Video: Contemporary Art Preview

Leading names and outstanding quality at the second major Dorotheum sale week of 2015. From the 9th to the 12th June, the auction programme will highlight contemporary and modern art, as well as silver, jewellery, wrist and pocket watches.

Pioneer Camp & Nail Panels
The contemporary sale on 10th June 2015 showcases works by leading international artists including Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Ilya Kabakov, Adolf Luther, Otto Piene, Robert Rauschenberg, Paolo Scheggi, Cy Twombly, Günther Uecker, Victor Vasarely and many others.

Leading the way is Ilya Kabakov’s „Landscape with a Pioneer camp, 1973“, which originally formed part of a 2004 installation by Kabakov, exhibited by itself at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, under the title „The Teacher and his Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov“. The painting is full of allusions and elements of Socialist and Suprematist painting (estimate € 450,000 – 600,000).
Another remarkable work to be presented at this auction will be Günther Uecker’s “Box” of 1968, consisting of nail panels and cut-outs, complete with the artist’s dedication: „made with my own hands“. It was also part of an installation at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, which Uecker for some time used as a space to live and work in together with Gerhard Richter – to illustrate the “dissolution of existing museum practices” (€ 270,000 – 320,000).

Arnulf Rainer’s early overpainting, an (untitled) „Überdeckung“, and a self-portrait by Otto Muehl are two of the Austrian works available at the auction (€ 40,000 – 60,000, € 60,000 – 80,000).
Works of very recent date include some by Thomas Schütte, Katharina Grosse, Andre Butzer, Martin Eder, Jonathan Meese, Eberhard Havekost, Christian Rosa, as well as a „Meditation on illusion“ - as the London artist Marc Quinn refers to his white bronze skeleton in meditative pose (€ 80,000 – 120,000, No. 1 of 6 copies).

Lucio Fontana: The Sculptor
Painted and glazed terracotta figures from the 1950s and 60s by Italian avant-garde artist Lucio Fontana, initially known for his „Tagli“ (cut paintings), leads the superior selection of Italian works. The artist’s animated, spontaneous, expressive, sculptural creations are estimated at €75.000 to 220.000.
Agostino Bonalumi’s almost two metre tall sculpture of bright red fibre-glass occupies a position somewhere between sculpture and design (€ 180,000 – 250,000) while Cy Twombly’s drawing „Untitled (Rome)“ of 1962 (€ 200,000 – 250,000) was inspired by Roman murals. In Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror object „Porta bianca“, the Italian pop icon Gianna Nannini appears in a life-sized sublimation print (€ 80,000 – 120,000).
Pure modernism manifests itself in „Linee“, a geometric brass sculpture dating to 1961, by the sculptor Fausto Melotti, who claimed that art is an „angelic, geometric frame of mind“. Inspired by drawing, he uses metal in delicate flexible structures that evoke the work of Miro or Giacometti, and Calder mobiles (€ 150,000 – 200,000).
The radical spirit of post-war modernism is embodied by Piero Manzoni and his „Achrome“, sewn from white canvas panels and valued at €200,000 to 300,000. In Manzoni’s own words: „I strive to create a completely white (or even better: an entirely colourless, neutral) plane, which exists beyond the confines of painting and is beyond the reach of outside intervention that might add or subtract to the meaning of the plane itself: the kind of white, that is neither polar landscape nor suggestive subject, nor an object of beauty, neither an emotion nor a symbol, nor representative of anything else: A white plane that is, plain and simple, a white plane.”

Winter Whites
White expanses of actual snow will indeed be part of the auction of modern art on 9th June 2015. The painting „Snow Landscape at Elmau“ occupies a central position in the work of Gabriele Münter at the point of stylistic transition from “Neue Sachlichkeit” to moderate modernism. Until 1924, Münter visited Schloss Elmau several times and created a number of these delicate sketches of the surrounding countryside.

Few artists were able to capture snow better than Alfons Walde could: „Bauernsonntag“ und „Almen im Schnee“ are among the best the winter-landscape genre has to offer (Farmers’ Sunday € 250,000 – 300,000 and Alpine Meadows in the Snow € 280,000 – 360,000).

Two female nudes, Marino Marini’s 134 cm bronze figure „Danzatrice“ (Dancer € 150,000 – 200,000) and a perfectly Minimalist nude by Amedeo Modigliani (€ 60,000 – 80,000), both in their own way pay hommage to the human body. A study of a male head sketched out in quick strokes of the crayon dates to the last years of Pablo Picasso’s life (€ 200,000 – 250,000) while “A Thief” is typical of the generous, almost naïve figures Fernando Botero is renowned for (€ 130,000 – 180,000).
Two paintings by Carl Moll from the nineteen-thirties, a Viennese motif with a still life and a “Still life with flowerpots and branches” show him at the height of his art (€ 90,000 – 160,000, € 70,000 – 100,000).

Tsarist
One of the highlights of the silver auction on 9th June 2015 will be a lidded gold cup of Tsarina Elisabeth Petrowna (1709 – 1762) made by the goldsmith Grigorij Lakomin and valued at €50,000 to 70,000.