has freed the technique of pointillism from its dogmatic restraint as previously championed by George Seurat and Paul Signac. As painting spills over onto the frame in his trademark style, House takes on an almost architectural form. For Hodgkin, colour provided a portal through which to explore his memories. Full details here. 

2017 Turner Prize nominee Hurvin Anderson’s Untitled (Beach Scene) sellsfor£890,750/$1,178,462 (estimate: £500,000-700,000)

Echoing masterpieces by Seurat or Manet, which speak to a distinctly bourgeois late-19th-century sense of leisure, Anderson masterfully subverts this legacy in Untitled (Beach Scene). This painting has broken the record for the artist in both its previous appearances at auction in 2009 and 2013.

Executed shortly after he returned to London from a residency programme on Trinidad, the painting both reflects the creative influence that the experience imparted on him, and Trinidad’s long colonial history under British rule. As political as it is lyrical, Untitled (Beach Scene) examines ideas concerning Afro-Caribbean heritage, identity, and migration - speaking directly to Anderson’s split heritage as a man born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents.

Anderson has been nominated for the 2017 Turner Prize. Full details of the work are available here. 

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening sale is still underway in London. Watch the sale live here.

Full results will be available later this evening.